Mid Sweden University

The overall aim of the article is to make visible and discuss the entangled process of student examination in visual arts teacher education in Sweden. We do this by investigating one student’s visual and textual exam, where learning through artistic work, research exploration and teaching didactics merges into the becoming of a visual arts teacher. The merging of becoming artist, researcher and teacher seems to open up to uncontrollable learning processes where affect, ethics and fluid movements of becoming-other are imagined, actualised, articulated and materialised.

The current article links masculine leisure with bodily performances and playfulness connected to global neoliberal expressions of gender, class and ethnicity. This study draws from an analysis of a skateboard video of young white middle-class men skateboarding in an urban environment in one of Sweden’s greater metropolitan areas. An interview with the young man who created the video was also conducted. The analysis brings together lines of inquiry that concern young males’ playful use of urban space with the articulation of the visual culture of skateboarding as a homosocial, mainly white middle-class practice where bravery and risk-taking are essential articulations. We argue that the skateboarders articulate masculine subjectivity by a complex amalgam of playfulness, risk-taking, colonization of space and the visual style involved in their skateboarding. The construction and presentation of self in the skateboard video are integrated with the quest for individual identity, self-realization and meaning making that pertain to a global entrepreneurial mindset in which mainly white middle-class men are privileged.

This article is about young people’s visual and verbal becomings through visual fabulations.The empirical material draws upon two educational research studies from visual arts and media practices, conducted by the authors. This research contribute with knowledge about the potentials of visual arts and media education to fabulate, speculate and thus generate future becomings, that might be realised. By analysing pupil’s fabulations, the potentiality of visual arts and media education becomes visible; for example unleashing creativity through experimental and open ended learning processes.

The purpose of the present chapter is to add to the body of knowledge about what aesthetic learning encounters might be and become by investigating local events of learning in a Swedish higher education visual art course. By making visible how aesthetic learning encounters unfold in an educational practice, the aim is to improve understandings of what learning in open-ended and experimental processes might mean for a learner and for visual art education. The research material consists of one student’s portfolio from a visual art course at the teacher training programe. To create a sustainable and ethical visual art education, it seems necessary to collaborate with the students on their learning processes, and being sensitive to the student’s expectations. At the same time, the collectively shared image of thoughtregarding what visual art learning should be and look like needs to be challenged. Doing so allows student subjectivity to expand beyond the academic fields of knowledge, which in turn helps students to access the power of being heard and trusting their own abilities to change and make changes as a collaborate 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 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.