Education Art

International Journal of

Educationthrough Art

International Journal of Education through Art | Volum

e Three Num

ber Three

ISSN 1743-5234

3.3

www.intellectbooks.com

intellect

Volume Three N

umber Three

intellect Journals | A

rt & D

esign


Education through Art Volume 3 Number 3 – 2007

Editorial

169–171

Articles

173–184 Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA

Robin M. Chandler

185–193 ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings

Vasiliki Labitsi

195–209 Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers Kinichi Fukumoto

211–229 Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society Peeter Linnap

231–241 Mentoring in the creative economy Tiina Rautkorpi

243–247 Book Reviews

248 Index

9 771743 523002

ISSN 1743-5234 3 3

ETA_3.3_Cover.indd 1ETA_3.3_Cover.indd 1 11/28/07 7:44:04 PM11/28/07 7:44:04 PM

Printed and bound in Great Britain byCambrian Printers Ltd., Wales

ISSN 1743-5234

International Journal of Education through Art

Volume 3 Number 3

A new English-language journal that promotes relationships between thetwo disciplines. The journal comprises refereed texts in the form of criticalessays, articles, exhibition reviews and image-text features. Particularemphasis is placed on articles and visual materials that critically reflect onthe relationship between education and art. The editorial content pro-poses original ways of rethinking the status of education and art educa-tion, while addressing the role of teaching and learning in either formal orinformal educational contexts – and alongside issues of age, gender andsocial background. The adoption of an open and inventive interpretationof research-based analysis is also a factor in the selection process, as is acontribution’s capacity to promote and experiment with visual/textualforms of representing art education activities, issues and research.

The journal is interdisciplinary in its reflection of teaching and learningcontexts and also in its representation of artistic approaches and prac-tices. Itprovides a platform to question and evaluate the ways in which art is pro-duced, disseminated and interpreted across a diverse range of edu-cationalcontexts. The contributions consider both formal and informal educationcontexts: policy and practice, pedagogy, research, comparative education, andtranscultural issues are all considered in order to raise debates in these areas.

Editorial Board Editorial Advisory BoardAnabela Moura – Portugal Juan Carlos Arañó – SpainAnalice Dutra Pillar – Brazil Anne Bamford – UKAndrea Kárpáti – Hungary Anna Mae Barbosa – BrazilDorothy Bedford – UK Elliot Eisner – USA Folkert Haanstra – Holland Luis Errazuriz – Chile Jeong Ae Park – Korea Maria Fulkova – Czech RepublicMary Stokrocki – USA Rita Irwin – CanadaLi Yan Wang – Taiwan Olçay Kirisoglu – TurkeyDavid Andrew – South Africa Ann Kuo – TaiwanToshio Naoe – Japan Diederik Schonau – NetherlandsYordanka Valkanova – Bulgaria Mary Anne Stankiewicz – USALaura Worsley – UK Nick Stanley – UKHarold Pearse – Canada Brent Wilson – USAGladir da Silva Cabral – BrazilLuis Errazuriz – ChileShei-Chau Wang – USAVasiliki Labitsi – Greece

EditorRachel Mason

Roehampton UniversityFroebel College,Roehampton Lane,London, SW15 5PJ, UK

[email protected]

Associate EditorsRita Irwin – CanadaDebbie Smith-Shank – USA

Reviews EditorNicholas Houghton

Wimbeldon College of Art,University of the Arts,Merton Hall Rd.,London, SW19 3QA

[email protected]

Editorial AssistantTeresa Eça

Av. San Pedro114 RoutarTorredeta 3150 839Portugal

The views expressed in this journal are those of the authors and do not necessarilycoincide with those of the Editor or the members of the Editorial Boards.

International Journal of Education through Art is published three times per year byIntellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK. The current subscriptionrates are £30 (personal) and £210 (institutional). Postage is free within the UK, £5 for the rest of Europe and £10 elsewhere. Advertising enquiries should beaddressed to: [email protected]

© 2007 Intellect Ltd. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personaluse or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Intellect Ltd forlibraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) inthe UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service in the USA provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organization.

ETA_3.3_00_FM.qxd 12/11/07 8:03 PM Page 167

sequence and be shown as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. Please do not send originalslides, photographs and other artworks.Visuals in proposals should initially be sentas low-res JPEG files on a PC-formattedfloppy disk or CD, together with the postedhard copy, and as email attachmentstogether with the emailed electronicversion. If articles are selected forpublication, contributors will be asked toprovide images to the Editor in Tiff format(300 dpi, 145 mm/1740 pixel width).

Copyright Before publication, authors are requested toassign copyright to the Journal subject toretaining their right to reuse the material inother publications written or edited bythemselves and due to be published at leastone year after initial publication in theJournal. A credit to the publisher and theoriginal source should be cited if an articlethat appears in the Journal is subsequentlyreprinted elsewhere.

Permissions Copyright clearance should be indicated bythe contributor and is always theresponsibility of the contributor. The sourcehas to be indicated beneath the text. Whenthey are on a separate sheet or file,indication must be given as to where theyshould be placed in the text. The author hasresponsibility to ensure that the properpermissions/model for visual imagereleases are obtained.

Reviewing Please contact the Editor if you areinterested in reviewing for this journal.

Contributions welcome The Editor welcomes contributions. Anymatter concerning the format andpresentation of articles not covered by theabove notes should be addressed to theEditor, Rachel Mason, at: RoehamptonUniversity, Froebel College, RoehamptonLane, London SW15 5PJ UK. Email:[email protected]: 44 (0) 2023923009/4

address if necessary. This should notexceed 80 words.

Abstract and keywords Each article should be accompanied by an abstract, which should not exceed 150 words in length and should concentrateon the significant findings. Authors maysubmit a second abstract in a first languageother than English also where appropriate.Each article should also be supplied with 3–5 keywords for searching purposes.

HeadingsThe main text should be clearly organizedwith a hierarchy of heading and subhead-ings. Main headings should be typed inlower case, bold and increased size;secondary headings should be in lowercase, bold italic.

QuotationsQuotations exceeding 40 words aredisplayed (indented) in the text. Theseparagraph quotations must be indentedwith an additional one-line space above andbelow and without quotes.

CaptionsAll illustrations should be accompanied bya caption, which should include the figurenumber. and the acknowledgement to theholder of the copyright.

Notes Notes will appear at the side of appropriatepages, but the numerical sequence runsthroughout the article. These should bekept as short as possible and to aminimum, and be identified by asuperscript numeral.

References and Bibliography These should be listed alphabetically at theend of paper and must adhere to thefollowing models: Books: author’s full name, title (italics),place of publication, publisher, year, andpage reference.Articles: author’s full name, title (withinsingle quotation marks), name of journal(italics), volume and issue numbers, date,and page reference.

A bibliography may be included if this isdeemed to be a necessary addition to thesidenotes.

Visual MaterialsIllustrations within articles are invited toassist discussion of artworks, learningactivities and/or environments. In general,only greyscale reproduction is available. Allillustrations, photographs, diagrams, maps,etc. should follow the same numerical

Notes for ContributorsOpinionThe views expressed in the journal arethose of the authors, and do not necessarilycoincide with those of the Editor or theEditorial Boards.

RefereesThe International Journal of Educationthrough Art is a refereed journal. Refereesare chosen for their expertise within thesubject area. They are asked to commenton comprehensibility, originality andscholarly worth of the article submitted.

LengthArticles should not normally exceed 5,600words in length.

SubmittingArticles/visual texts should be original andnot under consideration by any otherpublication. One hard copy must be sent tothe editor by post – typewritten/printed onone side only and double-spaced. Also, anelectronic version of the article should beemailed to the Editor’s email address: theelectronic version should be in Word.(Formats other than Word are notencouraged, but please contact theassistant editor for further details).

Language The journal uses standard British English.The editor reserves the right to alter usageto this end. Foreign words and sentencesinserted in the text should be italicised.Because of the interdisciplinary nature ofthe readership, jargon should be kept to aminimum. Whereas articles in Spanish,Portuguese, Chinese, Greek and Japanesemay be submitted for review, translationinto English will be the responsibility ofauthors should they be accepted forpublication.

Hard CopyHard copy text should be double-spacedand single-sided with at least a 3 cm leftmargin.

SoftwareThe journal is set with Apple Macintoshequipment and reset using QuarkXPress; itis therefore best whenever possible tosupply text in Word as this crosses easilyfrom PC to Mac systems.

Author biographyA note on each author is required, and thisshould include details of their currentposition, their institution, institutional mailand email address, or an alternative contact

Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor.The guidance on this page is by no means comprehensive: it must be read in conjunction with Intellect Notes for Contributors.These notes can be referred to by contributors to any of Intellect’s journals, and so are, in turn, not sufficient; contributors willalso need to refer to the guidance such as this given for each specific journal. Intellect Notes for Contributors is obtainable fromwww.intellectbooks.com/journals, or on request from the Editor of this journal. For additional guidance on submissions, reviewersguidelines or general information, please contact: Rachel Mason Email: [email protected]

ETA_3.3_00_FM.qxd 12/11/07 8:03 PM Page 168

International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3.

Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.169/2. © Intellect Ltd 2007.

Editorial The papers in this issue address disparate topics. It contains image-texts byGreek and Japanese art educators that report an international curriculumdevelopment initiative and a small-scale research. Contributions from theUSA and Estonia feature photographic images, paintings and sculpture in amuseum collection. They examine their socio-cultural meanings and mes-sages together with the role of image analysis in identity formation. A paperfrom Finland is a new departure in that it explores recent developments inthe ‘creative industries’ and their implications for professional training ofartists and designers.

Labitsi asked Greek children aged 8 to draw a story they liked very muchand used categories of visual narrative structure formulated by Kress.&Leeuwen to analyse the results. Previous research has shown that whereassome young children are elaborate visual storytellers others find it more dif-ficult to represent narrative visually. Many of the drawings Labitsi studieddid not represent the unfolding actions the children referred to in their oralexplanations of them. She concluded that their ability to communicate nar-rative visually was constrained by the limited range of schemata they hadavailable for this purpose.

The theme of art lunch functioning as a catalyst for a cross-national cur-riculum experiment involving teacher educators, schoolteachers and children.The project web site, based in Japan, is evidence that children in eight coun-tries have created ‘art lunches’ and exchanged outcomes. The lesson contenthas been interdisciplinary and combined art expression with learning in geog-raphy, history, home economics and religion. The Japanese coordinator’s ratio-nale for the choice of curriculum topic is that food is a fundamental humanneed and has universal appeal. It is worth noting however that food display isan art form in Japan where it has a lengthy history of inclusion in art lessons.

Linnap’s paper examines how and why images engender fear. In thefirst part he expresses concern about the increased censorship of photogra-phy in public places – an anti picture making hysteria – that has gonebeyond all reasonable limits of human freedom. He questions what it isthat people find so shocking, unsettling and frightening about photographsgiven the widespread presence of TV and film images deliberately designedto make explicit and characterise horror and fear. The second part featuresphotographs of everyday life from a traumatic period of Estonia’s historythat are only just coming to light so as to illustrate his point that ways inwhich images engender fear depend on the contexts in which they are cre-ated and interpreted. It includes images from a photo diary of a flight fromSoviet occupation by an Estonian now domiciled in America and pictures ofeveryday life taken by a family deported to Siberia. Linnap points out thatrepression or absence of images also engenders fear.

The museum pedagogy explicated by Chandler is grounded in criticaltheory, race awareness and her early childhood visits to the Boston Musuemof Fine Arts. As she points out, museums play a key role in the way young

169ETA 3 (3) pp. 169–171. © Intellect Ltd 2007. 169

ETA_3.3_01_editorial.qxd 12/11/07 8:03 PM Page 169

Americans view their own cultural life and heritage yet they present identityand heritage from a mono-cultural point of view. The interdisciplinaryapproach to image analysis she advocates seeks to differentiate the culturalmemories of ‘transplanted, subjugated peoples’ from this tradition andexamine with students issues of identity, colour and power. The paperincludes contextual information about artworks by John Singleton Copley,Jean Léon Gérôme and Cyrus Edward Dallin held in the collection of theBoston Musuem of Fine Arts. This text demonstrates how teachers can useart historical images representing peoples of colour to stimulate researchand discussion of their presence in 18th century European society, and toexplore topics such as slavery and indented servitude and the oppression ofNative American spiritual beliefs

According to Rautkopi, Finland is a world leader in ‘futures’ research.Mature postmodern societies operate a new kind of creative economy thatis preoccupied with meaning production and in which intangible values areimportant in generating new areas for consumption. The skill dimensionsneeded to lead the new creative sector are cultural literacy, craftsmanship,networking, organisation and the co-configuration and dialogue skills thatenable producers to respond to the unique features of products and cus-tomer needs. Rautkorpi’s investigation into the form of pedagogy bestsuited to respond to these societal needs leads her to interview successfulprofessionals in the creative and cultural industries who mentor recruits, toreflect on the way mentoring is embedded in traditional forms of artisanalwork and in supervision of postgraduate research; and to define it as a cul-tural encounter centring on a shared dramatic performance. Whereas men-tors support independent problem-solving and decision making, share tacitknowledge and cultural experience and tell stories about their work,mentees try to sort out how the mentor works and thinks and participate ina shared journey into the unknown.

Reading the last paper led me to re-read and reconsider Brent Wilson’stheory of three pedagogical sites. His first site is the space in which peoplecreate their own art and visual culture with little assistance from art educa-tors; his second site is the schools and other formal educational settingswhere art educators instruct students how to make and interpret art andvisual culture; and his third site is a space that operates at the margins ofthe first one in which new forms of hybrid visual culture and meaning arisethrough informal contacts between so-called experts and learners. Wilsoncontrasts the third site favourably with the second one when he describes itas a space that is inclusive not exclusive, ambiguous not clear, abnormalnot normal, anti-structural not structural, liminal not sharply defined. Themajority of contributors to this issue seem to want to engage with learnersself-initiated encounters with art and culture (Wilson’s first pedagogical site).Although they operate within the confines of Wilson’s second site they aspireto many of his third site pedagogical values. For example they understand arteducation outcomes as unfixed, hold to the possibility of new curriculum con-tent emerging through negotiating their own and their student’s culturalinterests and celebrate the emergence of cultural meanings not yet firmlyresolved. Although their personal pedagogical philosophies are not alwaysclear, I gained the impression that most of them value art education primarilyfor its potential to change the way the learners in their care live their own

170 Editorial


lives and are seeking out ways to escape the confines of the second site bymaking their pedagogy more collaborative and less institutional.

ReferencesKress, G. & Leeuwen, T.V. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.

London: Routledge

Wilson, B (2007) Third Site Bioquiry: Meditations on Biographical Inquiry andThird-site Pedagogy. Paper prepared for InSEA Asia Regional Conference Seoul,Korea, Aug 20–23.

171Editorial


ESSENTIALREADINGFORARTISTSAND ARTEDUCATORS

IRISH ARTS REVIEW, STATE APARTMENTS, DUBLIN CASTLE, DUBLIN 2, IRELANDWWW.IRISHARTSREVIEW.COM

The Irish Arts Review is Ireland’s leading visual arts

publication. Founded in 1984 and published four times

a year, this beautifully illustrated 150-page journal

features interviews with artists, new research and

expertly written articles and reviews of Irish painting,

sculpture, architecture, photography, and design.

The Irish Arts Review is used as a teaching resource in

schools and universities around Ireland and is an

essential and authoritative addition to all art libraries.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE IRISH ARTS REVIEWBy phone: +353 1 679 3525 By email: [email protected]: www.irishartsreview.comBy post: Irish Arts Review, State Apartments, Dublin Castle,

Dublin 2, Ireland

Ireland/N. Ireland UK Europe US Rest of World(economy)

One-year subscription €56 €73 €70 €70 €85Two-year subscription €80 €127 €122 €126 €148Three-year subscription €120 €190 €183 €189 €222Four-year subscription €160 €254 €244 €252 €296



Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.173/1. © Intellect Ltd 2007.

Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy onethnic self-identity, representation andcultural histories at the Boston MFA

Robin M. Chandler Northeastern University Boston USA

AbstractMuseums, especially the larger urban visual arts institutions established in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries serve as repositories of global history,Empire and cultural memory, even as they shape identity. When students ofcolour come to museums, they frequently only see their ancestors depicted inclassic portrayals of pre-twentieth century figuration framed by the white imagi-nation and often without any mediated interpretation that confronts racializedvisual texts and unpleasant histories. How should scholars and teachers inter-pret and mediate this space for all students – one that confronts our deepestfears about cultural authenticity, hegemony, self-representation, narratives andstory telling, prejudice and the passage of time? This article shares excerpts froman educational game the author has used at secondary and college level for overa decade. In Colorquest© students explore the cultural and intellectual spacethat museum collections and accessioning practices provide for interpreting howpeople of colour are represented in their artefacts; and the xenophobic gaze shap-ing their representation. The pedagogical site for Colorquest© is the Museum ofFine Arts, Boston.

BackgroundAs a child in the 1960s I studied drawing and composition at an urbanmuseum on Saturdays. I travelled the bus line from Cambridge, spent twohours in classes with my instructors, then frequented the galleries followingmy father’s instructions to ‘find people of colour represented in themuseum’. After classes I scoured it for people of colour who looked likeme. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) remained a private and profes-sional haunt long after my childhood dream of getting locked up in its cav-erns after closing hours. In these dreams ended the monumental PharaohMycerinus came alive and spoke to me of things ancient and Egyptian.Contemporary cinematographers, dazzled and romanced by the drama,scale and spectacle of art holdings in museums, have explored ways ofbringing them to life in popular films like the Harry Potter series Frida andNight at the Museum, for example.

Since then, I have escorted secondary and university students throughthe Boston MFA on a pedagogical exercise for more than a decade.Colorquest©: Identity and Representation sends them on a search for repre-sentations of people of colour. As the desert traveller in the painting

173ETA 3 (3) pp. 173–184 © Intellect Ltd 2007.

Keywordscultural identitypedagogyrace awarenessmuseumsvisual representation

ETA_3.3_02_art_Chandler.qxd 12/11/07 8:02 PM Page 173

The Questioner of the Sphinx,1 by Elihu Vedder (1863), it is possible to framethe museum as an African diviner or Delphic oracle availing spectators ofthe visual possibilities for understanding its artworks, their creators and thetimes in which they lived. My father’s instructions have stayed with me andinformed Colorquest©.

Presenting identity‘The Museum’ was constructed physically and ideologically as a site ofpower, conquest and intellectual history to preserve artefacts. For the last200 years as civic institutions museums have constructed memory from amonocultural viewpoint. Yet, as staged for me by my father, they containedobjects of material culture that brought the world of far distant lands to mydoorstep. I could immerse myself in the national and social identities andethnic differences among human beings and time-travel to places mostpeople only dream about. Later I travelled on six continents but my personalthirst for global integration and cultural knowledge was first quenched, on agrand scale, within the museum.

Today, the consumer-student and patron needs a peripheral vision (Moy,1993) to comprehend the museum as a stage for representing cultural andracial identity. While the historical ‘other’ may be self-represented in thecreation of the objects, museums often staged them imperialistically from aperspective of domination inside an Anglo-American or Euro-American tradi-tion. As a western innovation popularized during an imperial era of globalcolonialism, the profession of museum collector arose at a time whenwealthy amateur collectors and universities were collaborating with anthro-pologists to conserve and preserve the historical past. This form of institu-tionalization was a pubic enterprise that made the private collections of therich accessible to everyday people. In so doing, art museums effectivelydefined their own identities as gatekeepers, ideologues and arbiters of taste.A cadre of entrepreneurial elites was cultivated to display objects in theircollections in ways that would attract and intrigue viewers who knew little ornothing about their cultural contexts. Presenting identity has always been atthe centre of the museum mission, therefore. In simpler terms, museums tookover the functions of anthropology and private collecting, outwardly for thesocial good, and functioned as expressions of national and civic identitypresided over by European gatekeepers. Furthermore, as Boon (1994, p. 9)has pointed out, they sought to ‘make explicitly exotic populations appearimplicitly familiar and explicitly familiar populations appear implicitly exotic’.

Museum paradigms are changing in the twenty-first century, mostly dueto shifts in audience patronage and applied technologies. Indeed, how longwill the public continue to visit, patronize and support museums as publicspaces of knowledge production? As they evolve as cultural institutions, theconstruction of ethnic identity is being reframed by a host of smaller andnewer culturally and ethnically specific museums.2 While not the primarysubject matter of Colorquest©, this game is underpinned by discussion ofrace and ethnicity in the current period of ambiguity and artifice. Manymuseums were set up during or after punitive colonial conquests thatdemonized ‘exotic other’, while simultaneously appropriating their culturalpatrimony in the name of cultural supremacy. These historical memorieshave contemporary voices constituted by both pride and shame. Ambiguity

174 Robin M. Chandler

1. Nineteenth-centurypainting, Museum ofFine Arts, Boston.

2. Categories or types of‘new’ museum includeheritage-centred,tourism-centred,media-technology-focused, genocide-documentary-focusedmuseums, hands-onscience exploratoria,and many onlinevirtual museums.


and artifice characterize the complex intersubjectivities of the museumindustry which is a public, social world administered by entrepreneurialelites.3 Writers contributing to cross-cultural discourse about culturalembeddedness converge at the crossroads of identity and are concernedabout how it is influenced by museum acquisition and exhibition policies.This industry is rooted in the interpretation and spectacle of identity and themanner in which successive generations seek to define their civic commit-ments and social patriotism. More contemporary views of self-representationin the arts and photography have attempted to portray difference from aracialized point of view while explicating the complexities caused by para-digms and practices of racism.4 Who are the new generations of museumconsumers?

Neo’s dilemma – the blue or the red pillThe clients of arts education in this new century are largely children of TheMatrix (1999). Their greater awareness of the global community, reduced to aneighbourhood by the Internet and the World Wide Web, means that they arecosmopolitan, well-educated and graphically signed. They acquire knowledgethrough glyphs, signs, tags, video and web casts, and computer animationmore rapidly than any generation in the past. Handheld devices will soon beintegrated into the human body, eventually moving us into the realm ofhuman robotics. Current and future museum patrons are seeking rolemodels in the geopolitical struggles of good versus evil. What cultural models –individual and institutional – are museums promoting in practice-basedmuseum education? In the film The Matrix, the central character Neo is con-fronted with a dilemma: whether to take a blue pill and remain captive to abogus, flatlander, materialist, virtual and unreal world in which appearanceshide uncomfortable truths or, to take the red pill and confront the real worldof contradiction, conflict and chaos – one in which individuals must makechoices for themselves. Today’s youth see the world differently from theirforbears. For them meaning is increasingly made and remade in virtual reality,popular culture and through transgressing boundaries. Their identities areformed by interacting influences that both complicate and reduce who theyare and how they see themselves into the future. Their learning environmentscan play a key role in shaping their identity and offsetting the data bom-barding them at home, in the street and from peers (Wenger, 1998). Thisgeneration is producing and reproducing its own multifaceted culture to anextent Bourdieu never dreamed of (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Furthermore,pure transmission of knowledge has been replaced by production of knowl-edge (Freire, 1988) and by new visual and technological literacies.

The subject of inquiry in Colorquest© is the young spectator’s visual,aesthetic and historical literacy. This pedagogical tool is both object andcontext-centred. Identity formation is more interesting to students thaniconological exegesis and Colorquest© offers them the opportunity to rec-oncile objects in museums with their own histories, education and multi-ple identities. Theories of how cultural identity is generated have limitationspartially due to the monodisciplinary training of most educators and theirfear of approaching subjects like genocide, slavery or the crimes againsthumanity represented in art. Interdisciplinary applied research considershow these findings may be applied to art education. Schools and cultural

175Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity…

3. The term‘entrepreneurial elites’refers to museumprofessionals trainedas interpreters of artsand culture objects,the buyers and sellersof museum art, andthe mid-strata of mid-level personnelwho interface betweenthe public and themuseum.

4. An exemplar, ‘OnlySkin Deep: ChangingVisions of theAmerican Self’Exhibition, Museumof Photographic Artsat San DiegoMuseum, 2005.


institutions (museums et al.) are emerging as sites of reconstruction,debate and knowledge production about the ego and how identity isformed. Educators, therefore, are playing a critical role where their pedagogyis culturally responsive (Gay, 2000). The experience of taking students oninnumerable museum field visits led me to formulate a reflexive peda-gogy building upon interdisciplinary cross-cultural inquiry. However, thereis a strong indigenous compulsion embedded in museum collections andaudiences. Recent studies of museum audience development in the UnitedStates and elsewhere (e.g. Danylak, 2002) have explored issues of represen-tation, myth and stereotyping and examined the role of specifically ‘ethnic’museums. Today cultural politics is driving museums to deconstruct iden-tity in their exhibitions and accession policies.

Authenticity and heritage in the ‘floating classroom’In the Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, Carlos Fuentes(1999) depicted the world of the Americas as a ‘Utopia, the happy place ofthe natural man’. He observed that,

… the baroque was a shifting art, akin to a mirror in which we see our con-stantly changing identity. It was an art dominated by the single, imposing factthat we were caught between the destroyed Indian world and a new universethat was both European and American.

(Fuentes, 1999, p. 196)

How can educators reconstruct the differentiated cultural memories oftransplanted or subjugated peoples brought to the Americas or, of pre-existing Native Indian societies; and how are these histories contained inmuseums? How can they convey an accurate picture of history throughvisits to local art museums? During the nineteenth century the ideologiesof social Darwinism and eugenics and the colonization of arts and artefactsof newly conquered territories were accompanied by the classification ofnon-Europeans as non- or sub-human. The colonized individual was both ahuman subject of the conquering nation (albeit without equal citizenshiprights) and a material subject of intellectual curiosity. As cultural anthropology,archaeology and pseudo-science emerged as academic disciplines, naturalhistory museums became repositories for both ritual objects and bodyparts.

UNESCO implemented a global Proclamation Programme in 2003 tosafeguard ‘intangible heritage’ or ‘living human treasures’ of nations andgroups.5 The Programme asserts that, while cultural heritage (both livingand traditional) may be constantly shifting or in danger of extinction, it‘provides a sense of identity and continuity to groups and communities andconstitutes a crucible of cultural diversity’. Along with the Proclamation ofMasterpieces, countries that support the notion of ‘intangible cultural her-itage’ can designate certain individuals as ‘living human treasures’. This posi-tion UNESCO has adopted supports the view taken in this article that it isimportant that individuals and groups reflect on their cultural life and heritagethrough studying cultural artefacts in museums. The museum enterprise is apart of the cultural sector in cities and towns all around the world.


5. Visit UNESCO on the web athttp://www.unesco.org/culture/masterpieces.


Connecting the dots in theory and practiceThe Colorquest© game enables identification of museum subjects in thatportray people of colour in a variety of contexts. The vast scale of theBoston MFA and my familiarity with its more obscure recesses make it anideal site for exploring issues of identity, culture and power and for search-ing out how Europeans viewed themselves in contrast to the indigenouspeoples they conquered. The focus of the search is on clarifying culturallyspecific perceptions about difference from a European perspective.

The pedagogy was nurtured in several educational contexts. I served asa primary- and secondary-school consultant and worked in higher educa-tion for two decades, but not as a conventional art educator. Instead, Iundertook sociological-type fieldwork and pursued an active studio career.So I have been steered along several inquiry paths. Whereas the theoriesmentioned earlier informed the development of Colorquest© the pedagogysets out to bring these discussions of race and difference into the real worldof attitudes, behaviours, feelings, social practices, customs, stereotypesand public opinion.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, as director of Caravan, I worked as ahuman-relations trainer and my search for studies of race and differenceled me to sociology. Studying the social nature of systems and individu-als helped me understand the way difference and power operate.I became interested in how sociological theorizing about identity forma-tion might apply to the arts. I discovered that scholars like Becker (1982)and Zolberg (1990) had investigated ‘art worlds, but not in ways thataddress art teachers’ everyday concerns. Art historians, on the other hand,resisted social theories and contextual approaches to studying art. Some arteducators who were artists brought an experiential ethos to their teachingand others were more concerned with pedagogy or mediating public artspolicy to schools. These are all essential tributaries of a healthy, vibrant artworld. However, my understanding of interdisciplinary praxis is rooted in abelief that the arts can effect social change and have a profound impacton teaching and learning, school reform and teacher training. Art educa-tion can have a civilizing effect on systems when it leads children to reflecton their own nobility and the contributions they and their racial ancestorshave made to humanity. But this cannot happen unless they see them-selves represented, or represented positively, in museum collections andexhibitions.

Colorquest©: instructor preparationStep 1:Identify a large urban museum, with diverse collections and exhibitions.

Step 2:Study the collections and exhibitions over time, becoming familiar with allthe galleries and being careful not to exclude any historical periods, mediaor special collections you might assume do not contain representations ofpeople of colour. (Most do – from medieval tapestries to seventeenth-century ceramics and Etruscan vases and to contemporary painting or pho-tography.)



Robin M. Chandler 178

Step 3Identify a selection of works that depict a wide range of regions and historicalperiods. Representations that are figurative and representational ratherthan abstract offer greater impact. Two kinds of documentation are necessary.First, record all the descriptive data you can about the works, artists, etc.Second, purchase or rent slides of the artworks for review in class afterColorquest©. (If slides are not available at the gift shop or universityarchives, scan postcards or images from books and make your own slidesat institutional media centres. Or download digitized images from theInternet/ online for PowerPoint.)

Step 4Construct a list of ‘hip clues’ you are sure will resonate with your studentsof whatever age. Following the museum visit, class discussion can be a fertiledebriefing, consciousness-raising, learning event for both teacher andstudent.

Step 5Student projects that involve interactive media, comparative study andcross-cultural references can result from Colorquest©. Understanding dif-ferences in generational perspectives is a significant learning outcomewhere instructors are open to whatever new world-view students bring todiscussion and projects.

The pedagogyA cross-disciplinary curriculum approach consisting of courses in arthistory, aesthetics, humanities and social sciences is the ideal context toprepare for this search game/exercise. Begin with a lecture/discussion(Step 4). If the Americas are the primary focus, for example, sessionsmight begin with discussion of pre-Columbian art, western imperialism,the politics of colonialism and postcolonialism, the meeting of East andWest and cultural conflict as well as exchange.

Discussion of aboriginal art could include a review of the British occupa-tion of Australia and how these indigenous histories were shaped by powerand prestige.

This kind of discussion requires interdisciplinary rigour and familiaritywith history, economics, art and social policy, religion and political science.Intergenerational dialogue between teachers and students is a rich environ-ment for exchanging ideas about representation, cultural perceptions; andabout how communities of colour have been both marginalized and valorizedacross history by artists, collectors and museums. The twenty-first-centuryconsciousness of today’s students opens up ‘teachable moments’ for shar-ing views about a range of significant concepts like ‘persons of colour’,enslavement and exploitation, and context-centred approaches to the studyof art or symbolism and spirituality. In any case, these preliminary discus-sions are a rudimentary preparation for Colorquest©.

During the museum visit, students work in pairs. A list of clues aboutselected artworks is distributed and they are charged with finding as manyas possible in a limited time period (minimum: one hour). You may need totell younger students to check their time and location every 30 minutes, make


sure at least one member in each pair has a watch, and share rules ofmuseum conduct (like not talking to strangers). Finally, plan to wander themuseum acting as mentor/teacher. Urban museums can be very busyplaces, so plan the visit for a low-volume day. Hand out one list of clues perpair and ask one student in each pair to volunteer as a scribe. The list ofclues is the key. Clues must be given a humorous, contemporary and youth-relevant ‘spin’ in order to trigger verve, make the search a thought-provokinggame and tap into generationally specific lingo and popular culture.

In what follows I have selected some site-specific examples of eminentlypopular works at Boston MFA that could provide a basis for discussion andhave provided some examples of clues.

IMAGE 1:Work of art: Watson and the Shark. John Singleton Copley (American,1738–1815), oil on canvas, 72 x 90 (1778).

CLUE 1: A local boy telling ‘a fish story’ in an eighteenth-century version of‘Jaws’.

Copley’s painting depicts an unknown person of African descent at the pin-nacle of a morbid boating struggle in the harbour. Located in the EvansWing of the Boston MFA, this painting suggests numerous discussion top-ics pertaining to the presence of Africans in New World Boston, the occupa-tional lives of these people from mariners to labourers and intellectuals andthe presence of free and slave classes in eighteenth-century Boston and itsslave-carrying trade. Students can investigate the history of that Africanpresence, the depiction of people of colour in Copley’s works or a host ofother topics. The triangulation of the figure at the pinnacle with the boatends in the foreground makes this monumental painting a powerful visualencounter with tragedy at sea, and the spectator feels a part of the event.Students will take away a fresh understanding of teamwork in action andhow ‘colour’ becomes unimportant when people have to work togethertowards a common goal. Copley treated the African presence in the sameway as all the other characters. He did not retreat into caricature or parody.6

Precisely because this portrayal is naturalistic, the work functions as a start-ing point for discussion about ‘free blacks’, indentured servitude and theprevailing and ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery in the United States that didnot end until 1863.

During Copley’s time, the slave trade was in full force. Slaves existed inNew England circles and prominent New England families benefited fromit. Klein (1986) and numerous other scholars cite the 10 to 15 millionAfricans captured, sold and transported from the Old World (Africa) to theNew World (the Americas) as ‘one of the great crimes against humanity inworld history, which was made no better by the fact that Africans as well asEuropeans participated in its rewards’ (ibid, p. 140) In Art of Exclusion,Boime (1990) writes that the English Abolitionist movement was in itsinfancy when Copley painted Watson and the Shark, noting that slavery con-tinued in the Massachusetts Commonwealth long past the production ofthis picture and, indeed, in the very year of its execution. ‘Even the status of


6. See R. Chandler(1996).


freedmen and freedwomen proved troublesome for the colonists, in a statewhose proposed constitution excluded “negroes, Indians, and mulattoes”from the suffrage, demonstrating that public sentiment was far fromunanimous on the question of political rights for emancipated slaves’(Boime, 1990, p. 30).

Given such a history, students are free to imagine a variety of possibili-ties within the historical frame.

IMAGE 2:Work of art: Appeal to the Great Spirit, Cyrus Edwin Dallin (American1861–1944). H: 309.9 cm; L: 260.3 cm; W: 111.1 cm. (1909).

CLUE 2: Even in a prayerful pose on my trusty steed, it isn’t easy beinggreen (except when they clean up my bronze body) – especially in thisunpredictable New England ‘feather’ weather. And my neck… It’s killing me.

This outdoor bronze sculpture of a Native American Indian invoking theCreator sits at the Huntington Avenue entrance to the Boston MFA. Itgrew progressively greener with tarnish until modern conservation meth-ods were developed. It is a welcome acknowledgement of the Indian pres-ence and history in New England. Dallin completed several sculptures ofNative people including Massasoit (a seventeenth-century Sachem of theWampanoag) and Menotomy, an Algonquin word meaning ‘place of run-ning water’. As a friend and colleague of John Singer Sargeant andAugustus St. Gaudens, the sculptor of Boston’s Shaw Memorial standingopposite the State House, Dallin’s portrayal of Native Americans is conso-nant with the romantic character of paintings and sculpture at the time. Adiscussion among students about how these artists worked together, passedon commissions, understood and were inspired by the wider historical,archaeological, ethnographic and social paradigms of the fin de siècle era isan engaging forum for career preparation in the arts. Sharing informationabout early Native American Indian defiance, desperation, loss, decima-tion and genocide in the face of European annihilation is crucial. This wasan important excerpt in American history that students must come tounderstand and own as part of their national identity and citizenship.Many Indian societies at this time were deeply spiritual and ferventlydevoted to a cosmological view of the universe rooted in guardianship ofthe land and environment. In most cases this world-view was dismissed byEuropeans as pagan. The Dallin sculpture epitomizes the era of the ‘WhiteGhost dance’ and other religious movements practised illegally by Nativepeoples who felt a sense of hopelessness in the face of white barbarity inthe late nineteenth century – forced land removal, genocide, massacre,broken treaties, and removal of their children to Indian schools for assimi-lation in America, north and south.

In his essay ‘Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming America’ FranciscoAlarcón (1992)7 explains that Native peoples view the ‘discovery’ of Americaby Columbus as a conquest. He elucidates the ‘scope of the nightmare,holocaust effect the arrival of Europeans had on the Native peoples of thiscontinent: ‘If only we could feel within ourselves the sorrow and despair of a


7. In R. Gonzalez (1992),Without Discovery: ANative Response toColumbus.


Native population of 20 million in Mesoamerica at the time of the comingof the Europeans, reduced to less than two million one hundred years later’(Gonzales, 1992, p. 32) He punctuates this commentary with the proviso:‘No account is possible. Words are useless. We are forced to experience thisknowledge outside language’ [My italics] (Gonzales, 1992, p. 33).

IMAGE 3:Work of art: Moorish Bath, Jean Léon Gérôme (French 1824 –1904), oil oncanvas, 20 x 16 ins

CLUE 3: Jerome ‘cleaning up his act’ in a bathroom in the Middle East??

At a time when the Middle East is an ever-present player in geopoliticalevents, studying a nineteenth-century painting that portrays a Moor is mostrelevant. Historically the term ‘Moor’ refers to people of mixed Arab andBerber ancestry and of North African lineage who conquered Spain in theeighth century, and also connotes Muslim culture. Used historically, it alsocan also refer to all dark-skinned or miscegenated people from India to theAmericas. This painting provides a jump start for a conversation about whypeople defined as Moors were in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near East andfor speaking about French nineteenth-century painting at the time ofJerome when the French held colonial power or indirect rule in manyregions of the world. The practice of using Moors or blacks as slaves and/or‘cultural oddities’ in middle and upper European circles and court life is welldocumented in literature and numerous western paintings. The words ofthe late Edward Said, who referred to nineteenth-century (western) writersunderstanding of the Orient as a locale meriting ‘attention, reconstruction,even redemption’ (Said, 1979, p. 167), have contemporary resonance inrelation to civil strife and war in the Middle East. He further stated, ‘the pro-fessional contributors to Oriental knowledge were anxious to couch theirformulations and ideas, their scholarly work, their considered contempo-rary observations, in language and terminology whose cultural validityderived from other sciences and systems of thought’ (Said, 1979, p. 206).Said addressed the backdrop of political and economic forces that reinforce‘Orientalizing’, or the Eurocentric requirement to represent the other and,as a Palestinian Arab, he observed the West observing the Orient and inparticular, the Muslim Orient. Intersections between the cultural politics ofgender and race are a probable discussion topic in response to this work asstudents explore ways in which racialized identity oppressed women ofcolour more than any other group historically. Many artists have accessedthe politics of colour in their work and critical analysis of the artistic imagi-nation have produced numerous commentaries on the displacement,projection and pathology of theories of white racial superiority.

The seeds of Colorquest©: closing comments aboutexclusion and art worldsColorquest© offers entry into cultural worlds through artistic expression andreflection. The pedagogy can inform students’ own processes of identityformation given an inspired teacher.



I remember my undergraduate and graduate education at university asindoctrination not education. I rejected the well-known textbook History ofArt (Janson 1977) because of its western, Christian bias. It included scantrepresentation of or by women or artists of colour. Since then, the UnitedStates has witnessed the creation of separatist, discrete art worlds devotedto women’s art, Latin American art, African American art, as well a longertradition of production and institutionalization in Native American art.Each art world has produced its own infrastructure in parallel to those ofinstitutions and largely in response to unofficial policies of white privilegeand male advantage. While this is not a comforting history to revisit, andothers may have experienced it differently, I matured in an exclusive artworld in which screening and legitimating policies within pubic practiceexisted but were not written down because this would have violated constitu-tional values. Since my own career path intersects at art history, cultural dif-ference and sociology and since I am a practising visual artist I, and otherslike me, have survived with our sense of integrity and nobility intact.

This article has not engaged with the most recent museum studies lit-erature, which is extensive and included important works by Karp, Kratz,Szwaja & Ybarra-Frausto (2007), Carbonell (2003) and Lavine (1991) toname but a few. Early art education literature on ‘art games’ includingKatter (1986) or Hurwitz & Madeja (1977) were not mentioned becauseColorquest© is rooted in critical theory and race awareness. The articledoes not connect with cultural studies literature and is primarily informedby the anti-racism training that emerged in the 1970s, multicultural educa-tion theory and practice and the diversity awareness literature influencedprominently by Banks (2006). Beginning in 1968, this was a decade of rev-olution, both social and political. Colorquest© does not directly engagewith the theoretical exposition of public culture that characterizes a newbody of research on museums as cultural institutions. My concern is withthe historically conditioned interaction one museum provides and myreadings of the artworks as an adult artist who has patronized it for overforty years. Although I trained as an schoolteacher I have taught mainly inhigher education. While I am familiar with curriculum trends such asDBAE, municipal teaching and the perennial political struggle in Americato maintain arts programmes in schools my work has focused on theglobal project of visual culture. In my studio work, lecturing and publish-ing, and from my trans-racial religious perspective, I have found the socialsciences the most promising arena for exploration. This article cites adiverse spectrum of scholarship and practice, therefore. Some scholars ofmuseum policy and critics have noticed a shift of attitude towards publicoutreach. The notion of ‘the museum’ is class-related in that patrons,audiences and administrative personnel have always been drawn frombetter educated, well-off upper classes. Class production and the repro-duction of wealth and status is nothing new. However, museum educationdepartments underwent a period of self-reflection and audience analysis inthe 1970s and 1980s in an effort to cross class boundaries. The multicul-tural education movements of this era produced a new paradigm of ‘repre-sentativeness’. Arts departments in historically black and Indian collegesand predominantly white colleges and universities began to churn outartists, art consultants, art collectors and arts experts who challenged the



white racial hegemony that had previously dominated the art world. But myexperience was that the predominantly white young and older art museumeducators at this time were relatively uninformed and naïve about ethnicand racial difference.

Following each museum visit, students’ findings and questions withrespect to the history and provenance of works of art should be discussedand processed, but as visceral experiences carrying emotional weight.When I first walked the marble floors of the Boston MFA in the 1960s, therewere no African, South Pacific or Nubian collections and no Japanese orChinese art to speak of; there was little work if any by artists of colour, orwomen. In closing, it is important to point out that multimedia technologyhas played a pivotal role in the way Colorquest© is processed afterwards indiscussion with students. Online course chat rooms, group media projectsthat critique museums, interactive web research, and online art historicalarchives and virtual museums have all altered the pedagogy for the better.Film and Internet resources provide additional cultural insights intomuseum holdings. Colorquest© continues to function as ‘a safe space’for dialogues on race and stimulating critical thinking and inquiry on racialdifference that goes beyond fear and shame.

ReferencesBanks, J.( 2006) Race Culture and Education: The selected work of James Banks. New

York: Routledge.

Becker, H. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California.

Boime, A. (1990). The Art of Exclusion (Representing Blacks in The NineteenthCentury). Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Boon, J.A. (1994). Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in theComparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, Texts. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture.Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.

Carbonell, B.M. (Ed.) (2003). Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Malden,MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Chandler, R. (1996). Xenophobes, visual terrorism, and the African subject, ThirdText 35 (Summer), 15–28.

Danylak, K. (2002). Museums Australia – Evaluation and visitor research-topic:Exploding the myths behind multicultural and indigenous audience develop-ment: A case study from three new museums. Cultural Perspectives. Paper pre-sented at Museums Australia Conference, Adelaide- Once Upon Our Times.MA2002danylak.pdf.

Dominguez, V. (1986). The marketing of heritage. American Ethnologist 13 (3)546–555.

Katter, E. (1988). An approach to art games: Playing and planning. Art Education41 (3) 46–48 & 50–54.

Freire, P. (1988). Pedagogy of Freedom. New York: Seabird Press.

Fuentes, C. (1999). The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World.Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research and Practice. NewYork: Teacher’s College Press.


ETA_3.3_02_art_Chandler.qxd 12/11/07 8:02 PM 3

Gonzalez, R. (Ed.) (1992). Without Discovery: A Native Response to Columbus. Seattle:Broken Moon Press.

Hurwitz, A. & Madeja, S. (1977). Joyous View. New York: Prentice Hall.

Janson, H. W. & D. J. (1977) History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from theDawn of History to Present Day. New York: H N Abrams.

Karp, I., Kratz, C., Szwaja, L. & Ybarra-Frausto, T. (Eds.) (2007). Museum Frictions:Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Klein, H.S. (1986). African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York:Oxford University Press.

Lavine, S. (1991). Exhibiting Cultures: The Practice and Politics of Museum Display.Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute.

Moy, J. (1993). Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America. Iowa City: Universityof Iowa Press.

‘Only Skin Deep Symposium: Changing visions of the American self’ (2005).Exhibit- ‘Visualizing Race in American Phorography’, Museum of PhotographicArts at San Diego. 1 October –31 December. For further information, seehttp://www.sdmart.org/exhibition-skindeep-symposium.htmlAccessed, November 15, 2007.

Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

UNESCO (2001–2005). Third Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and IntangibleHeritage of Humanity. United National Educational Scientific and CulturalOrganization. On-line at http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00103.Accessed, November 15, 2007.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zolberg, V. (1990). Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Suggested citationChandler, R.M. (2007), ‘Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-

identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA’, InternationalJournal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 173–184. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.173/1

Contributor detailsWith a portfolio in the visual arts and sociology, Dr Robin M. Chandler has been apractising artist for more than 25 years and has exhibited in the United States andabroad (http://www.robin-chandler.com). She has conducted field research andcommunity projects taught and lectured in South America, Africa, Latin Americaand the Caribbean, Australia, Asia, and the United States. A widely published author,Chandler is an associate professor, at Northeastern University’s Department ofAfrican American Studies. A former Fulbright scholar (South Africa 1996), she hasbeen a consultant to numerous museums and corporations and is a well-knownspokesperson and activist for the arts, the advancement of women, and the empow-erment of black, Latino, Native Indian and Asian communities. Contact: Dr. RobinM. Chandler Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies AndDirector of Women’s Studies (2004–2006), Northeastern University, 132Nightingale Hall, Boston, MA 02115617-373-5681(o) 617-373-2625(f).E-mail: [email protected] www.robin-chandler.com





‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiryinto the representation of narrativestructures in Greek children’s drawings

Vasiliki Labitsi Greece

AbstractVisual narrative construction plays a key role in how children develop theirunderstanding of the world and communicate ideas and meanings. In this visualtext I examine how a small sample of 8-year-old children from Greece employednarrative structures to represent unfolding actions and processes of changein narrative drawings. Aided by a set of categories developed by Kress and vanLeeuwen (1996), I discuss the four main types of narrative structure the childrenemployed and the difficulties they experienced drawing characters in action.

Children and visual narrative Visual narrative or telling stories through a picture or sequence of picturesis a means through which children develop and communicate ideas andthoughts about themselves and the world. According to Kellman (1995),spontaneous visual narrative-making enables children to reconstruct theirinterior, psychological worlds, illustrate the day-to-day details of their livesand come to terms with its demands and situations.

A narrative dimension is very common in children’s spontaneousdrawings. From approximately the age of 5, drawing seems to become theprimary vehicle for their narrative-making (Wilson & Wilson, 1980). This isprobably because the visual medium offers particular strengths over othermodes of communication.

Setting, characters and unfolding actions are three basic elements ofany narrative (Porter Abbot, 2002). However, according to Wilson & Wilson(1979), children’s visual narratives tend to exist in a fragmented form andone or more of these basic elements may be missing. For example, somechildren develop elaborate settings but do not people them with characters.Some concentrate on drawing actions devoid of any setting; others createcharacters that never go into action.

Research by Wilson (2002), Wilson & Wilson (1977; 1980) and Barrs(1988, p. 64) has shown that some children become quite elaborate visualstorytellers with practice and the aid of popular visual narrative resourceslike comics. But in my experience as a teacher many primary-age childrenfind it difficult to represent ‘narrative structures’ visually.

Recently I studied a sample of 36 narrative drawings by 8-year-old Greekchildren collected in two primary-school settings and analysed the kindsof narrative structures they represented and the constraints they faced.


Keywordsdrawingprimary childrenvisual narrativenarrative structuresGreece

Narrativestructures:The visual represen-tation of unfoldingactions and processesof change.

ETA_3.3_03_art_Labitsi.qxd 12/11/07 8:40 PM Page 185

The children were asked to draw a story they liked very much. Once the draw-ings were completed they were asked to explain orally what they had drawn.

Examining narrative structures in children’s drawingsNarrative structures are recognizable by the presence of ‘vectors’. In one-fourth of the drawings examined narrative structures were not repre-sented visually, even when the children described unfolding action in theiroral explanations of them. For example, one participant child described herdrawing as follows (Figure 1):

A girl climbs, climbs, climbs, climbs to reach the sunset.

Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) have distinguished a number of different typesof narrative structure that can be represented in the visual mode and provideextensive descriptions of each one. When these categories were applied tothe drawings in the sample the findings were that the majority of childrenemployed four of them (Figure 2).

186 Vasiliki Labitsi

Type of narrative structure FrequencyUnidirectional transactional action 10Non-transactional action 8

Mental/verbal process 7

Bi-directional transactional action 4

Figure 2: Most frequent narrative structure types.

Vector: A strongdirectional thrust,usually diagonal,that connectscharacters with eachother or a characterwith an object. Avector can be formedby a body or limbs ofcharacters, objectsthey are holding ortheir eyeline (Kress &van Leeuwen, 1996;Jewitt & Oyama,2001).

Figure 1: Girl and the sunset.


‘Unidirectional transactional actions’ was the most common narrativestructure. Typically the goals of such actions were objects or tools the char-acters were holding or directing their hands towards (Figures 3–6).

‘Non-transactional action’ was the second most frequent type of narra-tive structure. In one case, the bodies of the human characters shown inside view in the ‘air gap’, the space formed between the sky and groundlines of the drawing, formed a vector that suggested the direction in which

187‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative…

Unidirectionaltransactionalaction: A vectoremanates from acharacter and isdirected towards apassive participantwho is usually anon-acting characteror some object and isthe ‘goal’ of theaction (Kress & vanLeeuwen, 1996).

Figure 3: Going shopping at the supermarket.

Figure 4: Mother and child panda eating.



Figure 5: Picasso painting.

Figure 6: Robin Hood fights his enemies.



Figure 7: Peter Pan and Wendy flying over a rainbow.

they were heading (Figure 7). In one sequential drawing the presence ofvectors was established through viewing the narrative as a sequence of rec-tangular frames (Figure 8). In this example, the body of a plant shownlarger and taller in each subsequent frame suggested a vertical vector ema-nating from the ground that was directed upwards. The action of growthwas non-transactional since it did not point to or was not aimed at anybody.

‘Mental and verbal processes’ were the third most common type of nar-rative structure evident in the sample. The written texts included in thought

Figure 8: A tree growing.

Non-transactionalaction: A vectoremanates from acharacter but doesnot point at anybodyor anything. Theaction is not done toanybody or anything(Kress & vanLeeuwen, 1996).



or speech bubbles projected the thoughts, feelings and intentions of repre-sented characters and consisted of dialogues, monologues, questions andexpletives. The spontaneous inclusion of this written material confirmedthe multimodal character of children’s visual practices (Anning & Ring,2004; Kress 1997; Bearne, 2003). In one case, a group of tin men inspiredby Tintown (Tenekedoupoli) a well-known illustrated book for children dealtwith the problem of how to cross a river. The dialogue was essential tounderstanding the narrative. It communicated the problem as it occurred,the characters’ concerns about it and finally the solution (crossing a nearbybridge) (Figure 10).

Figure 9: Tintown characters trying to cross a river.

Figure 10: Bank robbery.

Mental and verbalprocesses: They areformed by thepresence of thoughtand speech bubbles.The oblique protru-sions of thought andspeech bubbles forma vector connectingspeakers or thinkerswith their thoughtsor words (Kress &van Leeuwen, 1996).



Figure 11: Two giants fighting.

‘Bi-directional transactional action’ was the least frequent type of narra-tive structure employed to represent characters in conflict. Strong doublevectors were evident in the raised hands of characters holding weapons andwere enhanced by bullet lines or action lines formed by cannon balls(Figures 10 and 11).

Discussion The children’s visual representations of narrative structures were ratherlimited. In several cases they did not employ any. Even when their statedintention was to show characters in action. When they did use them thetendency was to show characters holding objects (unidirectional transac-tional actions), acting alone (non-transactional actions), or thinking andtalking with the aid of speech and thought bubbles (mental/verbalprocesses) that transferred the action from the visual to the writtenmedium.

One possible explanation is that their visual narrative-making was con-strained by the limited range of schemata or standard ways of representingobjects they had at their disposal that were replicated formulaically(Thomas, 1995). The repetition suggests that they may have felt more com-fortable using schemata they had mastered well (e.g. frontal upright depic-tions of human figures) and found it difficult to adapt them according totheir communication purposes (for example, to bend parts of the body of ahuman character or depicting them in profile in order to show them gazingand interacting with other characters or objects). Drawing characters

Bi-directionaltransactionalaction: Vectorsconnect twocharacters interact-ing. They simultane-ously emanate fromand are directed atboth of them (Kress& van Leeuwen,1996).



holding objects and inserting speech or thought bubbles requires only aminimum deviation from the standard frontal orientation as explained byGolomb (2004) and Thomas & Silk (1990).

ReferencesAnning, A. & Ring, K. (2004). Making sense of children’s drawings. Maidenhead,

Berkshire & New York: Open University Press.

Barrs, M. (1988). Drawing a story: Transitions between drawing and writing. InL. Martin & N. Martin (Eds.), The word for teaching is learning: Essays for JamesBrittan (pp. 51–56). Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books.

Bearne, E. (2003), Introduction. Ways of knowing, ways of showing: Towards anintegrated theory of text. In M. Styles & E. Bearne (Eds.), Art, narrative andchildhood. Stoke on Trent, UK & Sterling, USA: Trentham Books.

Golomb, C. (2004). The child’s creation of a pictorial world. Mahwah, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum Associates.

Jewitt, C. & Oyama, R. (2001). Visual meaning: A social semiotic approach. In T. vanLeeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis (pp. 134–156). London:Sage Publications.

Kellman, J. (1995). Harvey shows the way: Narrative in children’s art, Art Education,48 (2), 19–22.

Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the parts of literacy. London: Routledge.

Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T.V. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design.London: Routledge.

Labitsi V. (2006). Visual narrative in children’s books and drawings: The Greek case.Ph.D. thesis, Roehampton University.

Porter Abbot, H.P. (2002). A Cambridge introduction to narrative. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, G.V. (1995). The role of drawing strategies and skills. In C. Lange-Kuttner &G. Thomas (Eds.), Drawing and looking: Theoretical approaches to pictorial repre-sentation in children, New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Thomas, G.V. & Silk, A.M.J. (1990). An introduction to the psychology of children’sdrawings. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Wilson, B. (2002). Becoming Japanese: Manga, children’s drawings, and the con-struction of national character. In L. Bresler & C.M. Thompson (Eds.), The arts inchildren’s lives (pp. 43–55). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Wilson, B. & Wilson, M. (1977). An iconoclastic view of the imagery sources in thedrawings of young people. Art Education, 30 (1), 5–11.

—— (1979). Children’s story drawings: Reinventing worlds. School Arts, 79 (8), 6–11.

—— (1980). Cultural recycling: The uses of conventional configurations, imagesand themes in the narrative drawings of American children in arts. In J. Condus,J. Howles & J. Skull (Eds.), Cultural diversity (pp. 227–281). Sydney: Holt,Rinehart & Winston.

Suggested citationLabitsi, V. (2007), ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representa-

tion of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings’, International Journalof Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 185–193. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.185/1



Contributor detailsVasiliki Labitsi is an educational consultant for the Greek Ministry of Education, achildren’s book illustrator and teaches art education in the Education Departmentat Athens University. She has undergraduate degrees in Primary Education andSociology, Master’s degrees in Art Education and Children’s Literature and has stud-ied illustration at Ornerakis School of Applied Arts. She recently completed a Ph.D.thesis in Art Education at Roehampton University. She has illustrated children’sbooks for several Greek publishing houses and the Ministry of Education and hasexhibited her illustration work in Greece and Europe. She is a member of the boardof the Greek Association of Children’s Book Illustrators and has worked as assistanteditor of the International Journal of Education Through Art. Contact: Propondithos16, Oropos, Attiki, 19015, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]




Art Lunch Project: an internationalcollaboration among art teachers

Kinichi Fukumoto Hyogo University of Teacher Education

Japan (coordinator)

AbstractThe Art Lunch Project is a pilot study involving international collaboration of arteducators and teachers. The main aim was to compare approaches to teachingthe common theme of an art lunch. Lessons organized around this theme tookplace in both art and interdisciplinary lessons in schools in nine countries. Themajority of children recreated traditional food and meals in a range of art mediaand materials and only a few created ‘fantastic art meals’. This project is stillunder way and the participant teachers are discussing the issues that arise. Theyunderstand this international project as positive in that it functions as advocacyfor the subject of art in their school curricula as well as facilitating pupils’creative skills.

IntroductionThe Art Lunch Project aims to exchange practical teaching experience. Theparticipants come from nine countries: Portugal, Germany, the UnitedKingdom, the Philippines, Turkey, Slovenia, Finland, Denmark and Japan. Itis an ongoing project in which art or homeroom teachers in schoolsinterpret the common theme of ‘an art lunch’ in collaboration with university-based researchers in art education in their classrooms. Work completed bypupils is uploaded to the website listed below1 for mutual viewing by partici-pating teachers and children. In some countries, they are used for teachingart appreciation.

The reasons for selecting this theme were that curricula organizedaround the fundamental human need for food are likely to have universalappeal and the results will reflect national cultural differences. In Japan inparticular there is a strong tradition of including food design as a curricu-lum topic in lower primary-school grades and a custom of displaying sam-ple dishes that goes back to the Taisho period (1912–26).

Content of lessons in each countryHow did teachers in the participating countries approach the theme? Whatwere the children’s responses? What kinds of art materials were used inclassrooms to pursue which expressive aims? The resulting expressiveactivities will be introduced now, country by country, with accompanyingimages.


1. Project websitehttp://www.art.hyogo-u.ac.jp/fukumo/ArtLunchProject/ArtLunchHome.html

ETA_3.3_04_art_Fukumoto.qxd 12/11/07 8:16 PM Page 195

PortugalMs Emilia Lopes’s lessons with seventh-grade pupils were interdisciplinaryand combined such diverse subjects as art, English, science (sitology),geography, history and culture, home economics and religion. The mainlearning objectives were that pupils should gain a thorough understandingof cultural differences in cooking and of art as a mode of expression.Practical work was preceded by discussion of the history and culture offoreign countries designed to facilitate understanding of different worldregions and pupils were asked to submit an individual report on a particu-lar region. This was followed by activities designed to get them to thinkabout how to express an art lunch using clay as the main medium and tochoose a recipe for a meal. Then they created forks and cups out of wastematerial for a purposefully designed table setting.

196 Kinichi Fukumoto


197Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers

SloveniaMs Marjana Prevodnik targeted third-grade pupils at her primary schooland conceived a lesson using waste materials to enhance environmentalawareness that highlighted safety. The first practical step was to collect safematerials in collaboration with parents and ensure that none of these con-tained harmful substances. The next step was to study typical meals inJapan and Slovenia to stimulate artistic ideas. While the teacher proposedthey create traditional Slovenian dishes such as zanti (a vegetable soup



mainly consisting of cabbage), krvavica (blood sausage) and vipara struklji(cheese custard strudel), the pupils chose to create a chocolate cake andhandmade cookies, reflecting their own tastes in real life. After this, theirwork was displayed at a cultural festival in the school called ‘Spring Bazaar’.In addition, they e-mailed electronic messages about the work to partici-pants in other countries. These included: ‘We want to show you somemeals from cardboard and clay’, ‘We have prepared fish dishes’, and ‘Wehave made Slovenian dishes that differ from those in your country – pleaseenjoy them.’



TurkeyIn Turkey, Ms Dilek Acer and Dr Ayse Ilhan worked on the project withfourth-grade pupils in a primary school. While undergoing a brainstormingsession, their pupils freely experimented with ideas for an art lunch usingcoloured drawing paper and created a collage. Then they were asked toresearch food and cooking and prepare written reports. Through subse-quent discussion, they developed a basic understanding of the culture of


Kinichi Fukumoto200

food. A cultural attaché from the Japanese Consulate visited the school andexplained Japanese dishes like sushi and bento, which stimulated thesepupils’ interest in another culture and world region. He actively collabo-rated in the project and contributed to international understanding bypreparing some attractive display panels that introduced the food culture ofJapan.


Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers 201

FinlandMs Leena Hiillos was the teacher involved in the Finnish project with third-grade pupils at a primary school. Her approach was characterized by theuse of man-made materials like clay, paper and waste materials as well asleaves and other natural materials. The resulting work had subtle colourtones. Basically, the pupils’ work produced depicted everyday meals inFinland. Art is not taught as an independent subject in this country andclassroom teachers are responsible for art lessons.

The PhilippinesIn the Philippines, Ms Dino Marcelo organized a project around the theme‘A Filipino Food Fiesta Lunch’ with fifth-grade pupils in a primary school.The artistic aims for her lessons included ‘encouraging children “to usetheir imagination to create food out of waste material”, “appreciating thepotential of paper craft” and learning associated techniques and skills’; and


they also included the instrumental aims of ‘informing people that artenhances awareness of the environment’ and ‘thinking about the kind ofdecision-making necessary to protect the global environment’.

Ms Marcelo’s approach was characterized by an emphasis on model-making and the environmental theme of recycling. After they had partici-pated in some games designed to develop knowledge of recycling, herpupils learned about waste wood, folk art, fine art and some aestheticconcepts. Then they were encouraged to create an art lunch using papier-mâché techniques while consulting reference material on recycling, art andtypical Philippines dishes. The resulting work featured festival-related foodsuch as roasted pig (Lechon) and grilled squid (inihaw na pusit).



GermanyDr Petra Weingart organized a project entitled ‘Eating Art’ for fourth-gradepupils. After discussing what kinds of meals children in other countries eat,these pupils were shown some relevant art works to boost ideas. A lot of timewas spent in the initial planning stages ensuring that they carefully thoughtthrough ways of expressing meals they wanted to create. The teacheroffered them a diverse range of materials, including watercolour paint,sawdust, pieces of wood, cloth, tennis balls, styrene foam, chalk and card-board. The children analysed the presentation of meals prepared to entertainguests so as to gain cultural insights into the design of table settings aspart of an art appreciation lesson.

ScotlandMs Lindsay Brook from Scotland appealed to sixth-grade pupils to ‘create animaginative lunch for a foreign friend’. The starting point was to researchJapanese and Scottish cooking on the Internet and by other means to ‘findmeals that foreign friends are likely to enjoy’ and draw them with a view tocreating 3D models. Even though the project took place in a school with chil-dren from a low socio-economic group and there were discipline problems,it captured their imagination and enthusiasm and she successfully linkeddevelopment of drawing skills to the theme of creating an art lunch.

Denmark At Vibenshus School in Denmark, Ms Ingrid Buhl’s approach to the artlunch centred on how to use art-making to achieve new knowledge about acommon cultural artefact – the sandwich cake. The sandwich or ‘fancycake’ is loaded with cultural meanings in Danish everyday life where it isused to celebrate birthdays (as in many other countries) and symbolizes‘being together, having a good time and cosiness’. These cakes are a part of




city life and are displayed in bakery windows. There is no need to bake themat home because everyone can go to a shop and buy one or become part ofcity life by eating one in a cafe. The Danish fancy cake is loaded with associ-ated ‘feel-good’ meanings and has a characteristic shape, material qualities,texture and colours. The decoration has recognizable surface patterns withspecific motifs, repetitions and rhythms.

The third-grade pupils in this school investigated their cultural heritagethrough producing fake cakes and learned about their sculptural forms, to



mix colours and sense material surfaces. The starting point was investigat-ing a real cake and its material qualities – what the ingredients felt, smeltand looked like. The next step was to collect pictures of cakes. The studentsexperiments with materials ended up with their using foam rubber for thecake and whipped soap for cream. The pupils achieved in-depth formalknowledge of the food this way. Then the finished cakes became props inthree tableaux in which the pupils acted out birthday celebrations, andbeing confectioners and potential customers outside a bakery shop theyhad set up in the classroom. These tableaux were photographed. Thepupils reflected on every aspect of the lessons and there was a continuousdialectic between art practice and cultural learning; moreover, they learnedabout a cultural symbol that is taken for granted in everyday life.

The project adopted an ethnographic approach that to researching avisual cultural practice and its settings. The pupils, teacher and a researchershared ideas about common rituals associated with fancy cakes. Viewersexperienced few problems understanding the tableaux settings, suggestingthat the customs and rituals associated with the cakes are well understood.Whereas this indicates how thoroughly they are integrated into Danish cul-ture, it does not answer the question: ‘Why?’

JapanMs Masako Otsu from Amagasaki Municipal Muko-Kita Primary School inHyogo Prefecture led the project in Japan with fourth-grade pupils. Herlessons had the title ‘Yummy Yummy 100%! Fake It, Copy It, My SpecialLunch’ and their main purposes are listed below.

• To motivate pupils to enjoy art learning and express their food culturethrough art

• To expand their imagination through manipulating art materials



• To enable them to apply and develop their past experience and skills• To develop awareness of each other’s artistic expression, abilities and

ways of manipulating materials • To offer opportunities to exchange art works with foreign friends so as

to increase awareness and appreciation of the diversity of artistic expres-sion in the world

Emphasis was placed on the effort pupils made to discover skilful ways of‘creating authentic-looking food even though they are fake’. Because shealready knew lower-grade pupils were capable of creating rice balls andother kinds of food in papier-mâché, Ms Otsu wanted these fourth-gradepupils to discover their own way of combining materials to accuratelyrecreate the appearance of tasty food. She emphasized both aesthetic cri-teria and gaining insights into Japanese culture when she talked aboutthe way they arranged the fake food in their lunch boxes and colour coor-dination. She anticipated that knowing that children in other parts of theworld were making lunch boxes would facilitate her pupils’ awareness ofthe beauty of everyday artefacts and of some ‘good points’ aboutJapanese design.

To start with, the pupils were encouraged to develop their own ideasfor lunch boxes that made the invisible sense of ‘tastiness’ concrete. Thiswas followed by group brainstorming to elaborate ideas and select mate-rials and techniques that would ensure the products would look authentic.As a result, her pupils produced lunch boxes in various shapes, rangingfrom a star to a tulip, maple leaf, crab and snowball. In developing them,they thought about suitable partitions for arranging dishes such as friedprawns, rice balls, broccoli and seaweed rolls tastefully alongside eachother.

The materials used to create the food included papier-mâché, egg andfruit containers, shredded waste, aluminium containers, cloth, sand andsawdust. The pupils were satisfied initially with creating shapes out ofpapier-mâché and colouring them with watercolour. They then began tocompete with each other to develop techniques that made their work lookmore authentic. They were stimulated by each other’s creative ideas leadingto a healthy process of trying to outwit each other.

When one pupil made a fried prawn using a combination of papier-mâché and sawdust, there was an outcry of ‘Wow, that looks tasty!’ This ledothers to try create the feeling of a wonderful taste in similar ways; includ-ing using darker, increasing the amount of sawdust, for example, andcolouring sawdust in a vinyl bag to achieve a sprinkled effect and a ‘beauti-fully browned’ appearance. Meanwhile, a piece of green cloth was trans-formed into a cabbage, shredded netting used for fruit was transformedforms sprinkled with sand were transformed into octopus balls.

Finally, all the products were arranged in the lunch boxes in a colour-coordinated manner and displayed at an ‘exhibition of Japanese lunches’ onthe Internet for mutual appreciation. These pupils were excited by theprospect of communicating with counterparts in other countries abouttheir work and exploring the cultural differences in their work via theInternet as indicated by their desire to explain o-temoto (a small compli-mentary dish) and the soy sauce containers that are unique to Japan.

ETA_3.3_04_art_Fukumoto.qxd 12/13/07 9:39 AM Page 207

Significance of the Art Lunch ProjectAs part of the Art Lunch Project, a questionnaire survey was conducted ineach country. Teachers were requested to collect children’s drawings of anevening meal together with information about culturally specific food andget them reflect on this. The intention was to increase awareness andunderstanding of different styles of table setting and family culture and thepotential of the Art Lunch Project for individual artistic expression. Somedrawings were not returned for ethical reasons, but those collected featureda diverse range of subject matter including single dishes, table settings andconversation over the dinner table. Many children said that they ate withother family members but a small number did so alone for various reasons.

The Art Lunch Project will be successful if these children reflect on theirown cultural identity and understand that many countries share similarways of life. The project is ongoing. Most of the artworks collected so farhave represented traditional national foods. The absence of imaginative orvisionary work suggests some weaknesses in the lesson instructions. Butall the participating teachers have evaluated the exchanges positively interms of art practice.

The children appear to have gained confidence through associating foodwith national culture. Imagining children of a similar age recreating nationaldishes elsewhere must have made them think about life in foreign coun-tries. Through creating their own artwork some of them may have learnedto take pride in and value their culture more and become more aware ofdifferences in cultures and expressions of others. Working in a global spacerather than the closed space of the classroom has brought them into contactwith the invisible. Even though the timing of the project has differed slightlyfrom country to country, the almost real-time viewing of their own work onthe Internet and that of foreign children has made reflection on art activitiesand mutual appreciation more real. Additionally, participant children haveexperienced the joy of sharing ideas in time and space. A recurring com-ment from the participant teachers was that wrestling with the same themeengendered a sense of competition in them and their pupils and this addedto the value of the collaboration and exchange.

ConclusionsEducation through art implies international understanding through art.Although international exchanges of practical work in classrooms are diffi-cult because of language barriers, artistic expression communicates acrossnational boundaries. This makes it a valuable tool for intercultural commu-nication. These exchanges between Japanese and foreign children consti-tute a first step in education for peace informed by the sharedunderstanding that we are all human and that the starting point is to recog-nize heterogeneity.

Participant details

Kinichi Fukumoto, Associate Dean, Joint Graduate School, HyogoUniversity of Teacher Education (Japan). E-mail: [email protected]

Masako Ohtsu, Art specialist, Amagasaki City Mukokita ElementarySchool (Japan).



Teresa Eça, Researcher, Paulo Freire Research Centre, University of Evara(Portugal).

Emilia Lopes, Art teacher, Escola ‘A Ribeirinha’ (Portugal).

Petra Weingart, Art education researcher, teacher in primary andsecondary-modern schools (Germany).

Barbara Ebner-Federlein, Teacher of needlework, arts and crafts, Grund-und Hauptschule Bergrheinfeld (Germany).

Martina Paatela-Nieminen, Postdoctoral researcher, School of ArtEducation, Academy of Finland, University of Art and Design (Finland).

Leena Hiillos, Classroom teacher, Pukinmaki Elementary School (Finland).

Ayse Cakir Ilhan, Associate professor, Department of ElementaryEducation, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Ankara University (Turkey).

Dilek Acer, Lecturer, Department of Pre-school Education, Faculty ofEducational Sciences, Ankara University (Turkey).

Marjan Prevodnik, Senior art education adviser, National EducationInstitute (Slovenia).

Marjana Prevodnik, Classroom teacher, Hinko Smrekar ElementarySchool (Slovenia).

Lourdes K. Samson, Associate professor, Humanities Department,Miriam College (Philippines).

Dina Marcelo, Elementary art teacher, Grade School, Art Department,Miriam College (Philippines).

Sandra Ewing, Art lecturer, Department of Creative and AestheticStudies, University of Strathclyde (Scotland, UK).

Lindsay Brock, Art teacher, Windlaw Primary School (Scotland, UK).

Mie Buhl, Associate professor, head of Department of EducationalAnthropology, the Danish University of Education (Denmark).

Ingrid Buhl, Art teacher, Vibenshus School (first to ninth grade)(Denmark).

Suggested citationFukumoto, K. (2007), ‘Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art

teachers’, International Journal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 195–209.doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.195/1





Images and fear: Repressed pictures astools for analysing society

Peeter Linnap Tartu Art College Estonia

AbstractThis article discusses societal attitudes to images, concentrating on photographs.What may or may not be photographed communicates a lot about a society. Asthe ability to take photographs increases, with ever more digital devices capableof capturing images, so do various restrictions. These restrictions are connectedwith the deep fears images can engender. Using examples from Estonia, thisarticle demonstrates that while photographic images continue to have thepower to shock, the way and extent to which this happens depends on the par-ticular contexts in which they are created and interpreted.

IntroductionIn every culture there are certain images that make people feel uncomfort-able or fearful. Indeed we could go further and propose that there are wholefields of socio-cultural reality that, according to social norms, should not berecorded via images or, at least, such images should not be shown publicly.Images in general, and more particularly those that are referential or repre-sentational, are removed from but also link what is private, restrictedand/or illegal to what is in the public sphere. People who make images areoften considered dangerous therefore or, at the very least, disturbing. Sincethey are aware of this, many artists and other sorts of image-makers todayare afraid to create certain kinds of images. An otherwise healthy interest inimage-making – the will to spontaneously depict scenes, events, subjectsand objects – is often visited by unconscious fears and an endless need forreassurance. As recently as 6 September 2007, Breidenbacher (2007) wrotein a US newspaper,

Fair boss saw smoke, and put out photo. Even a blue ribbon didn’t exempt aphoto from the state fair’s tobacco ban. Her name was Betty and she foundherself at a Super Bowl party in Oswego, wearing nothing but a pair ofPittsburgh Steelers boxer shorts. Someone put a cigarette between her lips.The picture won a blue ribbon in the New York State Fair’s 2007 PhotographyExhibition.

Here is another example.

The new White Plains Building Department Policy of requiring persons askingto see a site plan to fill out a questionnaire asking why they want to examinethe plan, and prohibiting photographing of site plans in the Building Department


KeywordsImage theoryPhotographyEstoniaSocial valuesFear

ETA_3.3_05_art_Linnap.qxd 12/17/07 8:38 PM Page 211

as WPCNR was prevented from doing last week, violates the Freedom ofInformation Law, according to Robert Freeman, Chair of the New York StateCommittee on Open Government.

(Bailey, 2007)

A recent blog comment in the Sidney Morning Herald raised similar issues butin a more personal way.

In January, while on leave, I started photographing people who were climbingup the rocks at Wattamolla Beach, in the Royal National Park, and jumpingoff. I got four frames away over ten minutes or so, as I was keeping an eye onmy son swimming nearby, and then I copped an earful. ‘Take a picture of mydaughter and I’ll rip ya f___ing head off.’ Here we go again I thought… Iexplained that I was just shooting people jumping off the cliff and that mylens included everything from that tree to that rock. ‘Yeah, and if you take apicture of my daughter I’ll I’ll rip ya f___ing head off.

(Reid, 2007)

Many similar examples can easily be found. Even though some of the loca-tions differ they confirm that the astonishing multitude of places where takingphotographs is disallowed is increasing (compare Jay, 1984; Staples, 2000;Ruby, 2007).

This article aims: • To show that some phenomena within the dichotomy of images and fear

are far from explicit; rather they are contextual and have to be dealt withthrough verbal descriptions, analysis, contextualizing, etc.

• To exemplify some of these phenomena at greater length using Estoniancase studies. Through considering Estonia’s totalitarian past mixed witha neo-liberal present, it should be possible to discover both differentand common features of images and fear.

• To demonstrate that art is no longer a major locus of feared imagestoday.

• To draw attention to general confusion in the sphere of image ethics.

I have chosen the medium of photography for most of the examples. This isnot a chance decision: photography is the field I have studied in greatestdetail and it has been interrelated with the questions of fear, and dread,what it is/is not permissible to depict. The timeframe for the examples israther broad as I am above all trying to trace the complexity of these issues.The examples span almost half a century. As well as domestic or autobio-graphical photographs, other types of vernacular photography are considered,and there are a few examples from film.

Images in society: restrictionsThere are a growing number of spaces where photography is forbidden:corporate areas, business parks and even trading centres or restaurants. Inaddition, there is land that it has long been illegal to enter, such as military

212 Peeter Linnap


zones. To make matters worse, a recent American ban on photographingor filming on all public transportation exceeds any reasonable limits tobasic human freedom. In most such cases, the reasons for prohibitingpictorial representation are unclear. Typically these regulations are justifiedthrough weird notions of safety or privacy, and one can only guess what isbehind them. It seems that a new wave of anti-picture-making hysteriareached its height with the tragic events of 9/11 in New York City. But it isalso clear that people using it as an excuse to exercise control over civil-ians distorted this event. This is strange given that recent developments invisual technologies have produced miniature cameras in cellular phonesthat make it impossible to prevent people taking photos. Moreover, thesetechnological developments render any notion of guaranteeing privacyentirely absurd.

People sometimes express concern about why they have been photo-graphed. This anxiety is both psychoanalytical at root and related to socialnorms and regulations about pictorial representation. It interrelates withconcerns about social standing and status, gender, age and many othervariables. Most personal restrictions on pictorial representation concernvisual aspects of identity. When we ‘take’ a person’s image what we reallyface is a mixture of both psychological and socially determined factors thatcause image-making to be problematic; problematic because social regula-tions about image-making in public have never been successfully fixed inlaw and often remain arbitrary.

An alarming number of institutional barriers to image-making havebeen built into every socio-political regime, driven by irrational urges. Inhis book Everyday Surveillance, Staples (2000: 140) included the vendor’smaster database which provides details of websites that have beendeemed ‘unacceptable, inappropriate, or undesirable’ to access. The listincludes the following categories: ‘abortion advocacy, activist groups,adult entertainment, alcohol/tobacco, alternative journals, cult/New Age,drugs, entertainment, gambling, games, gay/lesbian lifestyles, hacking,illegal, job search, militancy, personals/dating, politics (advocacy of anytype), racism/ hate, religion, sex, shopping, sports, tasteless, travel, userdefined, vehicles, violence, weapons, web chat’. What else is this surreal listof prohibitions other than an arbitrary enforcement of some new, incom-prehensible normality?

As mentioned above, the list of places where pictorial representation isprohibited, or not recommended, is very long and this leads to a simple,albeit fundamental question. If certain locations are considered privateproperty, i.e. owned by private or corporate bodies, are images of such enti-ties an extension of such ownership? Or to put it more simply, is a videorecording, a photograph or even a drawing of a house automatically theproperty of the house owner (Tagg, 1988)? Although this kind of questionhas been posed before (Haggerty & Ericson, 2006), there has never been asimple answer. Since the laws about it, that vary from country to country,have tended to be rather liberal, particular cases have required differentsolutions. Chaos continues in the formal regulations between ownershipand its representation.

213Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society


Fear in the field of vision – art as a territory of excusesIn parallel, late capitalist societies have demonstrated considerable hostilitytowards contemporary critical or analytical art. It would be easy to write a his-tory of prohibited artworks from a national and international perspective andcompile a history of anti-art from an ethical point of view. Such booksalready exist (McEvilley, 2005). However, there is a more fundamental prob-lem lurking behind the curtains of the art-fear discussion. Rather than creat-ing a list of what exactly we are afraid of in art, we should pose quite adifferent question: namely, when are artworks, actions or artists to befeared? Perhaps there is no single answer; though some general statementsare possible. The first appears to correlate with a certain default under-standing of information perceived to be artistic.

Artistic information is rarely produced so as to bring about practicalends. Although in the 1990s the most radical artists did produce a numberof works that clearly exceeded this limitation (Hans Haacke, Alfredo Jaar,etc.). These were minor voices, unable to redefine how art is understood. Inhis groundbreaking piece Shapolsky Real Estate Holdings. For example,Haacke presented statistical data in the form of an artwork. Although heintended to display this work in art(ist) spaces, he failed. As Haacke(1996, p. 72) himself states, (writing about himself in the third person):

Thomas Messer, the director of the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum,rejected this and two other works, which were all, made for a scheduled one-person exhibition at the Guggenheim museum. Messer cancelled the exhibitionsix weeks before the opening, when the artist refused to withdraw the disputedworks. Messer called them ‘inappropriate’ for exhibition at the museum andstated that he had to fend off ‘an alien substance that had entered the artmuseum organism’. Edward F. Fry, the curator of the exhibition, was fired whenhe defended the works.

214 Peeter Linnap

Figure 1: Mari Laanemets. Untitled. (Installation view). 1997


Several other art venues refused to show this piece and it failed to bringabout further dialogue between art and other spheres of human activity.

In these kinds of examples, what could otherwise be interesting juxta-positions tend to remain in the realm of intra-art communication. Whereessentially serious questions are at stake and there are serious goals toachieve it seems the nomenclature ‘art’ devalues and disarms. As soon as(any kind of) painful or fearful image is connected with the notion of art, itis almost guaranteed that its potential to be taken seriously will not befully achieved. The concept of the artist as a gambler (Homo ludens) mightbe a factor here. Another obvious reason why art lacks credibility is becausepopular art forms define and characterize fears and horror through veryexplicit means. To put it another way, film and television have definedtheir own ways of representing fear, that do not resort to representationsof everyday experience. It seems that art is no longer a major locus forfearful images.

Explicit triviality of trauma photographs: some case studies Of course, this is not to say people are no longer afraid of images. If wefocus our attention on more modest small-scale, fearful images that con-nect with personal experience, it soon becomes clear they generate fear infar more significant ways than the explicit clichés the horror industries pro-duce. I will give some examples now to illustrate this point.

A little girl is repeatedly looking at snapshots of uncles and aunts,grandmothers and grandfathers from family albums. She feels thatsomething is strange or not right. The majority of the people depicted inthe snapshots have passed on and it is hard for her to understand whypictures of people who have departed this life are preserved. The girl


Figure 2: Mari Laanemets. Untitled. (Scratched album photograph). 1997


Peeter Linnap216

grabs a pair of scissors and starts to restore the world, to conform totruth: if someone is no longer here, their picture cannot be either, other-wise it would be a lie. The girl scrapes the faces of all deceased personsoff the photos (Linnap, 1997, pp. 57–59) (Figure 2). This extraordinaryexample reveals the compensatory function of photographs in real life:They attempt to hide the absence of someone or something; and theytry to replace it with a symbolic, hence surrogate presence of self.Another example is borrowed from Mark Romanek’s 2002 film One HourPhoto, where the lonely Seymour Parrish, nicknamed Sy, who is seem-ingly locked in another world, is employed in a photo laboratory. Forhim, the work not only involves developing films, but also caring forvaluable moments stored on film. Sy is especially interested in theYorkins family. Through photos, he grows familiar with their holidays,informal moments and Jake’s childhood. It turns out that Sy’s interest inthe Yorkins is pathological: over the past eleven years he has madecopies of family photos and followed the progress of their lives while hisown life has been utterly ruined.

Images from Estonia’s recent historyLet us now consider some more personal examples. As an Estonian, I comefrom a specific socio-historical background in which the most traumatic andfearful events took place when the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic countriesin the 1940s. For a long time this period was excluded from official history andespecially image history. It is easy to see why images were hushed up duringthe Soviet occupation; but harder to understand why they have not been redis-covered and widely shown over the past sixteen years since Estonia becameindependent. The period itself was extremely rich in all sorts of events andchange. In 1940, the Soviets marched across the border with almost no resis-tance from the local inhabitants. During the following few years:

• Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people escaped from Estoniaby sea, using whatever means of transportation was at hand.

• Some were enlisted in foreign armies on either the German or Sovietside.

• Some hid in the forest as partisans for almost ten years and formed arather non-systematic resistance movement known as the ‘forest brothers’.

• Some were taken to deportation camps in Siberia.

It shocks people to recall these collective, traumatic events and often ren-ders them speechless, even today. So perhaps it is not so surprising that pic-tures of this old diaspora slowly started to become public in the late 1990s.

Eric Soovere’s published photo-based diary from the 1940s reveals subtle,vibrant records of the places he passed through on his journey of escape(Figure 3). The last stop on Estonian soil was followed by Stettin, Altdamm,Augsburg and other German and Sudeten German places, some withoutnames (Soovere, 1999). He does not criticize or evaluate them: they only have‘we were here’ meaning for him. They form stages and a background formajor and minor characters in his story: the author in the mountains ofSudetenland; sleeping on the top of a railway carriage; Red emissaries callingthe refugees back home; barracks; milk queues; cultural and sports events, etc.


Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society 217

These photographs present a fleeting yet kaleidoscopic view of a world wherenothing was secure or permanent (Figure 4). By contrast, when Sooverespoke about the traumatic experience the diary recalled, he chose to concen-trate on other images. After the war he moved to the United States and haslived there ever since and the locus of trauma for him was embedded in thepictures of his former farmhouse in the Estonian countryside (which was lostforever). As someone who lived in occupied Estonia, there is nothing veryspecial or gripping about this image for me. From my point of view, a differentimage would be traumatic: for example, a last photograph of the boat thattook a part of Estonia’s population away from their homeland forever.

Pictures by Donald Koppel are another example. Of Estonian descent,Koppel lived in Miami, Florida until his death in 2005. During the SecondWorld War, he started to take photographs (Carr and Linnap, 2006). Hisexperience was typical of many Estonians: first he was in the Estonian Army,then in a Russian and German camp. Koppel was not an official front corre-spondent and as a consequence was not restricted by rules about what tophotograph and how. His camera recorded Russian war ships in Tallinn andEstonian men in Waffen-SS uniforms. None of these images are exceptional;the war is just disorder and chaos, albeit exceptional enough to be docu-mented. Conspicuous among Koppel’s imagery is the eastern Estonian townNarva (Figure 5). The post-1944 bombed Renaissance town looms in front ofthe camera as a hideous, inimitable desert. The image of a town that was lit-erally erased and reduced to heaps of rubbish and awful mounds of stonemakes a powerful, emotional impression. Although rumours about the totaldevastation of Narva were quite widespread in Estonia, Koppel’s photographsimpinge on us doubly now: the corroboration of hitherto propositional

Figure 3: Eric Soovere. Registration of Refugees on the board of Germanmilitary ship “Lappland”. 27.09.1944.


information unfolds in front of our eyes. Moreover, there are other interpre-tations that enhance the emotional force of these photos. In the political/geographical subconscious of Estonia today, the territory of Narva (like all ofeastern Virumaa) is not-entirely-ours. Will it ever be again?

218 Peeter Linnap

Figure 4: Eric Soovere. The former mobilized Estonian soldiers had to sleep onthe roofs of the trains. June 1944 on the way to Augsburg refugee camp,Germany. It was the beginning of the further sufferings for these people,because in the following “screenings” in the camps they were separated fromtheir fellow contrymen.

Figure 5: Donald Koppel. Narva after bombing by Russians, March 1944.


Let us next consider a picture shot by a child over a windowsill (Figure 6).It depicts the most traumatic event ever in Estonian history – the forceddeportations to Siberia in the 1940s and 1950s. This little, foggy, troublingsnapshot depicts what is probably the most painful part of the deportation-camp narrative: arresting people right in their homes.

To reconstruct the circumstances, in which that little snapshot wastaken, is to confront a deep fear. To be caught photographing under thesecircumstances was tantamount to facing the death penalty, and it was takenby a child! No wonder, then, that the amateur photographer only dared topublish this image in 2005; the trauma was so troubling, so deep, that thephotographer avoided making it public for many decades.

A further example comes from a family I know who were deported toSiberia for ten years. Family members always fell silent when people referredto this ‘interlude’ in their lives. It was only when the effects of alcohol madethem somewhat more talkative that some of them delved, ever so slightly,into their memories. Although the family took over 1,500 pictures duringthose ten years they did their best to erase the decade 1949–59 from con-sciousness and turned over numerous photographs to a relative, a student ofphotography. The pictures taken were of what, under those circumstances,were ordinary events. People undertaking forced forest labour; a man sleepingon top of an excavator digging bucket, or play-acting the same scene for thepurposes of an image. Snapshots of desolate and sparsely developed Sovietremote settlements follow. In some pictures, the snow is melting. Someone isbeing buried. People are sitting at long tables. Nowhere does the eye catchanything that is fearful or traumatic. But this only provokes additional ques-tions. Do pictures like this really cover the multitude of (partly unpleasant)experiences (Figures 7–10 & 15–16)? What if they were taken to cover up thegrim realities that people were going through during this decade? Maybethere were other images that were hidden, lost, confiscated, destroyed?


Figure 6: Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi. So the deportation of Estonians began. A child´s snapshot from the home window, 1945.


220 Peeter Linnap

Figure 7: Unknown photographer. In this kind of railway cars thousands ofEstonians were transported to Siberia. (Photograph from the book: MartLaar. “Forest Brothers”. Tallinn, 1993).

I want to add three more examples from the 1990s, when Estonia wasonce again an independent state. One is by Jüri Liim who risked his lifefilming such subjects as the illegal presence of Soviet troops or corpses ofmurdered liberation fighters (Figure 11). The others are images by the con-ceptual artist Peeter Tooming, who compared pictures of the same placesand objects taken in 1937 and 1987 (Figures 12–13).



Figure 8: Unknown photographer. Thousands of Estonians were transportedto Siberia in this kind of railway car. (Photograph from the book: “Estonians:The years of Suffering” Tallinn, 1943).

Figure 9: Ants Leitmäe. “From family photographs in Siberia” 1949–1959.

Absent images and imagination Whilst acknowledging that horrifying pictures can induce fear, trauma andpain, it is the case that we become more fearful where images are totallyabsent or scarce. In such cases, the psyche starts to project far more horrificmental representations of dread. Is it the case that images can liberate usfrom chimaeras and phantasms that otherwise would torture the personal orcollective mind? Parallels can be drawn with phenomena that continuously


222 Peeter Linnap

Figure 10: Ants Leitmäe. “From family photographs in Siberia” 1949–1959.

occupy and trouble mass consciousness. In most cases, these are events orbeings that are not or are poorly covered by images. If ‘perfect’ images ofthe mass media’s favourite, enigmatic topics existed (UFOs abominablesnowmen and various sorts of monsters for example), they would no longerbe featured. They remain interesting only as long as something is unre-solved, unclear, not seen well enough.

Questions with few answersTo summarize, we have yet to confront a number of difficult questions andpropositions. Is it ever possible to visually represent fear, or in doing so, dowe merely depict scenes that relate to fear in indirect, personal ways? Thisleads to the understanding that fear or horror is topologically situated androoted in unfamiliar territory. What if the very act of producing a specificrepresentation is just a way of negating fear? If this is the case, every act ofrepresenting fear could be interpreted as a therapy for the traumatic hiatusassociated with death.

At this point a comparison of language and image is called for. A numberof phenomenological studies have noted that, in a state of fear, languagestops. In psychoanalytical methodology, language functions as a tool forgetting rid of fear. Bur what happens to visual perception and imaginationin a state of fear? Do images, like language, cease to exist? Are they blocked,repressed? Would it ever be possible to use images to rid ourselves of fear?In seeking answers to these questions, it becomes clearer how differentimages and language really are. First, anyone who recalls a frighteningexperience remembers above all a plenitude of imaginary visions. In theseabundant images, people probably try to imagine the source of the fear.Since strategies for survival are at stake here, this kind of image processing



takes place almost instantly: fast enough to be inaccessible through lan-guage, but ideal for visual representation.

If images merely represent aspects of traumatic experience and fear, thequestion arises how do they stand in relation to these phenomena? Is therelationship entirely arbitrary or personal? Or to turn the whole problemupside down: are images by themselves capable of evoking traumas andgenerating fear?

Figure 11: Jüri Liim. Illegal presence of Soviet military troops in Estonia: trainingcentre for submarine crew at Paldiski, 1992. Videostill.


224 Peeter Linnap

Figure 12: Peeter Tooming and Carl Sarap. From “55 Years Later”. 1937/1992.Kunda, Estonia, 1937.

On factual information and image ethicsIn order to begin to resolve this problem, we need to find out if imagesare merely statements, or if some of them can be understood as proposi-tions? In a general sense, images are rarely equal to propositions, andfactual information can always be attributed to them using verbal text.But it is the poor state of current knowledge about visual grammar that isthe issue isn’t it? Investigations into phenomena known as ‘documentaryturns’ (the messages contained in interpretations) have shown they haveat least some features in common with visual argument. The perpendicularpositioning of a camera in front of subjects and objects asserts we aredealing with factual information, i.e. a statement that at least has thepotential to be a proposition. Although the era when a language of imageswas disputed is over, we cannot entirely avoid drawing certain parallelsbetween the two.

One notable feature of traumatic or fearful images is that we try to avoidthem. Or, to put it more correctly, we try to escape our own reactions thatparticular images could provoke.


The discourse generated by these issues is known as ethics; or moreprecisely, image-ethics (Gross, Katz & Ruby, 1988). The latter has tended tobe rather loose and in most cases consists of a set of moral norms or basicregulations applied mainly to public representations. Sex, death, violence andother such matters have been at the heart of these kinds of institutionalizedregulations, and not much else. But what counts as image ethics today –and how it has changed with the coming of new media and altered modesof representation – has yet to be determined (Long, 1999). It is importantto note, that there is probably greater control over the publication of imagesthan ever before. Again, the issue of public availability of the personaldetails of ordinary people has been debated with considerable forebodingin the media. The desire to prioritize issues of safety and privacy; however,it is hard not to see arguments for the hyperactive selling of the privaterealm today as being in the interests of multinational news corporations andentertainment businesses.

Art and fear: some observations So far, I have deliberately avoided much discussion of the domain of art.The grim reality is that art, either in a more restricted, old-fashioned


Figure 13: Peeter Tooming and Carl Sarap. From “55 Years Later”. 1937/1992.Kunda, Estonia, 1992.


sense – or a newer, all-embracing one– has become a minor field of visualproduction. The use of the word ‘minor’ is not intended to imply that art isredundant, rather that its impact and influence has decreased and becomeminimal. Artists ceased to concern themselves with creating beauty andbestowing aesthetic pleasure a long time ago. Instead their art became aform of therapy for psyches disabled by late capitalist ways of living andbegan to function as a critical tool for researching society (Figure 14). Weknow these ideas have been widely accepted, but at the same time we can-not deny art is losing its identity. It is no wonder that art education today isconfused about its aims. There is no consensus around the concept of thearts anymore, nor is there agreement about what their major functionsshould be, hence it is really hard to guide art education in any particulardirection. But this could also be seen as a positive shift.

One of the first things that we thought about when this era that we call post-modernism began to happen, one of the first words that was used to describeit was pluralism. And I’ve always felt personally committed to pluralism. Thatthere should be a variety of approaches and that any one of these variety ofapproaches should be regarded as OK as long as none of them attains anhegemonic position and represses others because that happened in themodernist Kantian tradition…

(Sarapuu, 2003, p. 46)

This is clearly demonstrated in the work of younger artists today (Figure 1):in every sort of new ‘conservative’ painting and occasional, irritating revisits

226 Peeter Linnap

Figure 14: Peeter Linnap. From “Concealed Landscapes”(Deserted USSRRocket-base) 1988



Figure 15: An instrument found in KGB “interview-office”. (Photographfrom the book: “Estonians: The years of Suffering” Tallinn, 1943).

Figure 16: Title: Left: A Forest brotherhood partisan guarding the Peenjärvecamp in Virumaa (north-east Estonia); right hidden entrances to the forestbrotherhood’s underground caves.


228 Peeter Linnap

of modernist classics. I have a feeling that what was once called anti-art (beit dada or postmodern) had an ethical function and that a lot of it was con-nected to fear. One manifestation of this could simply be the destabilizingimpact of art on our consciousness. Unfortunately it appears that this isbeing lost in the new liberal, risk-averse society. Nevertheless, our fearsremain. They are used by governments, media, education and the law andare more real than ever. In other words, fear is genuine, and that is why art-works based on fear are usually genuine as well. It would be nice to thinkthat artists will continue to be able to invent and rediscover new ways ofexpressing fear out of the exhausted clichés of the mass media. Yet the factthat a number of influential societies have come to prefer art that entertainsand support safe art is a telling indication that its power lies dormant.

References Bailey, J.F. (2007) City ban of photography of site plans policy illegal. http://

wpcnr.com/jp/index.html.Accessed 9 September 2007.

Breidenbach, M. (2007). Fair boss saw smoke and put out photo. http://www.syracuse.com/articles/news/index.ssf?/base/news-3/1189069226294870.xml&coll=1.Accessed 11 September 2007.

Gross, L., Katz, J.S. & Ruby, J. (Eds.) (1988). Image ethics: The moral rights of subjectsin photographs, film and television. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

—— (Eds.) (2003). Image ethics in the digital age. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press.

Haacke, H. (1996). Obra social. Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies.

Haggerty, K.D. & Ericson, R.V. (Eds.) (2006). The new politics of surveillance andvisibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Jay, B. (1984). Photographer as aggressor. In D. Featherstone (Ed.) Observations.(Untitled series no. 35, pp. 7–25). Carmel, CA: The Friends of Photography.

Linnap, P. (1997). On both sides of transparency. In P. Linnap (Ed.), Invasion(Catalogue of the II Saaremaa Biennial, pp. 57–58), Tallinn: Centre forContemporary Photography.

Linnap, P. & Carr, I. (Eds.) (2006). Donald Koppel: I saved them for you: Photographsof Estonians in WW II. Tartu, Estonia: Tartu Art College.

Long, J. (1999). Ethics in the age of digital photography. https://www.nppa.org/professional_development/self-training_resources/eadp_report/.Accessed 7 May 2007.

McEvilley, T. (2005). The triumph of anti art: Conceptual and performance art in theformation of post-modernism. New York: McPherson & Co.

Reid, J. (2007). Photography is not a crime. http://blogs.smh.com.au/photographers/archives/2007/02/photography_is_not_a_crime.html.Accessed 3 September 2007.

Ruby, J. (2007). An ethical image: A post-modern conundrum. Presented at the Imagesand Fear conference, Tartu Art College, Estonia, 22 June.

Sarapuu, H. (2003). Thomas McEvilley: Changes in art education: An internationalcontext. Kunst.ee Magazine, 3 , 46.

Soovere, E. (1999). Käru ja kaameraga [With camera and pushcart]. Tallinn: Olion.


Staples, W.G. (2000). Everyday surveillance: Vigilance and visibility in postmodern life.New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Tagg, J. (1988). The burden of representation: Essays on photographies and histories.New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Suggested citationLinnap, P. (2007), ‘Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysingsociety’, International Journal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 211–229.doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.211/1

Contributor detailsPeeter Linnap is professor and head of the Photography Department of Tartu ArtCollege. His Ph.D. research ‘Photology’ carried out in the University of TartuSemiotics and Cultural Theory Department was a systematic analysis of photography,based on Jurji Lotman’s concept of semiosphere. The author of more than 500essays, research-based and critical writings, his artwork and texts have been pub-lished in many journals including Art in America, Art and Design, Neue Bildende Kunst,Aperture and European Photography. Contact: Paasiku 4-128, 13916 Tallinn, Estonia.Email: [email protected]





Mentoring in the creative economy

Tiina Rautkorpi, Helsinki Polytechnic, Finland

AbstractFinland is among those countries leading research into the creative economyand co-configuration. A new economy preoccupied with intangible values andcultural meaning-making is being promoted in Finnish business and industry.This article argues that traditions of mentoring in business and education havemuch to offer in creating the necessary conditions for the new forms of workneeded in this context. Mentoring as an area is ripe for development in art edu-cation also where attempts are under way to break down existing boundariesbetween the economy, society and the arts.

Introduction My starting point is the tradition of mentoring in western societies. Historicallythis has been linked to a master–apprentice relationship; on the other hand,there has always been interest in it in manager training (Juusela, Lillia &Rinne, 2000; Keski-Luopa, 2001.). Mentoring occurs during academicsupervision in university studies (particularly in postgraduate researchtraining) where the focus is initiation into a particularly demanding pro-fession – that of researcher or master of research (Aittola, 1995).

Widespread public debate about mentoring started in the field of workcounselling and supervision during the 1970s and 1980s. There were manypublications on mentoring at work in the 1990s. Another starting point is theFinnish context for promoting a creative economy. By a creative economy Irefer to a society with an economy that is based on cultural networking andcontinuous meaning-making.

I will begin with existing research. There is a great deal of ‘futuresresearch’ in Finland, which currently has one of the world’s largest academicresearch units in this field. The multidisciplinary Finland Futures ResearchCentre was established in 1992 to carry out projects in the areas of foresight,environment, innovation, creativity, culture and the knowledge society.

This kind of research focuses strongly on the future characteristics ofmature, postmodern societies. Prosperous industrialized societies have longsince entered an era in which the basic necessities of life are readily available.In western societies subscribing to the ‘old’ capitalist theory of economics,the exchange value of a commodity was considered more important than itsuse value. In today’s postmodern societies, what are called intangible valuesare as (or more) important than tangible values in generating new areas forconsumption. In futures research the term ‘intangible values’ refers to valuesclosely connected with things like knowledge, welfare or building and preserv-ing human relationships. Intangible values are very important in the contextof postmodern consumption.


Keywordsmentoringculturemeaningcreative economyeducation

ETA_3.3_06_Art_Rautkorpi 12/11/07 7:58 PM Page 231

Meaning-making societies Given that an increasingly large share of the value of products is intangiblethis is necessarily intertwined with culture. The cultural characteristics ofproducts and services have become a central issue in consumption to theextent that they are no longer bought for their practical value but because ofassociated cultural meanings. Nobody buys a particular brand of cheese, orbecomes a slave to fashion, merely in order to survive.

According to futures research, mentoring and work counselling areessential within new creative economies in which the work culture is largelybased on added intangible value. They require:

• Skills of co-configuration that enable collaboration between customers andemployees in a range of fields. These skills form the starting point fordesigning user-focused products and services.

• A meaningful society that capitalises on arenas of interpersonal encounters.When researchers speak of a network society gradually replacing aninformation society, they stress that such encounters happen globallyand are not tied to particular places as in tribal societies. A major shareof actual production in a creative economy consists of products thatpromote encounters or encounter services.

Markku Wilenius, professor of futures studies, has repeatedly stressed thatcreative economies require three kinds of skill dimension in order todevelop cultural know-how:

1. A new type of craftsmanship: the design and realization ability of cre-ative artisans and artists to create interesting, distinctive, aestheticproducts;

2. Cultural literacy: the ability to ‘read’ different ethnic, regional and organi-zational cultures and sub-cultures;

3. A new type of leadership culture suited to guiding creative experts andenabling production and take-up of innovative solutions (Wilenius,2004, pp. 57–60).

The cultural production of meanings is the shared frame of reference for theentire work process. At the same time, the new forms and organizations oflabour and coping require that each employee is able to master increasinglybroad sections of the work process. An IT professional working in servicemanagement or office networking, or someone with a job in educational plan-ning and management for example, must be able to manage the whole workprocess from start to finish. Traditional superior/subordinate distinctions areno longer relevant for work based in co-configuration requiring a very highdegree of self-determination (Huhtala, 2004).

Pragmatist aesthetics According to Richard Shusterman, pragmatist aesthetics encompasses thewhole of life (Shusterman, 1992, 2000). Scholars in this field stress that arthistory is made here and now and all the time. For Shusterman, art existseverywhere, and pragmatist aesthetics plays a central role in creative post-modern economies. As with other important aestheticians, his starting

232 Tiina Rautkorpi


point is aesthetic experience, the fact that humans are touched and movedby aesthetic qualities.

Postmodern, network societies are characterized by cultural diversity anddialogue containing hypertext, discontinuity and new combinations of mean-ing. According to pragmatist aesthetics such conditions exist in interpersonalencounters, and genius and style are continuously manifested in emergentpractices in daily life. In postmodern societies, aesthetics is linked to modesof self-expression and self-branding like dressing up. We all have potential tobe performing artists and enjoy the means of producing aesthetic experi-ences. Shusterman (Ibid) suggests that these increased opportunities for self-expression protect us from the threat of mechanization.

Pragmatist aesthetics understand modern culture as one of encounters.A cultural return to encounters between performers and spectators alsoimplies revisiting the theatrical stage and using ancient drama techniques(Reitala & Heinonen, 2001). According to drama theory, genuine presence isthe essential, shared characteristic of self-expression as realized in perfor-mance – the present moment, the here and now, that always includes apotential starting-out in some direction. In other words, an individualscene in a drama always contains the seeds of its own future.

Many books and articles on mentoring tell the same story of itsorigins:

According to Greek mythology Ulysses, the King of Ithaca, gave his sonTelemachus to the care of the goddess Pallas Athene, as he went to wage warin Troy. Athene disguised herself as Mentor, an old friend of Ulysses. Homersays that Mentor’s task was to help and guide young Telemachus and preparehim for the task that he had received at birth. The story describes the Greeks’belief that the relationship between a young person and his or her seniorrelies on the fundamental principle of human survival: we learn skills, cus-toms and values directly from a person that we look up to and respect.

(Juusela, Lillia & Rinne, 2000, p.14)

From its inception, therefore, mentoring has been closely entwined withdrama. From a developmental and educational point of view, the new net-work society needs arenas for personal encounters in which meanings information remain in a state of potential coming-into-being.

The interviewsIn the following section I will discuss ideas about mentoring that emergedfrom interviews with three people with lengthy careers in creative fieldswho have been mentors/supervisors. Two of them worked in mass-mediacompanies and were thoroughly familiar with the master-apprentice tradi-tion that has been embedded in art education for a long time. They believethis tradition will be useful in the future, provided it is modified andextended in certain ways.

My first interviewee was Ms Ria Karhila, editor for the Finnish BroadcastingCompany and other independent production companies and a freelancedirector. From time to time she has prepared visual-arts and media-arts stu-dents for careers in radio and television. She told me she views them asnovice colleagues in art. She is convinced that they need to work closely

233Mentoring in the creative economy


with adults already working in the field and understands the mentor-actorrelationship as two-sided. The mentor who shares in the youthful energy ofthe student is privileged to be in the frontline of development and hears thestudent’s dreams and visions.

My second interviewee, Mr Mikko Bruun, directs a corporate strategyoffice at the Finnish Broadcasting Company. His work as developmentmanager of radio operations since the mid-1990s has included divisionmanagement, producer training and voluntary-work counselling groups.Mr Bruun has been a journalist and lecturer in Finland and Sweden andworked for UNESCO. He explained that new forms of leadership trainingand work counselling were being initiated at the Finnish BroadcastingCompany because of fundamental changes in the social environment. Hepointed out that modernity, a time of continuity, has given way to an era ofdiscontinuity and mobile, multi-personal audiences. The disruption of theentire cultural paradigm is affecting the nature of the work and personalskills required of every employee.

My third interviewee, Mr Eero Holstila, is in charge of municipal policyfor business and industry and his job is to attract businesses to the capitalregion. Finnish businesses have pioneered the use of mentoring to meetthe needs of creative economies. Nowadays public policy supporting busi-ness is increasingly conducted by federations of municipalities and is linkedto adult education to ensure that the workforce develops appropriate skills.

Until the beginning of 2006, Eero Holstila was managing director ofCulminatum, a centre of expertise for the Helsinki region. The centre, whichencourages contact between universities and the world of work, effects newcombinations of expertise by linking the best know-how in public adminis-tration, business and higher education. The expressed focus of its innova-tion strategy for 2005 was promoting the creative economy by supportinginclusion of cultural meanings in planning the operating environment ofresidents.

Culminatum and its associates, such as the Forum Virium Helsinki thatsupports digital services in the region, understand the creative economy asa means to increasing well-being. Culminatum has developed and imple-mented partnership programmes for small and medium-sized enterprisesand uses mentoring to exchange and support expertise. Eero Holstila toldme he has studied clusters of new, knowledge-intensive fields in severalcountries. He pointed out that representatives of creative fields often speakof knowledge clusters and creative campuses and explained that he doesnot think creativity is independent of time and space. It requires long-termpersonal interaction in order to flourish.

Creativity and diversity According to futures research a newer fragmented production process isdeveloping side by side with the creative economy. Because traditionalindustrial value chains are being dismantled and broken down into sec-tions, the production of a given product or service requires a much smallerownership in the entire value chain. In an economy of this kind, the qualityof even the smallest sub-processes is defined by cultural meanings.

If we think of an everyday kitchen appliance like a pasta machine, it is nolonger enough for it just to make pasta. We need a machine suited to ‘a tall

234 Tiina Rautkorpi


sporty man’, designed in colours that young couples living in cities favourthat are compatible with other postmodern kitchen appliances. The list isendless, because so many technical, design and practical requirements andcultural connotations and values have to be adapted to and met.

Research into the creative economy increasingly focuses on the pluralityof society and culture. Some research and development activity in business,for example, concentrates on winnowing out appropriate meanings fromthe flood of meanings, and on distinctions based on meanings and the cre-ation of individual brand concepts.

Given these new conditions, we need much more research in art educa-tion. It is a fact that the creative economy has often tried to pluck out cre-ativity, as it were, from art and design fields and bring it closer to business,but this has been energetically resisted. As theory of cultural criticism sug-gests (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2005), the more culture becomes a marketcommodity, the more it threatens the autonomy and inherent value of cre-ative work with extinction.

However, much more is going on than the separation of creativity fromtraditional fields of art and design. Creative work based on the productionof intangible values and the principle of autonomy is an in-built necessity ina creative economy for conserving culture and the economy, so theirmutual positions are reversed. If we really believe that free competitionautomatically guarantees the quality of new art forms, there is no need tointroduce new methods of teaching and learning even at this time of radicalsocial change.

Researchers who study work development, such as Bart Victor andAndrew Boynton (1998) speak of ‘craft work’ rather than ‘production ofmeaning’. They argue that craftwork is embedded in more recent work pat-terns in many ways. In industrial societies with mechanical and automatedforms of work it is still needed, for example, whenever products are modi-fied to meet the needs of new customer groups. In Finland we often use theconcept ‘craft design’.

Writing about ‘generations of work’, Victor & Boynton (1998) note that,as production methods change, new gaps are continuously created in con-sumer needs and desires; they point out that it is the characteristics of arti-sanal work that serve to bridge these gaps by helping to create new styles,innovations and unique features of products.

Developing co-configuration skills Leaders in the creative sector are often represented as having a visionary,charismatic leadership style (Aaltonen & Heikkilä, 2003). However, the net-work society requires other types of organizational skills. For example, skillsin building are keys to managing experts from different fields who must bepersuaded to work together towards common goals. We need new combi-nations of artistic/artisanal work and business skills. Management probablystill requires charisma and a shared vision, but the ability to subtly under-stand and support people from widely divergent operating cultures is prob-ably more important.

According to Yrjö Engeström (2005), a professor of cultural-historicalactivity theory and developmental work at the University of Helsinki, co-configuration closely resembles co-production and co-creation activities, all



Tiina Rautkorpi236

of which are linked to the production process. The concept of co-configurationrefers to continuous activity or ‘chipping away around shared targets’; conse-quently, it is linked to products or services with long life cycles. According toEngeström, co-configured products or services never seem complete in atraditional sense, because they must be adaptable and capable of modifi-cation to suit users. They contain ‘customer intelligence’ created by meansof information technology. Work development requires training in a newtype of articulated knowledge, for achieving continuous re-configuration ofdialogues between users, producers and products. The production process isturned upside down when the ultimate goal is to respond to customerneeds and situations and teamwork focuses primarily on inter-professionaldiscussion of such needs.

A creative economy based on intangible products and services requires co-configuration skills because product development cannot move forwardunless existing products are enriched by continuously linking them to new ser-vices and experiences (Wilenius, 2004). Yrjö Engeström has suggested that co-configuration work requires multiple perspectives. The concept of perspectivedependency is central to Adrian Cussin’s theory of cognitive pathways (1992)that proposes that actors gain independence from their own perspectives byestablishing a network of paths through a given terrain. When operationalchanges begin to occur within this terrain, an established network obstructsnavigation. To regain independence of perspective, the network must be desta-bilized, which means that the system is in continuous movement.

Complicated thinking of this kind is needed to understand how co-configuration works and learning how it operates takes time. Co-configurationskills cannot be acquired rapidly, and must be assimilated over successivegenerations. To be able to articulate meaning-making in the work process insuch a way that everyone can configure meanings is a demanding skill. Itrequires not only that all parties share a broad-based overall understandingof a particular sort of work or production, but also a climate of trust.

The professionals I interviewed had extensive experience of meaningproduction of various kinds. Mikko Bruun agreed that neither creative workin the content business nor the methods of supporting it will ever be per-fected. He uses many counselling methods, such as gestalt therapy, team-work methods, psychodrama, sociodrama and psychotherapy in his workand believes that no single method can respond to all that is expected.

Supervision as a journey When we think about new methods of art education, it is important toremember the mentoring embedded in supervision of postgraduateresearch. In this case the developmental process of an actor from youth toadulthood becomes even clearer. Mentoring is intertwined with stories ofshared journeys towards the unknown. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a taleabout mentoring, in which Virgil (a classic supervisor character) leads hisprotégé from Hell to Heaven.

Helena Aittola (1995) reviewed literature on supervision and humandevelopment. Both the growing comprehension of possible destinationsand the process itself enable supervisees to broaden their perspectives, setfar-reaching goals and objectives and extend their ideas of what is humanlypossible.


Mentoring in the creative economy 237

In academic supervision, instead of attempting to change, help orunderstand supervisees, supervisors support independent problem-solvingand decision-making (Aittola, 1995). The postgraduate students in Aittola’sstudy (1995) found supervision very beneficial and wanted it to be both pro-fessional and personalized. Not surprisingly therefore, Ria Karhila told methat her head swims when she thinks about teaching novice colleagues.Her instruction takes the form of sharing experiences, telling stories abouther own work, mistakes, uncertainties and successes. She is not surewhether she is a teacher. Instead she wants to share in the lives of others,understand them and speak her mind.

Nobel laureates, and famous researchers who study at Harvard orCambridge University (Aittola, 1995) typically enter an apprentice system atthe start of their research careers. In a mentoring relationship of this kind,the acquisition of information is less important than observing how a ‘master’works, thinks and does research at close range. The greatest advantageof this supervision system is that the supervisee acquires a broad researchorientation, including the ability to evaluate the quality of research. Thementor’s tasks also include strengthening the values, norms and self-imageof supervisees.

Where academic mentoring is understood as leading superviseesthrough a rite of passage, even more colourful metaphors are used. Periodsduring the journey are characterized by intellectual crises, unexpected com-petition and encounters with enemies, emotional conflict, failure and thepossibility of self-deception. According to this literature, postgraduateresearch students are serious and gloomy, even though cognitive develop-ment and creative research requires a rich imagination and playfulness. Atbest, mentoring nurtures these capacities in the study process (Juusela,Lillia & Rinne, 2000; Keski-Luopa, 2001).

The notion of a shared journey into the unknown, that involves leadingothers and being led, is a frequent theme in fiction. In the journeymetaphor, the word ‘dia-logos’ (that which is in-between) is emphasized(Sava, 1998; Räsänen, 2003; Greimas, 1987; Propp, 1928/1977). Thus, men-toring is an intermediate stage in growth that is inevitably linked to partner-ship and choice. Mentoring is also associated with crossing socialboundaries in the sense of breaking down borders between disciplines inresearch and/or art (Wilenius, 2004).

Today, management is increasingly understood to consist of promotingcreativity and co-configuration. Stories seem to be the most effectivemeans of transferring modes of work and organizational culture betweenpersons. According to Aaltonen & Heikkilä (2003), they are used in man-agement to clarify links between actions and as means of attaining goals.

Tacit knowledge and dialogueDuring the mentoring process two people from different communities,work cultures and professions enter a dramatic stage to participate in ashared performance during which they learn about each other’s workmodes. This process closely resembles the work patterns based on co-configuration that Engeström described.

Mentoring, work counselling, academic supervision and teaching alldeal with and process tacit knowledge that cannot (yet) be articulated or


transmitted to others. This knowledge is personal, contextual and difficultto externalize as abstract concepts or numerical data. Other forms ofknowledge are easier to verbalize or express through metaphor and anal-ogy. However, tacit knowledge exists at a deeper level and cannot be directlytransferred or copied from one particular process and/or organization tothe next (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995).

The tacit knowledge that is typical of artisanal work is closely bound upwith experience, techniques and tools. It forms the basis of all handcraftand related value production. In artisanal work makers continuously accu-mulate tacit knowledge when they strive to create new, unique solutions vis-à-vis customers, products, processes, tools and materials. When PirkkoAnttila (2004) contrasted practical and personal knowledge she noted thatthe former was associated with a skilled maker’s personal style. Soattempts to transfer this to a new situation do not necessarily lead to posi-tive results. My interview with Ria Karhila confirmed this. As a professionalwho enjoys working with students, she told me that she understands her-self as a person who unties knots, an unruffled solver of difficult situations.Where a student lacks courage, she considers avoidance of risk is unpro-ductive and told me it simply leads to mediocre work.

The notion that dialogue enables transmission of tacit knowledge iscentral to mentoring. When Shusterman writes about pragmatist aesthet-ics, he argues that dialogue provides a stage for action and makesmoments of self-expression possible. Dialogue offers a safe, equal relation-ship within which to formulate meanings. The language of encounter isshared and understandable (at least at some level), and this facilitatesexchanges of tacit knowledge between two people.

I want to suggest a connection between mentoring and a theory of dia-logue and polyphony (multi-voicedness) formulated in the nineteenthcentury. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984; see also Buber,1993) constructed a theory of dialogue around the notion of story structuresand the dramatic stage. He understood Socratic dialogue and theMenippean satires as precursors to the modern dialogic novel. Accordingto him, Socratic dialogue embodies means of narration such as syncrisis,or the comparison of different viewpoints, and anacrisis, or provocation toelicit speech.

In Socratic dialogue protagonists had different perspectives on theworld. The nature of truth and human thinking was presented as dialogicand ideas were tested dialogically. According to Bakhtin, Socrates usedquestions to reveal tacit knowledge or ideas not yet properly articulated. Heconstructed action stages on which persons with two world-views couldspeak of themselves in their own language as equals and simultaneouslytest each other. According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky’s novels are good exam-ples of multi-voicedness. Their heroes conduct dialogues with themselvesand each other that continuously modify their identities. Dialogue pervadesevery word in his novels giving them two voices (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 68).

Conclusion Thus, it is possible to argue that the actors in Bakhtin’s multi-voiced worldare continuously on stage, living in dramatic time and in a state of theirown becoming. It is the act of opening one’s mouth and replying to

238 Tiina Rautkorpi

ETA_3.3_06_Art_Rautkorpi 12/13/07 9:40 AM Page 238

another’s speech that opens up directions for individual actors. The activi-ties of actors participating in a dialogue on a stage unfold one sentence ata time, and each response has the potential to turn it in a new direction.

As mentioned previously, creative economies are flooded with mean-ings. However, the main interest of pragmatist aesthetics and drama theoryis in how humans act in and manage society. The creative economy with workpatterns based on co-configuration requires actors who are subjects of theirown lives.

Those within reach of the opportunities offered by the creative economyand co-configuration feel hopeful, because they have many options (Juuti,2005). The aesthetics of dialogue is not totally fragmented, and the keypoint is to find the right direction in life. My interviewee Eero Holstila didnot view the mentoring process as a locus for creating innovation per se.Whereas the latter is characterized by unpredictability, mentoring is primar-ily a support structure. He thinks that individuals need to experience basicsecurity so as to encourage them to take bigger professional risks.

At any one time, dialogue may include a performance by one person inresponse to the voice of another. Each new reply contains hope. Hoperesides in the fact that life has direction and evolves. Art education institu-tions need to think carefully about how to respond to the requirements ofnew creative economies. Together with my interviewees, I propose mentor-ing as an appropriate means of breaking down boundaries between disci-plines and connecting cultural meaning-making and economics.

Notes1. In Finland, work counselling first started among healthcare and social-work

professionals. The British and American tradition in this field often focuseson understanding the meaning of inter-organizational relationships andcommunication; see the research interests of the Tavistock Institute ofHuman Relations in London. The term ‘supervision’ appears infrequentlyand originates in both manager training and therapy. The tutorial meaningof the term ‘supervision’ was first used at Cambridge University.

2. Details of interviewees: Mikko Bruun is Head of Development at the Corporate Strategy Officeof the Finnish Broadcasting Company (face-to face interview, 20 April2005). Eero Holstila currently works as Director of EconomicDevelopment at the City of Helsinki Economic and Planning Centre. Atthe time of the interview he was Managing Director of Culminatum(face-to-face interview, 7 April 2005). Ria Karhila is a freelance TV jour-nalist (e-mail interview, 20 April 2005).

ReferencesAaltonen, M. & Heikkilä, T. (2003). Tarinoiden voima: Miten yritykset hyödyntävät

tarinoita? [The power of stories: How do companies make use of stories?].Jyväskylä: Gummerus.

Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (2005). Kulttuuriteollisuus: Valistus joukkohuijauksena[Culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception]. Tiedotustutkimus, 27(4–5), 9–37.

Aittola, H. (1995). Tutkimustyön ohjaus ja ohjaussuhteet tieteellisessä jatkokoulutuksessa[Supervision of research work and supervisory relationships in scientific further



education]. Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research, 111.Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto.

Anttila, P. (2004). Tiedonhankinnan kanavat ammatillisen asiantuntijuuden edis-täjinä [Channels of information acquisition in the promotion of professionalexpertise]. In H. Kotila & A. Mutanen (Eds.). Tutkiva ja kehittävä ammattikorkeakoulu[Polytechnics in research and development] (pp. 128–160). Helsinki: Edita.

Bakhtin M. (1984). Problems of Dostoyevsky’s poetics. (Ed. and Trans. C. Emerson).Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Buber, M. (1993). Minä ja Sinä [I and Thou]. Juva: WSOY.

Cussins, A. (1992). Content, embodiment and objectivity: The theory of cognitivetrails. Mind, 101, 651–688.

Engeström, Y. (1995). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to devel-opmental work research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.

Engeström, Y. (2005). Developmental work research: Expanding activity theory in practice.Berlin: Lehmanns Media.

Greimas, A. (1987). On meaning: Selected writings in semiotic theory. (Trans. P.J.Perron & F.H. Collins). London: Frances Pinter.

Huhtala, H. (2004). The emancipated worker? A Foucauldian study of power, subjectivityand organising in the information age. Commentationes Scientiarum Socialium,64. Saarijärvi: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.

Juusela T., Lillia, T. & Rinne, J. (2000). Mentoroinnin monet kasvot [The many faces ofmentoring]. Jyväskylä: Yrityskirjat Oy.

Juuti, P. (2005). Toivon johtaminen [Management by hope]. Aavaranta-sarja. Keuruu:Otava.

Keski-Luopa, L. (2001). Työnohjaus vai superviisaus: Työnohjausprosessin filosofisten jakehityspsykologisten perusteiden tarkastelua [Work supervision or super-wisdom:On the philosophy and developmental psychology of the work supervisionprocess]. Oulu: Metanoia-instituutti.

Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanesecompanies create the dynamics of innovation. New York & Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Propp, V. (1928/1977). Morphology of the folktale. Austin & London: University ofTexas Press.

Räsänen, M. (2003). Kirjeitä sinisestä hatusta [Letters from the blue hat]. In J. Varto,M. Saarnivaara & H. Tervahattu H. (Eds). Kohtaamisia taiteen ja tutkimisenmaastoissa [Encounters in the terrains of art and research] (pp. 174–183).Artefakta, 13. Hamina: Akatiimi Oy.

Reitala H. & Heinonen T. (2001). Dramatisoitua todellisuutta [Dramatized reality].In H. Reitala & T. Heinonen, Dramaturgioita: Näkökulmia draamateorian, dra-maturgian ja draama-analyysin ongelmiin [Dramaturgies: Viewpoints on the prob-lems of theory of drama, dramaturgy and analysis of drama] (pp. 9–74).Saarijärvi: Palmenia-kustannus.

Sava, I. (1998). Taiteen ja tieteen kietoutuminen tutkimuksessa [The intertwiningof art and science in research]. In M. Bardy (Ed.). Taide tiedon lähteenä [Art asa source of knowledge] (pp. 103–121). Stakes julkaisut. Jyväskylä: AtenaKustannus Oy.

Shusterman, R. (1992). Pragmatist aesthetics: Living beauty, rethinking art. Oxford:Blackwell.

——— (2000). Performing live: Aesthetic alternatives for the ends of art. Ithaca, NY &London: Cornell University Press.

240 Tiina Rautkorpi


Victor, B. & Boynton, A. (1998). Invented here: Maximizing your organization’s growthand profitability: A practical guide to transforming work. Boston, MA: HarvardBusiness School Press.

Wilenius, M. (2004). Luovaan talouteen: Kulttuuriosaaminen tulevaisuudenvoimavarana [Towards a creative economy: Cultural expertise as a resource forthe future]. Helsinki: Edita.

Suggested citationRautkorpi, T. (2007), ‘Mentoring in the creative economy’, International Journal ofEducation through Art 3: 3, pp. 231–241. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.231/1

Contributor detailsTiina Rautkorpi is Senior Lecturer of Media at Helsinki Polytechnic, Finland. Sheworked as a radio and TV journalist and documentary director for ten years. Sincethen she has been employed as Lecturer in Education Planning and Management inthe Department of Visual and Media Arts. She is interested in combining industryand business-oriented research and development with art pedagogy in adult educa-tion; and her main research topic is the use of art pedagogy, developmental workand research methods in journalistic production. Contact: Research and Development,Helsinki Polytechnic, PO Box 4032, FIN-00099 City of Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: [email protected]




BOOK REVIEWS


Book Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.243/5. © Intellect Ltd 2007.

Artes Visuais: Da Exposição à Sala de Aula (Visual Arts: FromExhibition To Classroom), Ana Mae Barbosa, Rejane GalvãoCoutinho and Heloísa Margarida Sales, (2005)São Paulo: Edusp-principlesEditora da Universidade de SãoPaulo, 216 pp. ISBN 85-314-0935-7 (pbk), Real(Bzl)62.00Reviewed by Anabela Moura, Escola Superior de Educação de Viana doCastelo, Portugal

This book provides an account of research on an important topic. Theauthors investigated the key areas of professional development of art teach-ers and the role of educational resources in this development. The originalproject was funded by the Cultural Centre of the Brazilian Bank – CCBB anddeveloped by Arteducação Produções and La Fabbrica do Brazil. The aimwas to reflect on and evaluate what impact the educational materials calledDiálogos e Reflexões (Dialogues and Reflections – D & R) had on teachers’ atti-tudes and behaviours. Ana Mae Barbosa, one of the three researchers andauthors, briefly summarizes this research project. It was set in 70 primary(elementary) schools in the city of São Paulo, Brazil and was mostly aboutart teachers; the sample comprised four groups of specialist teachers withhigher education training (80 per cent of whom specialized in the arts). Theresearchers critically evaluated the various approaches of participant teach-ers to the materials. Of the 64 teachers in the sample, 32 of them (5 menand 27 women) sent their students’ works to be evaluated at the end of theacademic year. Only four of them were artist practitioners, but all those whocompleted the questionnaire reported that they went to exhibitions andused the Internet regularly as a research tool. The teachers’ average agewas 43 and they had an average of sixteen years teaching experience.

There is a lack of clarity about the methods used by the four groups. Theroles of the different members of the research team were not well specified,although it is clear that all the groups had a field agent who visited theteachers, as well as monitors who accompanied those visits and aresearcher who contacted all the teachers by e-mail. Moreover, students’responses served as the basis of reflection by the La Fabbrica do Brasil’s teamon the involvement and professional development of the participants.However, the researchers did not address all the four groups in equaldepth. This was perhaps inevitable given the number of case studies, thelack of reflection and evaluation of many of the participant teachers, andalso their difficulty with the reporting of their own case studies. Barbosaconsidered the strategies and resources fundamental to the success of thisproject. The CCBB was in charge of distributing the D & R material to thefour groups, all of which, in their conversations with the field agent or intheir answers to the questionnaire, praised it (p. 209) and considered it anadequate strategy. According to the researchers, there was a feeling that the

ETA_3.3_07_rev_Paulo.qxd 12/11/07 7:59 PM Page 243

244 Book Reviews

materials and the meetings with the groups were interrelated (p. 210) since,the teachers were given guidelines at those meetings, on how to use thematerials. The conceptual basis and defined methodology allowedthe teachers to use the materials in an individual way, which was verifiedthrough practice (p. 212).

The teachers reported that the D & R material gave them greater free-dom to speak about art, and themselves. They considered that the materi-als alone made their teaching richer in quality and that the meetingsenabled them to get the best out of them and that D & R contained bothinformation and orientation, whose guiding principles should be broughttogether in combination with the teachers’ own principles. It was also con-firmed that, throughout the one-year study, the teachers were able to inte-grate and/or add new content to their curricula, with a wider variety ofmaterials and classroom repertoire, through proposing themes that weremore inclusive and applicable to their students’ realities, and throughaddressing aesthetic and philosophical questions about contemporary art.Interdisciplinary approaches between art and history were also thought tobe essential. By using the evaluative criteria employed by Group 1 togetherwith the sequence of the students’ artworks it was possible to provide com-parative analysis throughout.

The conclusion was that there was progress in all the classes that sentin materials. This idea of progress was emphasized in the teachers’ conver-sations with the field agents and in their answers to the questionnaire, withthe exception of Group 1, which did not mention this aspect explicitly. Thefinal evaluation was positive with the researchers noting that ‘the quantita-tive results and qualitative analyses show that the contents of the CCBBexhibitions in 2004 became a part of the programmes of the teachers whotook part in the research’ (p. 210). This conclusion was drawn from theteachers’ analyses, taking the following factors into consideration: their aca-demic training, their repertoire, the characteristics of their teaching practiceand their commitment to teaching. A final recommendation is for agree-ments to be drawn up between cultural institutions and state education toenable educational specialists to visit schools and provide guidance forteachers for evaluating their teaching resources, proposing ideas forprojects and making better use of the resources that local communitieshave to offer.

This book is well written and it is clear that the researchers have put agreat deal of effort into it and that this study will make a contribution toresearch in this field. It contains an interesting discussion about project-based art criticism. However, the references it presents are poor in terms ofbackground reading and the description of the methods used is not clearenough. The reader is given some explanation of whom the participants ineach case study are and becomes better acquainted with them as thedescription progresses. Nevertheless, it would be better if more details wereprovided in order to explain the differences and behaviours in each specificsituation. The sequence of ideas throughout the paper and its overall struc-ture are clear. On the other hand it would have helped those internationalreaders who know little or nothing about this country or education systemhad the researchers contextualized it within the Brazilian art education scene,including the images of the four exhibitions mentioned in the project, and


245Book Reviews

information about the educational materials (Diálogos e Reflexões – D & R)would help readers to understand the teachers’ responses better. Moreover,the book discusses concepts that readers may not understand. Therefore,further explanation, clarification and definitions would help, for example,Abordagem Triangular or Triangular Approach (which has nothing at all to dowith ‘triangulation’ as used in many research designs) and PedagogiaQuestionadora or Questioning Pedagogy, folder interactivo or interactive folder,re-leitura or re-reading. The final verdict is that this research is not reflectiveenough and the discussion remains far too generalized. It is rare to readabout research without finding fault with aspects of method, but in this caseit is apparent that changes to the overall research design were required, aswas a clearer explanation of the authors’ own understanding of aestheticpractice.

Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays,Mervyn Romans (ed), (2005)Bristol, UK and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, for the NationalSociety for Education in Art and Design. 243 pp.ISBN 1- 84150-131-X (hbk), £24.95Reviewed by Harold Pearse University of Alberta, Canada

Although this book is a collection of essays by diverse authors, all but two ofwhich appeared over a span of sixteen years in the International Journal of Artand Design Education, when taken together they read as a complex yet rela-tively seamless history of art and design education in the United Kingdom. Itis no coincidence that most of the essays are from that fertile decade forart education history research and writing – roughly from 1983 to 1993. Whatlinks the chapters together is the organization – six sections of from two tofour chapters each, dealing with drawing manuals and books; motives andrationales; institutional approaches; the professionalization of the field;pivotal historical figures; and British influences abroad. While in themselvesthe section headings do not imply a particular chronology, within each sectiona historical evolution is revealed. This structure, devised by the editor,Mervyn Romans, firmly situates the field’s history in a social/political/eco-nomic and cultural context and is a vivid indicator of how research andwriting on the history of art and design education has matured.

After a helpful contextualizing introduction by the editor, the bookopens with two chapters that focus on drawing instruction publications innineteenth-century Britain and America. Rafael Cardoso’s chapter, ‘APreliminary Survey of Drawing Manuals in Britain c. 1825–1875’, describesvividly the impact of the advent of cheap engraving and printing methods inthe mid-1820s that made drawing and design instruction books available toa broad public and helped to prepare the ground for the establishment ofinstitutions like the Department of Science and Art and a system of schoolsof design a decade or so later. Diana Korzenik’s chapter, ‘“How to Draw”Books as Sources to Understanding Art Education of the NineteenthCentury’ shows how in America drawing instruction served practical purposes

ETA_3.3_07_rev_Paulo.qxd 12/13/07 10:13 AM Page 245

while in Britain, as Cardoso explains, the aim was to uplift moral values.Cardoso’s article is relatively recent (1996) while Korzenik’s (1985) is a classic.Both help us to gain insights into the relationship between popular self-help publications and school system-generated curriculum materials.

The second section of the book, Chapters 3 and 4, both by Romans, isheaded ‘Motives and Rationales for Public Art and Design Education’. Theonly new chapters, they revisit the taken for granted and generally acknowl-edged genesis of a system of art and design education in Britain, the1835–36 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. Earlier historianstended to regard the Committee’s deliberations and recommendations asmotivated primarily by economic considerations. In the spirit of the newrevisionist historians, Romans argues in one chapter that concerns with theeconomy were by far overshadowed by the question of ‘taste’. Through acareful reading of the Committee’s minutes he reveals the complex layers ofmeaning underlying taste as a social construct, its link with fashion andconsumerism and as the moral justification for the implementation of pub-lic art and design education. In the other chapter he re-examines this periodand the Select Committee’s hearings through the lens of the language ofclass. Again he introduces a new complexity and subtlety to the discussionnoting that social class was in a state of flux at that time and that ourunderstanding can best be served by considering the interactions betweenthe changing working, artisan and middle classes.

While Roman’s contention that art and design education historians canlearn from ‘the wider community of social historians’ is well founded, whenit comes to carefully and critically presenting socially contextualized histori-cal material, the authors in this volume are no slouches. John Swift’s twochapters (5 and 6) elaborate in exquisite detail the growth of Birmingham’sArt School from its first incarnation in 1800 to the 1920s, chronicling thepressures of local influences and the struggle against central control. Inspite of the dominance of London in governing the national system of artand design schools, the one in Birmingham developed a relatively autonomousapproach and innovative educational philosophies, including the notion ofexecuted design wherein students could bring their own ideas to fruition.Swift describes how this innovation benefited female students, at least tothe extent that gender stereotyping would allow.

The two chapters that make up Section 4, ‘Towards Art Education as aProfession’, by David Thistlewood and John Steers respectively, trace thehundred-year history of the National Society for Education in Art andDesign (originally the Society of Art Masters) and the fifty-year history of theInternational Society for Education through Art (INSEA). Full of fascinatingcharacters, both are rich in detail and effectively situate people and eventsin social, cultural and political contexts.

Probably the most accessible section is the one on ‘Pivitol Figures inArt and Design Education History’. Every field of endeavour needs heroesand four of almost mythic stature are presented here, each with their ownchapter: John Ruskin, Marion Richardson, Herbert Read and RichardHamilton. Given their pervasive influence it is not surprising that theircareers link to other chapters. John Ruskin and his book, Elements ofDrawing are featured in the chapter on drawing manuals and Herbert Readand Education through Art are key players in the chapter on INSEA. Marion

246 Book Reviews


Richardson, a graduate of the teacher-training course at the previouslyprofiled Birmingham School of Art, is respectfully portrayed as an exem-plar of the inspired practising teacher whose work and ideas can propel anentire education movement. Her insistence that the expressive work ofchildren was to be nurtured and valued profoundly influenced the New ArtTeaching of the 1930s and 1940s and as the author, Bruce Holdsworth,observes, still reverberates today. Similarly, the legacy of RichardHamilton, post-secondary educator and artist and a key player in the BasicDesign movement of the 1950s and 1960s, still persists in the widely heldconviction that there are fundamental visual principles that should be thefoundation of art and design education at any level.

The final section is comprised of two chapters dealing with the influenceof British art and design education overseas, specifically Canada and Japan.Graeme Chalmers’ essay examines the ways that the South Kensington sys-tem translated to Ontario and draws insightful parallels between the strate-gies and circumstances of a little-known bureaucrat, Samuel Passmore Mayin Canada and the celebrated Sir Henry Cole in England. Akio Okazaki looksat the impact of the introduction of nineteenth-century drawing manualsand the South Kensington system in early twentieth-century Japan and thebacklash in the 1920s of a short-lived ‘free drawing movement’. Curiously,just as Japanese art had influenced European art via Impressionism andPost-Impressionism, European modernism and the ideas of Read andRichardson influenced art and art education in twentieth-century Japan.

An anthology is an appropriate format to portray the history of art anddesign education as it is so multifaceted that its scope and range can bestbe reflected through multiple voices. Moreover, the task is likely to bebeyond the endurance, if not the knowledge and resources, of a singleauthor. This book is an important contribution to stimulating a much-needed dialogue between historians of art and design education as well asamong the wider community of historians. At the same time it is an acces-sible vehicle for practitioners and students to gain an awareness and under-standing of the roots and evolution of their field. It serves effectively one ofthe most important tasks of history – revealing and scrutinizing the sourcesof our current theories and practices.

247Book Reviews


ETA Volume 3 INDEX

Barreto, C., and Coutinho, R., Art education and professional training: The SãoPaulo Professional School for Women, pp. 69–76.

Cepeda, C., Art in science education: Creative visions of DNA by engineering stu-dents, pp. 37–42.

Chanda, J., Learning from images: a source of interdisciplinary knowledge, pp. 7–18.

Chandler, R., Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representa-tion and cultural histories at the Boston MFA, pp. 173–184.

Chung, S.K., An exploration of media violence in a junior-high school art classroom,pp. 57–68.

Flood, A., and Bamford, A., Manipulation, simulation, stimulation: the role of arteducation in the digital age, pp. 91–103.

Fukumoto, K., Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers,pp. 195–209.

Gombe, C., Indigenous plaited patterns on Ugandan mats, pp. 125–134.

Gumbe, J., Researching ritual as content for Angolan art education, pp. 19–35.

Labitsi, V., ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of nar-rative structures in Greek children’s drawings, pp. 185–193.

Linnap, P., Images and fear : Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society,pp. 211–229.

Navarro, S., Alzheimer’s: Researching the disease through sculpture, pp. 135–141.

Piazza, G., On the wave of creativity: Children, expressive languages and technology,pp. 105–123.

Rautkorpi, T., Mentoring in the creative economy, pp. 231–241.

Steers, J., The ever-expanding art curriculum – is it teachable or sustainable?pp. 143–155.

Ulkuniemi, S., Exposed lives: dialogues between viewers and installations aboutfamily photography, pp. 43–55.

248 JVAP 6 (3) Index © Intellect Ltd 2007. ISSN 1743-5234.

ETA_3.3_8_index 12/11/07 7:58 PM Page 248

SAC_1.3_Ads.qxd 12/12/07 3:32 PM Page 376

SAC_1.3_Ads.qxd 12/12/07 3:32 PM Page 352


Educationthrough Art

International Journal of Education through Art | Volum

e Three Num

ber Three

ISSN 1743-5234

3.3

www.intellectbooks.com

intellect

Volume Three N

umber Three

intellect Journals | A

rt & D

esign


Education through Art Volume 3 Number 3 – 2007

Editorial

169–171

Articles

173–184 Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA

Robin M. Chandler

185–193 ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings

Vasiliki Labitsi

195–209 Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers Kinichi Fukumoto

211–229 Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society Peeter Linnap

231–241 Mentoring in the creative economy Tiina Rautkorpi

243–247 Book Reviews

248 Index

9 771743 523002

ISSN 1743-5234 3 3

ETA_3.3_Cover.indd 1ETA_3.3_Cover.indd 1 11/28/07 7:44:04 PM11/28/07 7:44:04 PM

Education Art

Documents

Transcript of Education Art