Blagoeva, Nadezda
(Helsingin yliopisto, 2020)
This dissertation presents an artist-teacher-researcher’s exploration of the use of the integrated approach to teaching visual arts to primary students, aged six-to-eight in the after-school clubs organized by an international school in Helsinki. The study is necessitated by the fact that in our postmodern world the availability of visual information is growing with dazzling speed and children, even at an early age, more than ever before are flooded with images through a multitude of channels. Therefore, they need guidance and sharing in order to construct their own knowledge about the world around them and to become multi-literate (Räsänen, 2015a; Räsänen, 2015b), all-round individuals (Finnish National Agency for Education – EDUFI, 2016), able to comprehend the complexity of this diverse visuality. In our fast-changing social and technological environment, dominated by the visual, new means of expression, and methods and materials for art creation are constantly emerging. So, in order to suggest answers to the educational challenges of the future in the field of visual arts it is becoming increasingly necessary to expand curriculum horizons, to find suitable ways for making use of the new and the contemporary (Watts, Cox, & Herne, 2009) and to establish links between different spheres of knowledge and life.
For these reasons, the theoretical background of the study relies upon central tenets of the socio-constructivist and integrated approach, while at the same time takes into account some aspects of contemporary art forms and practices. The latter are shown to be essentially integrative in their nature and are viewed as a suitable means of introducing students to the varieties of ways for seeing the world around them and using their knowledge acquired in other subjects for the creation of new original artworks. Contemporary art effortlessly brings together, unites, combines, reuses, recycles, up-cycles, re-contextualizes and remediates materials and ideas to express the interconnectedness between various conceptual entities and, in this way to construct new meanings, just as the integrative approach aims at bridging the gap between disciplines in education. In this dissertation contemporary art forms and practices are considered to be integrative in terms of three of their main aspects: their materialization, their conceptualization and the collaboration during their creation.
In view of this understanding of integrative teaching and contemporary art, the dissertation seeks to answer the following broad research question: How can the integrative potential of the three basic art-making principles of contemporary art – alternative materials utilization, conceptualization and collaboration – contribute to the successful integrative teaching of visual arts to primary school students to promote knowledge construction? In order to answer this research question, four artistic projects were planned, developed and implemented, each exploring various aspects of applying the integrated approach to my teaching of visual arts to six-to-eight year old students.
The dissertation presents the research and teaching process as a developmental spiral consisting of five action research cycles. Employing action research method for the implementation of all the projects offered a clear methodological procedure that facilitated the data collection as well as the natural flow of the research process – the results and conclusions drawn from each action research cycle inspired the research questions for the next cycle (artistic project). The specific learning objectives as well as the artistic qualities of the artworks created during the projects implementation explored different aspects of the said integrative potential of contemporary art forms and practices.
This research in action gave the opportunity to arrive at theoretical conclusions that stemmed directly from my authentic artistic experience applied in the teaching-learning process. These conclusions are presented as a three-tier model for facilitating integrated knowledge construction in the primary visual arts after-school activities by means of introducing contemporary art forms and practices. The model suggests that practical pedagogical utilization of the integrative potential of contemporary art forms can be materials-driven, concept-driven and collaboration-driven integration. These were the specific aspects of contemporary art that were explored in the course of the study and were observed during the implementation of the projects to have the potential to foster collaboration and knowledge integration that transcend disciplinary boundaries.
In addition, employing action research allowed me to explore my artistic and teaching approaches thoroughly, to evaluate their development, and to gain awareness of the similarities between the artistic and the research process. In this way, the overlap of professional identities – an artist, a teacher and a researcher – was recognized as an opportunity for guiding the students into authentic artistic processes through artistic action research (Jokela, 2008; Räsänen, 2005), which affected positively the pedagogical and theoretical outcomes of the teaching and research process. The adoption and pedagogical adaptation of the kaleidoscopic diversity of contemporary art’s materialization, conceptualization and collaborative practices fostered collaborative interdisciplinary integration, which is in line with the current Finnish National Core Curriculum for basic education (EDUFI, 2016). They facilitated integrated knowledge construction among the primary after-school students, made the educational process more inspiring and meaningful (European Commission: Eurydice, 2019) and provided the young learners with a creativity toolbox to remix and remediate knowledge and experience, to think outside the box, so as to meet the visual challenges of the postmodern world.
________________________________________
Keywords: contemporary art; action research; integrated approach; primary after-school activities; visual arts education; multi-professional collaboration