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

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
• Students in the compulsory school seem to produce more advanced pictures
the longer they have been in school. However, Lars Lindström, Leif
Ulriksson and Catharina Elsner found that they stagnated or showed only
minor progress with regard to process criteria measuring the ability to
work independently, to assess their work, and so on, that is such qualities
which visual arts psychologists Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner associate
with “the real benefits of visual arts education”.
• Lena Aulin-Gråhamn and Jan Thavenius developed a sociological theory
of aesthetic experience. They wanted to show how the way in which we
think about and use the aesthetic is influenced by its institutional framework,
such as the school, the art world or the market. They advocate a
radical aesthetics, inspired by the art world, as an alternative to the modest
aesthetics, prevailing in schools, and the market aesthetics, which dominate
the aesthetic field.
• Marner and Örtegren claim, like action theorist James Wertsch, that
human action typically employs “mediational means” such as tools and
language, and that the mediation shapes the action in essential ways. In
their medium-specific perspective, the rhetoric of the child’s “freedom of
speech” by a pictorial language becomes a pipe dream, unless students are
afforded the guidance and time needed not only to master materials and
techniques, but to transform them into media for personal expression.
• The concept aesthetic learning processes was introduced in Denmark in the
1990s to emphasize, as Marner and Örtegren do, that we do not simply
express our personal experiences; we mediate them by using, for example,
a pictorial language. In Sweden, the concept has got various meanings. It
is used especially in connection with interdisciplinary projects in aesthetic
domains without a tradition as separate school subjects, such as drama,
film and ICT.
• Swedish students who want to prepare a doctoral thesis within the field of
visual arts education are directed to departments of education, art history,
psychology or child studies. However, the theories offered by these disciplines
are often too far away from the complex realities in the classroom.
To improve teaching, art educator Elliot Eisner claims, the most urgent
kind of research is that which focuses on the processes teachers employ
in the classroom.
72 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION