This article presents a negotiating practice that demonstrates the importance of the interplay of visual, verbal and linguistic signs. As such it discusses the relationship between identity and a signifying practice in a Swedish preschool, as children and teachers negotiate meaning. With emphasis on the relationship between building identity and having access to discourses, the notion of identity is troubled among these children, the teachers and within the research practice. A negotiating practice unfolds thanks to a documentation practice that also forms the research material: photographs and conversations made and used within the children's work in a seven month-long creative process.
This article investigates changes in visual art education through gendered visual, pedagogical and theoretical interventions. The research material is derived from a combination of two independent research projects and examples from published research. The material consists of images and video diary recordings by young people, and researched didactic examples of working with gender in visual art education. Young people's gendered cultures include 257 Synnyt / Origins | 2 / 2019 | Peer-reviewed | Full paper a growing vocabulary of gender definitions and ways to 'perform' gender. At the same time, everyday life experiences are largely structured around binary gender logics. This article answers questions regarding the ability of visual art education to change and transform stereotyped thinking and the binary oppositions of gender. Analysing visual and verbal material from a post-humanist perspective, the findings suggest that visual art education should engage with the gender problem, and that it has the capability to dissolve gender binaries and stereotypical thinking by facilitating fabulation, imagining, speculation and fantasising about the future. Visual art education seems to benefit from focusing on learning processes that are open-ended and acknowledging the affect and visual desires involved in image making. These are driving forces specific to visual art, which have the potential to differentiate gendered stereotypes.
The ongoing marketisation of education is a great loss for visual arts education since explorative learning processes are marginalised in favour of more goal-oriented learning. The empirical material analysed in this research derives from the visual art portfolio of a student from an elective university course in visual arts education. Working within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical framework, we examine the folding, unfolding, and refolding of aesthetic learning processes, suggesting productive concepts and practices. The analysis made us aware of our own pedagogical ideals and the loss of having to disassemble them, in line with the new curricula. The student’s visual learning process showed us how to reassemble new and explorative learning processes, assigning aspects of sustainability and an ethics of care in relation to environmental and social questions. We suggest strategies for learning in the folds, where educators are called upon to prepare students for an uncertain future. This demands a creative imagination, an ethical standpoint for negotiating the curriculum in line with differentiation by forming, inventing, and fabricating new concepts and images.
In this article we discuss an ongoing project named Performing Knowledge A project to improve knowledge in higher education through a double perspective: Theory and Performativity. This project is situated at the Department of Visual Art Education at Konstfack, University College
of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden. The aim is to investigate and develop pedagogy and methods through double perspectives, whereby scientific research is joined with artistic practice as different, but compatible forms of knowledge in learning and degree projects in higher education.
The research examined how different forms of knowledge appear in learning processes as well as in student theses; focus is equally placed on forms of representation and presentation. The article presents and discusses two different student projects as examples of performative knowledge. In
this text we draw upon a presentation held at the 32nd InSEA World Conference, in Osaka, August 2008.
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