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

BETWEEN VISUAL ARTS AND VISUAL CULTURE
and Helene Illeris, decided to start from scratch through the controversial
establishment of the new research unit Visual Culture in Education at the
Department of Educational Anthropology.
This choice changed the primary focus of Danish visual arts research
from curriculum studies and children’s pictorial production to an educational
anthropological approach focused on the concept of culture and the
cultural significance of visuality in education. As a consequence, the initial
research of the unit was not about the development of the school subject,
but rather about how the concept of visual culture can enrich education
across traditional divisions based on subjects and levels.
In 2003 and 2004 the unit published two special issues of educational
journals dedicated to visual culture, one in Danish directed at teachers,
and one in English directed at the Nordic educational research community
(Buhl, Flensborg and Illeris 2003, 2004). In addition, an introduction to the
research themes of the unit was published in InSEA News, the newsletter of
the International Society for Education through Art. In the article the central
notions of the research in visual culture were defined in terms of visual
phenomena, visual events and visual culture as a strategy of reflection:
The notion of visual phenomena generally includes a broad range of images, objects, and
sites such as photographs, advertisements, television broadcasts, graphical user interfaces,
paintings, sculptures, landscapes, public and private spaces etc. Even if some artefacts,
especially works of fine art, do have a privileged position in Western cultures, we do not
think that this should exclude educators from working with all the other forms of imagery
that surrounds us in late modern societies. On the contrary, following the critical
tradition in Scandinavian art education, we think that the images, objects, and sites from
which students gain their most intensive visual experiences in their daily lives should be
at the centre of education.
The notion of visual events denotes the complex interactions that take place between the
viewer and the viewed. Visual events are always geographically, historically, socially, and
culturally situated, and they always imply certain specific ways of looking. Working with
visual events in educational settings therefore means being aware of questions like “who
is looking at what, when, how, and why”, “who has the right to look at whom”, “how
does the image/object/site look back at the viewer(s)”, etc.
The notion of visual culture as a strategy of reflection explores different ways of studying
vision and visuality concerning educational practices as well as research. In educational
practices this notion addresses the conditions for choosing a certain way of studying
visual phenomena or the concepts they represent, e.g. “how is my concept of a landscape
constructed, where does it come from”, or “how is the idea of childhood constructed”. As
84 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION