Art education as a discipline

Guðrún Erla Geirsdóttir visual art teacher

Abstract

Visual art education is compulsory in primary and secondary education in Iceland, where it is taught as an arts and vocational subject. Visual arts teachers are special subject teachers who receive students from all primary and lower secondary school grades. Visual arts are taught in specially equipped classrooms, and the teaching is organised in bouts. The publication of instructional materials for the visual arts is scarce. It is customary for visual art teachers to prepare their own teaching materials.

This paper is based on a qualitative method using narrative inquiry with the visual art teacher Guðrún Erla Geirsdóttir, who graduated from the School of Arts and Craft in Iceland with a teacher licence in the 1970s and continued further studies in modern textile at the Gerrit Rietvelt Academy in Holland. Geirsdóttir worked as a costume and set designer for theatres in Reykjavík and was active in politics at the city council level, where she served as a member of the board for two art museums before she started working as an art teacher. Geirsdóttir shares her experience as a visual arts teacher in compulsory school – including primary and secondary level – in Reykjavík, where she taught for two decades, from 1995‒2017. During this period, important changes were made to the operation of schools when they shifted from state to local government management, discontinuing the centralised role of the national director of studies for the visual arts within the Ministry of Education, offering support to new teachers. The compulsory schools adopted only morning classes, which led to the reorganization of the school building where Geirsdóttir was teaching. Visual arts were advocated to general primary teachers, and classrooms for the arts and vocational subjects were gathered in the school basement. The classroom was divided into two rooms; the main room was equipped for drawing and painting, and the second had a clay oven used for clay work, which was better suited for teaching. The number of visual art lessons per school year decreased with the introduction of more art subjects.

Guðrún Erla Geirsdóttir insists on her strong educational background in the arts that informs her teaching methods. This importance should be understood in the context of changes in art teachers’ education in Iceland in the late 1980s. A new national curriculum emerged in 1999, emphasising sequential curriculum models and disciplinebased teaching. Discipline-based art education (DBAE) was well-suited for Guðrún Erla Geirsdóttir’s professional theory grounded in her background as a visual artist and active participant in the art world.

Geirsdóttir explains the set-up of the classroom and the principles behind the course material she prepared, based on a disciplined-based approach to visual arts teaching. The course material was designed for each class level to build on former knowledge when students moved up a grade. She describes a variety of materials prepared for the development of technical skills, such as different methods to represent perspective, each suited for different class levels. The assignments were well-defined to make the best use of each lesson, allowing students to personalise the outcome through form, colour, and content as they were encouraged to use their imagination. Geirsdóttir introduced art historical material to students by showing printed reproductions of artworks during the first years of her career. Eventually, a video projector was installed in the classroom, opening up new possibilities, such as appealing to disinterested adolescents by showing YouTube videos of accelerated art-making processes and graffiti. The video projector allowed for slide shows of artworks, replacing reproductions on display on the classroom walls. Geirsdóttir enabled students to have direct contact with artworks in museums and at home with assignments integrating art history, aesthetics and criticism.

The findings provide insight into one art teacher’s working conditions and facilities and elucidate how experience, education and background, together with public policies and school facilities, affect learning and teaching in art education.