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

BETWEEN VISUAL ARTS AND VISUAL CULTURE
Sørensen, Bodil Havskov Jensen and Niels Adelsten to build a comprehensive
theory of visual arts education based on a critical-constructive perspective.
The aim was to lay a solid foundation for curriculum development and innovation
of the school subject that could challenge the child-centred pedagogy,
based on Lowenfeld’s developmental approach, which dominated Danish
teacher training.
In 1991 the critical-constructive approach was consolidated. In the new
national curriculum the name of the school subject was changed from Formning
(“Creative Arts” – literally “formation”) to Billedkunst (Visual Arts) and
the new guidelines largely mirrored Pedersen and his colleagues’ conceptions.
Furthermore, in 1989 the first M.A. students in art education were
enrolled, and in 1986, 1994 and 1995 one licentiate thesis and three Ph.D.
theses were defended by researchers affiliated with the department. With
a full-time staff of two associate professors and a lecturer, a quite strong
and differentiated environment developed around research interests such as
curriculum studies, children’s pictorial production and cognition in relation
to perception and representation. Furthermore, an independent section for
media education was established with a staff of two associate professors.
The developments of Danish research in visual arts education of the following
10 years up to today can be characterised both in terms of continuity
and in terms of rupture. In terms of continuity, both the critical and the
constructivist approaches to research have been maintained and further
developed by the new generation of researchers who entered the field in the
second part of the nineties. Helene Illeris and Mie Buhl both use critical and
constructivist approaches in their meticulous redescriptions of the field of
art education in schools and teacher education in their doctoral work. But
while the critical theory of the Frankfurter School had been the central
approach of most of their colleagues, Illeris and Buhl use epistemological
analysis inspired by French poststructuralism and German systems theory,
and thereby signal a clear rupture with the remains of modernist and essentialist
assumptions in Danish visual arts education. Conceptions of art
education as naturally good and based on students’ presumed inner needs of
personal expression are left behind in favour of approaches based in social
constructivist concepts such as “positioning”, “strategy” and “choice”.
The new millennium has inaugurated a period of massive changes in
Danish visual arts research. The closing of the School of Educational Studies
in 2000 and Kristian Pedersen’s tragic death in 2002 caused a profound
crisis for the newly established research field. Following their new research
interests in contemporary themes such as multicultural education and visual
culture, the remaining researchers in the field, Ingelise Flensborg, Mie Buhl
NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 83