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

BETWEEN VISUAL ARTS AND VISUAL CULTURE
chology] publish articles written either in Scandinavian languages or in
English, and several Danish articles have been published here (e.g. Buhl,
2004; Flensborg, 2004; Funch, 1996a; 1996b; 2000; Illeris, 1997; 2004; 2006).
At the European level, Danish articles have been published in journals such
as The International Journal of Education Through Art (Buhl 2005) and
The International Journal of Art and Design Education (Illeris 2005).
Ph.D. and Doctorate theses
In Denmark, as in Germany, we have two very different kinds of doctoral
degrees: the Ph.D. degree, which is given to candidates who have successfully
completed a Ph.D. programme and have demonstrated through a publicly
defended thesis a capacity to carry out a scientific project involving independent
use of the scientific method of the subject, and the “classical Doctorate
degree” which is the highest academic degree, awarded for a thesis
which is considered to be a highly original and outstanding contribution
to a subject. The classical Doctorate degree is not related to any formalised
programme of study and is normally awarded to experienced researchers,
who already hold a Ph.D. and are well established in their research careers.
Since 1995 one Doctorate and three Ph.D. degrees have been awarded in
visual arts education in Denmark. In 1999 Kristian Pedersen was awarded a
Doctorate degree for his dissertation Bo’s pictorial socialisation, which completed
a more than 15-year long longitudinal study of one boy’s pictorial
production combined with more than 20 years of curriculum studies in art
education. Birgitte Holm Sørensen was awarded a Ph.D. for her dissertation
Media education in an educational pin 1995, and thereby made an important
contribution to the development of an independent research field of
media education. In 2002 Helene Illeris successfully defended her dissertation
Picture, pedagogy and power, which studies Danish visual arts education
from the “postmodern” viewpoints of the French cultural theorists Pierre
Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and the same year, Mie Buhl was awarded a
Ph.D. for her dissertation Paradoxical visual arts education, a study of Danish
teacher education in the visual arts through the lenses of the systems theory
of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.
Unfortunately at the moment there are no Ph.D. students in visual arts
education or visual culture education enrolled in Danish universities.
Nevertheless, DPU has, and has had Ph.D. students working with related themes
of study, such as aesthetic learning, gender and ICT (Lisbeth Frølunde),
the interplay between physical environments and the learning process in
public schools (Birgitte Justiniano) and the home as a learning environment,
with a special focus on material culture (Sara Hanghøj). In other universities
and institutions Ph.D. students are working on theses on themes such
NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION 87