Lost and Found—Unfolding and Refolding Aesthetic Learning Processes

Annika Hellman,Ulla Lind

doi:10.3390/educsci11120778

Abstract

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.

Highlights

The marketisation of education has severely impacted visual arts education
We find that we have folded together with our ideals about aesthetic learning processes, and the end-product-driven focus in the Swedish curricula
Living within the folds and striving for each student’s right to difference, variation, and metamorphosis suggests that we as educators need to make a move towards steering documents at a higher level

Summary

Introduction

The marketisation of education has severely impacted visual arts education. This is a time of great grief and mourning for us teachers at visual arts teacher training programmes. Growing resistance towards these directions has made us rethink our practice and research and experiment with alternative ways of thinking and acting [1,2,3]. Working within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical framework, we want to examine the folding, unfolding, and refolding of aesthetic learning processes, suggesting productive concepts and practices. By using the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, analysing a university student’s complex aesthetic learning process in a Swedish teacher training context, we wish to create a rift in the umbrella of our common sense. That is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much” [10] (p. 201)

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion