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

MULTICULTURALISM AND ARTS-BASED RESEARCH
at elementary school, art studies in Finland’s eleven teacher education programmes
are strongly reduced. Arts are usually taught by generalist classroom
teachers whose education only includes approximately 135 hours of
studies in visual art (more than half of this being individual readings). New
teacher education programmes offer a possibility for a classroom teacher to
study an extra year and become a qualified art teacher for grades 1–9 (and
for an art teacher to get the degree of a classroom teacher). However, so far
only about ten classroom-teacher students a year have been qualified for
this double degree.
The reform concerning double degrees is connected to the ongoing process
of standardizing European university degrees so that it is possible to
continue from bachelor’s level to master’s level in all subjects taught at different
universities. There are good and bad sides to this reform. In teacher
education, the change reflects an idea of general transfer in the sense that
a teacher is no longer assumed to need special age-dependent pedagogical
skills. It also contains the misunderstanding that concepts and strategies
of the disciplines underlying different school subjects would be similar or
that a student could adopt them in a year. Teachers specialized in one subject
are supposed to learn the strategies of all ten subjects that a classroom
teacher teaches during a year. One solution to this problem has been offered
by integration. The idea of integration is realized in the new Finnish core
curriculum (2004) that decrees that in and between each school subject,
holistic, integrative learning should take place within seven carefully defined
thematic areas. However, interdisciplinarity is not an easy trick but a
complex issue even between arts and skills subjects and it has to be studied
carefully (Räsänen, 2005; Puurula, 1998).
The number of art classes in schools runs parallel with the changing professional
titles of Finnish art educators reflecting paradigm shifts in the
field. In 1950, we ceased being “teachers of drawing and handwriting” and
became something that roughly translates as “teachers of imaging skills”.
During the 1970s, art education in the Nordic countries was strongly influenced
by the so-called polarizing method developed in Sweden, grounded
in semiotics that emphasized visual communication (see Lindström in this
publication). This is why Scandinavian art educators understand teaching
visual culture to be self-evident. For instance, producing and analyzing photographs
and movies has been part of the Finnish art curriculum for thirty
years. Also, contextualization through art history and media analysis has
been included in the Finnish art curriculum since the 1970s. (See Räsänen,
2005; Pohjakallio 1998.) However, it has been suggested that the current
name of the school subject art should be changed into visual culture. This
96 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION