Estetiska uttryck som pedagogiska aktörer i slöjdundervisning

Abstract

This study takes its starting point in the vulnerable situation in which students find themselves when engaged in the uncertain, risk-filled work of artistic processes, where they are simultaneously being graded. The study explores how conditions for artistic processes are produced, situating the research within a school context, specifically in an art classroom at the upper secondary level. Building on previous research that highlights how intra-actions and relationality generate agency (Barad, 2003; Benavente, 2015; Eriksson, 2019), this study focuses on the relational dynamics in the classroom and the resources active in artistic processes in a school context. Based on posthumanist oriented theoretical frameworks, teachers and students are viewed as participants in a relational process, where non-human actors also actively contribute. The study is practice-based and uses visual ethnography as a method, with participant-produced images acting as carriers of knowledge. The empirical data collection begins with the students' own experiences of the resources that have supported and advanced their artistic processes. The material includes students' digital photo documentation and hand-drawn maps of their processes during a teaching segment. The results show that it is through dialogue that both human and non-human resources become active, driving the artistic processes forward. Dialogue in artistic processes is performative; it sets vulnerability in motion, enhances the students' agency, and transforms it into acts of resistance. Through the dialogue in these artistic processes, a room of opportunity is produced, allowing students to both be affected and to affect.