This presentation comprises research issues related to the school subject arts education, sexuality education, facts and fundamental values. A content that forms the very core of creating oneself as a young person in society, through body, materiality and emotions. The presentation is based on the experiences from an ongoing four-year (2020-2023) practice-based Swedish study. The research project explores how sexuality education is taught and can be taught in different school subjects from a subject didactic perspective. It is a research projects in which transdisciplinary fosters an ontological and methodological turn in educational and artistic practices. The purpose of the presentation is to analyze how concepts such as identity, norms and sexuality are formed in an arts education context. Sexuality education is an integral part of Swedish schools and referred to as a special knowledge content by the National Board of Education.  In the school context, arts can play an important role, not only as offering participatory strategies for the students in more inclusive forms of work, but also as ways to engage in collective processes (Ceder, et.al. 2021). These aspects include both informal contexts such as visual culture, digital media and formal contexts such as education.

The Swedish curriculum for arts education highlights the importance of critically examining content as norms, sexuality and identity. A number of researchers use democracy and participation in the argument that arts education should be strengthened through critical examination of visual culture (Atkinson, 2017, Lind & Hellman, 2020). Through freedom of expression, making images is linked both to the school's mission of both facts and of fundamental values (Lind, 2010). Other studies show that students can express opinions in images that they cannot express verbally; for example, they could visually depict race, but at the same time it was taboo to talk about it in the classroom (Eriksson 2019). Both Lind's and Eriksson's studies point to the fact that images provide other opportunities for expressions than spoken or written text. In a study of the construction of fundamental values in arts education, it is possible to see how the teaching is characterized by a modernist tradition where the practice of imaging is in focus and critical examination is seen as "theory" and thus de-prioritized (Ahrenby,2020).

In the present presentation, teaching is explored as a socio-material and performative practice (Mol, 2010, Fenwick & Edwards, 2013). This approach is useful to investigate the complex and entangled aspects of materiality, norms and relationality (Allen, 2018). Through the theoretical starting point, it become possible to examine the subject didactics as an ongoing process of intra-relationships, a series of material and relational entanglements through teachers, visual materials, governing documents and the transformation of knowledge. Barad's concept of intra-action is implemented as a concept for the practice that is explored (Barad, 2007). Barad uses the concept of intra-action to emphasize that in a research process, the producer of knowledge is always a part of the production of knowledge. To understand matter as mutually constitutive of sexuality, with practices, tensions etc, a conceptualization of what can becomes agentic is used based on Bennett's concept of "vibrant matter" for how things are important actors in the world and its ability to act, create effects and transform under different circumstances (Bennett, 2010). 

The empirical material in the presentation is part of a larger practice-based research project on sexuality education in Sweden. Five researchers and former teachers with different subject background have collaborated with teachers in diverse subjects at four primary schools. We have conducted research circles with teachers at the schools, participated in teaching planning and observed implementations. We have also done interviews with both teachers and students at the various schools. At each school, 5–12 teachers in different school subjects were involved in the research circles, which included between 5–8 meetings, together for approximately 15–20 hours. The choice to work with research circles is motivated by its possibility to make subject didactic processes visible and function as a meeting place between researchers and teachers. The collaboration is part of working at the interface between research and teaching in an experimental togetherness. Although the research group was responsible for planning, the themes of the meetings were co-constructed through collaborations with the teachers. Here the research process becomes performative; it is part of intervening and co-creating the practice being studied (Fenwick & Edwards 2013). The material that is analyzed in the present presentation is based on the collaboration with me as a former art teacher and researcher and two art teachers at two different primary schools. The analyzed material includes transcribed audio data from three work meetings between me and the visual art teachers. The analysis also includes the student's images from the assignment as well as field notes from the classroom teaching. In the reading of the empirical material, it is the student images that become as a vibrant matter engaging in difficult questions and topics.

This presentation explores various entanglements between arts education and the transdisciplinary knowledge area of sexuality education. This is done by examining how the concepts of norms, identity and sexuality are co-created in two different contexts of arts education. By trying to think beyond dominant ideas about subject didactics that are illustrated by clear ontological differences between learning, materiality, teachers and knowledge (Atkinson, 2017). Instead of considering pedagogical work as an ongoing process of intra-relation, a series of material entanglements arise through which teacher and student work in the specifically described tasks of identities, norms and sexuality. In the use of photos, contemporary art, mobile phones and the spaces, work of closeness and relationality is co-constructed. This can give students the opportunity to think and reflect for themselves. Working with visual materials is also a way to explore, try and playfully develop norms and identities Despite a pre-determined art practice, such as portraits of "identities", the students' work develops into a process of intra-action through experimentation. It is through the students' world and the vibrant matter of the images that engaging questions and topics such as gender identity and stereotypical representations are examined and explored. It is the materiality, the vibrant matter that create a transformation between the questions of fundamental values and the facts and knowledge goal in classroom practice. The analysis will show the agency of materiality and the role it plays in the enactment of sexuality education. Materiality is central to understanding the students’ embodied learning. The presentation and the research study demonstrate the need for more empirically based classroom studies of art education and also the educational opportunities to challenge reproductions of identity and sexuality norms.

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