Konstnärliga undervisningspraktiker: Genealogier, diskurser och makt

Art teaching practices : Genealogies, discourses and power

This dissertation is about art teaching practices at upper secondary schools with a focus on theatre and at university arts programmes with a focus on film. More specifically, it addresses the factors that have contributed to current teaching practices in art education today and how students and teachers in interaction with each other shape, become part of and identify with the norms and values that emerge through these practices.

The overarching question concerns how norms and values emerge as power/knowledge processes in the teaching process. The genealogical study presented examines how art education is constructed at a policy level. The study discusses how, in past eras, investigators, researchers and educators described what students needed to do during their education to develop into professional artists, how teaching practices were designed and justified, and how art was distinct from other activities and forms of knowledge in education. The interaction study presented examines the act of teaching. It discusses how, the participants shape each other and establish norms and values in relation to notions of what art “is” and can be.

The conditions of possibilities in art teaching practices has been identified in three discourses. The discourse of conversation governs the format and organisation of the teaching practice. It is assumed that through conversation the students can develop their artistic ability. The discourse of freedom identifies how students submit to the vague, flexible and ever-changing notions of what art signifies. The discourse of production describes how the artistic work in the teaching practice takes precedence over an acquisition of established knowledge.

The importance of the participants’ own experiences and feelings, therapeutic conversations, the liberation from conventional education discourses, confession practices and the establishment of a production discourse all emerge as important techniques in art teaching practices. Core values and norms are expressed through these techniques.

The study shows that participants in art teaching practices develop the skills of self-evaluation, self-analysis and self-governance. The notion of an individualised, exploratory educational experience clashes with a process that directs the students to align themselves with the shared norms and values of the art world, of its content and expression. Students perceive their artistic output as unique while the art produced can be understood as expression of a normalisation process that strives to maintain the values and norms in art teaching practices. In summery the dissertation shows that the participants’ learning process is of an exploratory nature. Rather than acquiring and assimilating established knowledge, the participants learn by finding their own paths in a knowledge-formation process in which they discover the artistic potential of their own experiences and insights.