Session Information
27 SES 05 C, Crafts and Vocational Teaching and Learning
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper explores floristry teaching in Sweden from 1980 to 2015, with a focus on colour and form. The analytical approach falls within the framework of a sociocultural (Wertsch, 1998) interpretation of educational activity, in which human actions (and materiality) are interpreted as socially situated and created by time and space (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Säljö, 2010).
Colour theory—which can be explained as a set of guiding linguistic categories—offers a form of aesthetic abstraction (Akner-Koler, 2007) that contributes to the attainment of a perspective on the surrounding world (e.g., Säljö, 2015). Overall, colour theory in floral design involves, to a large extent, being able to perceive and value what happens when different flowers are combined to form a composition in colour and form (Ashwell & Pearson, 2011; Hunziker & Trygg, 1994). In Swedish floristry teaching practice over the past several years, judgments regarding colour and form seem to have shifted from being relatively tacit, in the sense that they reside implicitly within models, to being more verbalised and outright in the analytical reasoning used in teaching. This shift can be compared to Goodwin’s (1997, 2000) observation (in a different context) concerning how the categorisation of colour is mediated both by material artefacts and specific work-relevant practices.
The linguistic categories of colour theory materialise in floristry education as symbolic artefacts (Säljö, 2015), such as the so-called “colour wheel”. What can be seen in previous research is how colour categories provide a kind of language “used to codify and structure perception of the visual field” (Goodwin, 1997, p. 112). Another article by Goodwin (2000) examined archaeologists’ classifications of colours, which they accomplished with the help of pre-defined colour charts. The archaeologists used the Munsell colour system, which is commonly used for categorising soil.
By inquiring about communicative recourses (e.g. colour wheel) this paper attempts to explicate and discuss expressions of specific changes in teaching practice and how representational forms reflect perceptual functions in teaching practice (e.g. Tilley, 2001). The main analytical question asked towards the empirical material in order to discuss how scientific artefacts and aesthetic abstractions conceptualise specific kind of knowing within a school context, is: how has the way of expressing vocational knowing about colour and form changed in Swedish floristry education since the 1980s?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Akner-Koler, 2007Form & formlessness: questioning aesthetic abstractions through art projects, cross-disciplinary studies and product design education (Doctoral dissertation sammanfattning). Göteborg: Chalmers tekniska högskola. Stockholm. Atkinson, P. (2001). Handbook of Ethnography [Elektronisk resurs]. Sage PublicationsCarlgren, I. (2015). Kunskapskulturer och undervisningspraktiker. Göteborg: Daidalos. Collier, M. (2001). Approaches to analysis in visual anthropology. In T. Van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Ed.), Handbook of visual analysis (pp. 35–60). London: SAGE. Goodwin, C. (1997). The blackness of black: Color categories as situated practice. In L. B. Resnick, R. Säljö, C. Pontecorvo & B. Burge (Eds.), Discourse, tools and reasoning: Essays on situated cognition (pp. 11–140). Berlin: Heidelberg; New York: Springer. Goodwin, C. (2000). Practices of color classification. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(1–2), 19–36. Hunziker, E. & Trygg, B. (1994). Skapa med blommor: Form, teknik, stillära. Stockholm: LT. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Spindler, G. (1992). Doing the ethnography of schooling: Educational anthropology in action. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Säljö, R. (2010). Lärande i praktiken: Ett sociokulturellt perspektiv (2nd ed.) Stockholm: Norstedts.Säljö, R. (2015). Lärande: En introduktion till perspektiv och metaforer (1st ed.) Malmö: Gleerup Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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