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

BETWEEN VISUAL ARTS AND VISUAL CULTURE
from a Professional University College. The four years of training include
specialisations in two to three main subjects, with visual arts as a “small”
specialisation, which covers about one semester. The B.A. gives access both
to work in the compulsory school at all levels and to attend M.A. studies at
the university. The teacher trainers in the Professional University Colleges
generally hold a university degree in education with a special orientation
within a single school subject, e.g. visual arts. Some hold a university degree
in another discipline, e.g. art history. Few teacher trainers hold a Ph.D.
and, at least until the Professional University Colleges were formed in the
beginning of 2008, teacher training institutions have had limited research
qualifications or obligations.
In Denmark large parts of educational research are concentrated within
one faculty: The Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus (DPU),
which was established in January 2008. DPU offers postgraduate two-year
Master of Arts programmes in education (M.A. (Ed)) and Ph.D. programmes.
Until the last revision of this article in August 2008, the faculty’s programmes
of study have been identical to those of its autonomous predecessor, the
Danish University of Education, established in 2000 when the former Royal
Danish School of Educational Studies (Danmarks Lærerhøjskole) and three
smaller educational research institutes were closed. While the old School
of Educational Studies offered an M.A. programme in visual arts education
at the Department for Aesthetic Education and Media Studies, DPU
operated with a structure based on general approaches to education in six
departments: Educational Psychology, Educational Sociology, Philosophy of
Education, Educational Anthropology, Curriculum Research and Learning
Lab Denmark 7 . Faced with this structure, the three researchers specialised
in visual arts education chose to work within the Department of Educational
Anthropology. In 2002 a new research unit called Visual Culture in
Education was established and a new direction was set towards visual arts
education based on the concept of visual culture.
Danish research in visual arts education
In Denmark visual arts education was formally established as an institutionalised
field of research in 1976 when Kristian Pedersen was the first to be
appointed Associate Professor in “Creative Arts” (Formning) at the Royal
Danish School of Educational Studies. During the 1980s Pedersen worked
together with his colleagues Rolf Köhler, Ingelise Flensborg, Birgitte Holm
7 By 1 August 2008 these six departments have been restructured into three larger departments: Department
of Learning, Department of Didactics and Department of Education. The research unit Visual Culture in
Education has chosen to be placed in the Department of Curriculum Research.
82 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION