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

BETWEEN VISUAL ARTS AND VISUAL CULTURE
The future of Danish research in visual arts education
As mentioned in the introduction and in the section on the latest developments
in the field of research, Danish visual arts education research is
facing a rather complicated situation because of both the ongoing political
reforms of the educational systems and a certain fragmentation of the
field caused by the closure of the M.A. and Ph.D. programmes in visual arts
education. An outcome of this situation has been that the previously very
strong connections between teaching, teacher training and research have
been loosened in favour of a new and quite open perspective. Whether this
situation should be considered positive or negative is hard to say due to the
many unknown factors. As mentioned earlier, the latest university reform
has, within one year, reduced the number of Danish universities from 12 to
six, and DPU is now continuing its activities under the much bigger University
of Aarhus. Alongside with the university reform, the “Centres for
Higher Education” (CVU), which were established as recently as in 2003,
and which included most of the former 18 teacher training colleges, have
been replaced by the new and even larger Professional University Colleges.
It is still too early to say what effects these further organisational changes
will have for Danish studies in visual arts education, but for sure the
situation of continuous political and organisational pressure has increased
the difficulties within the field. At the moment it seems probable that the
research unit Visual Culture in Education will not be allowed to continue
its activities as an independent unit, although a new Assistant Professor, Pia
Lundberg has been appointed to the unit in April 2008. Furthermore in the
present situation it can be difficult to reach agreement among researchers
and teacher trainers as to whether it is more important to develop new and
broad perspectives on visual arts education such as visual culture or to fight
harder for what we have, e.g. through more “traditional” in-depth studies of
the benefits of visual arts education from cultural, sociological and psychological
perspectives.
A recent report from the Danish Arts Council (Bamford & Qvortrup,
2006) reviews art education provisions and quality within the Danish Folkeskole
in Music, Visual Arts and Handicrafts through an examination of five
case studies from selected schools and a content analysis of legislative changes,
policy and reforms in the area. The main finding of the report is that
while the art education provisions vary from “barely adequate” to “good”,
the evaluation of the quality of arts programmes is insufficient. In spite of
these very rough generalisations based on scanty and far from homogenous
material, there can be no doubt that the conclusions of the report point in
the right direction: the development towards more reflection, evaluations
90 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION