”You must make it up yourself” : An encounter between art education and its pupils

Only abstract. Paper copies of master’s theses are listed in the Helka database (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Electronic copies of master’s theses are either available as open access or only on thesis terminals in the Helsinki University Library.Vain tiivistelmä. Sidottujen gradujen saatavuuden voit tarkistaa Helka-tietokannasta (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Digitaaliset gradut voivat olla luettavissa avoimesti verkossa tai rajoitetusti kirjaston opinnäytekioskeilla.Endast sammandrag. Inbundna avhandlingar kan sökas i Helka-databasen (http://www.helsinki.fi/helka). Elektroniska kopior av avhandlingar finns antingen öppet på nätet eller endast tillgängliga i bibliotekets avhandlingsterminaler.The research focuses on modernist art education. According to it making art enhances capacity for free, individual expression, which results in the development of personality, ethical life and spiritual growth. Such discourse is enlightening and universalizing. A central question is: how art education encounters young pupils whose individuality it aims at producing. Another goal is to reflect on the challenges that contemporary culture and art impose on art education: increased awareness of the difficulty of defining art and what is good for people, and young people’s own visual and aesthetic cultures. The empirical material consists of interviews of art pupils and teachers, a curriculum and material dealing with contemporary art and other recreational activities. The analysis is about interpreting meanings and discourses. It has resulted in developing new approaches to Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Art education aims at good consequences but it is also an institution that needs to legitimate itself. It cannot function without the concept of art but art is a few hundred years old social construction. This setting produces rhetorical problems. At the same time art is seen as a special visual language, free expression or even the culmination of humanity. If art has always existed in every culture in some form, as it is often defined in multicultural discussion, what is not art? Occasionally, art is seen as aesthetics or visual culture but they are not synonyms for art. ”You must make it up yourself” is a phrase used similarly by teachers and their pupils: individual expression is a paradox as a goal. On the other hand it is self-evident. Within given means pupils make unique pictures in any case, and they attach personal meanings to them. When the pupils evaluate the concrete practices of art making, they most of all appreciate rules and conventions in order to estimate learning and succeeding in their efforts. In this kind of everyday aesthetics competence in oneself derives from flexible learning of rules and skills. No matter how art is defined, it is only one possibility among many practices that can provide such gratification.ISBN 952-10-0002-