Research in Visual Arts Education - The National Society for ...

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
The Swedish research review supports these priorities, at least as far as empirical
studies are concerned. The studies of preschool children’s pictorial
activities in situ, interpreted within the frameworks of Mikhail Bakhtin
and Lev Vygotsky, add new insights to the international literature. The
same might be said about the portfolio assessment of children’s and young
people’s creative skills, inspired by the work of Howard Gardner and Ellen
Winner at the Harvard Project Zero.
A handful of empirical studies, although neither Nordic nor always
published within the time frame of this survey, should be highlighted as exemplars
of high standards and important implications for visual arts education:
Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1976; Csikszentmihalyi &
Getzels, 1989) experimental study of creativity and problem-finding in art;
Michael Parson’s (1987) phenomenological study of how we understad art;
Folkert Haanstra’s (1994) meta-analysis of effects of art education; Winner
and Cooper’s (2000) meta-analysis of arts education and academic outcomes,
and Hetland and Winner’s (2007, 2008) qualitative, ethnographic study of
thinking dispositions fostered by art education.
Conclusions of the Swedish review
• Contemporary education of visual arts teachers in Sweden can be characterized
in terms of two trends: decentralisation and academisation. The
present challenge is to develop a modern, research-based apprenticeship
and to elevate the position of experience-based knowing in teacher education.
• Process and socio-cultural approaches laid the foundation for a new interest
in children’s drawings from the 1990s onwards. Inspired by Mikhail
Bakhtin, Karin Aronsson argued that children’s drawings should be understood
as narratives rather than representations of something that the child
has seen or know of. By interpreting children’s drawing as social practice,
Eva Änggård and others offered still another lens for observing what is
going on.
• Anders Marner and Hans Örtegren found that in spite of new visual arts
curricula, Swedish classroom activities did not seem to have changed very
much between 1992 and 2003. Approx. 45 % of the art teachers defined
visual arts (pictorial studies) as an art-and-craft based, aesthetic-practical
school subject, whereas almost the same percentage of the teachers put
communication at the core of the curriculum. A minority looked upon
their subject as basically an outlet for free creative expression.
NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 71