Research in Visual Arts Education - Bilderlernen.at

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNINGIn Denmark, “child art” was never abandoned as a topic of study. Instead,established accounts of children’s appropriation of a pictorial languagewere revised. Soon after, but independent of, the publication of Brent andMarjorie Wilson’s “Iconoclastic view of the imagery sources in the drawingsof young people” (1977), the Danish art educators Rolf Köhler and KristianPedersen (1978) published a book where they criticized the famous ViktorLowenfeld (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1969) for not taking into considerationthe great impact of the visual culture in which children participate. Likethe article by the Wilsons, their book created a huge stir among those whocherished the romantic view of the innocent child.In the Nordic countries, Lowenfeld’s grand narrative of the emancipationof the child from artful scribbles, via a growing mastery of visual realismto the expressive qualities of early Modernism, is giving way to a variety ofsmaller, less comprehensive narratives. The copies sold of the Danish translation(1 st ed. 1971; 2 nd ed. 1976) of Creative and mental growth in Scandinavia,declined from around 1,200 in 1984 to less than 300 in 1995/1996. Today,artistic development is rather described as the growth of a gradually more differentiatedrepertoire, with different options co-existing and being availablefor different purposes, rather than replacing each other in a hierarchical order.Process and socio-cultural approaches laid the foundation for a revivalof interest in children’s drawings in the 1990s (e.g. Hansson et al., 1991;Andersson, 1994; Lindström, 1995; Aronsson & Andersson 1996; Aronsson,1997). For example, Karin Aronsson & Sven Andersson (1996; Andersson,1994) asked African and Swedish children to make drawings of classroomlife and of their future family. Their findings supported the notion of “socialscaling”; that is, social space in the drawings (relative size, distances, degreeof detailing etc.) reflected children’s hierarchies of importance.Another mani festation of the child art revival is The cultural context(Lindström, 2000), presenting papers from a symposium held in Vilnius,Lithuania, which was organized by the Network of Nordic Researchersin Visual Arts Education. In this edited volume, Aronsson & Junge andLindström, for example, presented cultural com parative studies of children’sdrawings in non-European cultures, such as Ethiopia, Nepal, Mongolia andCuba.Marie Bendroth Karlsson (1996) studied visual arts projects in theSwedish preschool and school. She concluded that “art activities are oftenmade subordinate to other goals and used as means for reaching non-artisticgoals, such as diagnostics, decoration/entertainment, concept learningetc.” (p. 300). Elisabet Ahlner Malmström (1998) analysed communicative54 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION