Youth as Visual Culture Producers: a Relationship between their Skills and Educational Skills

Author(s):

María Reyes González Vida(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2012

Network:

05. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

05 SES 12, Urban Education & Children and Youth at Risk

Parallel Paper Session

Time:

2012-09-21

09:00-10:30

Room:

ESI 2 - Aula 6

Chair:

Mark Hadfield

Contribution

The research project “Youth as visual culture producers: Artistic skills and knowledge in secondary education”, funded by The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (EDU 2009-13712), was launched in February 2010. It starts from the idea, shared with other researchers (Charlot, 2001; Birbili, 2005, Hernández, 2007b), that secondary education is not taking into account how youngsters are linked with knowledge in and outside of school. The project analyzes this situation in the context of art education: one of its main aims is to encourage a rapprochement between artistic knowledge as proposed by schools and knowledge that refers to visual culture production which youngsters in Spain deal with on a daily basis and which they acquire outside school.

Our first step when tackling this project was to design a pilot questionnaire and carry out a series of interviews with eight youngsters to investigate the research objective. The work being put forward is a presentation and analysis of two of these interviews and questionnaires, with the aim of exploring the view held by youngsters about the relationship between their artistic and school knowledge. To this end, we raised a process of reflexivity (Macbeth, 2001) which examines the contributions by Pablo –a 13 year-old boy- , and Ana –a 15 year-old girl- with respect to their experiences in Visual and Manual Arts classes in a school in Granada (Spain). These views are contrasted with their experiences as visual culture producers outside the class – Pablo draws pictures on the subject of Holy Week in his spare time and Ana designs tee-shirts-. The analysis has been generated by answering specifically the following questions:

How is educational knowledge impacting on their construction as visual culture producers?

Which other knowledge which is not acquired purely in the classroom do they rely on for their creations?

What is the training value of non-educational areas?

What can we learn from the way in which they learn?

The study of their accounts – in which there are answers which are inter-linked to these questions, in the form of a thick description (Geertz, 1973) - offers clues which lead us, on the one hand, to re-examine the role played by school in the acquisition of artistic knowledge, and on the other helps us to become aware of our prejudices on this topic, acquiring a greater understanding (Aguirre, Olaiz and Calvelhe, 2011). At the same time, it helps us identify contradictory situations, think them through and understand them (Charlot, 2001; Carneiro, 2010), and also to rethink other ways of researching the learning of knowledge by young producers of visual culture.

Method

The research has been considered from a phenomenological perspective and a constructionist approach. It deals with the qualitative analysis of data obtained from Ana and Pablo’s interviews and from their replies to the pilot questionnaire: -From the questionnaire we examined the replies on what they do in Visual and Manual Art classes, what sort of lessons they have, what do they think they need in order to improve learning, what interests them in class, whether or not they use their own ideas during the activities they engaged in this subject and what has been the most interesting work which they have carried out, among other questions. -Two types of interviews were carried out: one in which they commented on and developed replies given in the questionnaire and another episodic interview in which they presented situations as visual culture producers, and put forward events in their life which they consider relevant in this respect (Hernández, 2004).

Expected Outcomes

This research belongs to a project which aims to find explanations of the current mix-up between school identity and that of youngsters as independent visual culture producers. The analysis carried out in this work shows the peculiarities of these youngsters’ activity as producers and the connection between that knowledge which comes into play in their productions and school knowledge. In it we highlight the following findings: -It accounts for the need to be aware of the personal and sociocultural context in which youngsters move along with their eventuality, in order to understand and to place the knowledge they are exposed to outside school –Pablo lives in Granada with a family where Holy Week is celebrated fervently; Ana lives with her mother who is a craft enthusiast-. -It lays bare contradictions between the learning process of knowledge inside and outside school, a factor which has endorsed our interest to continue delving into our knowledge of learning processes (Aguirre, Olaiz and Calvelhe, 2011). -It has helped to silence our prejudices about what we understood to be areas of learning of artistic knowledge, as they turned out to be wider that what we believed when we started this piece of research.

References

Aguirre, I.; Olaiz, I.; Calvelhe, L. (2011) “Efectos de la reflexividad en una prueba piloto sobre una investigación con jóvenes” in I Jornadas “Investigar con Jóvenes: cuestiones temáticas, metodológicas, éticas y educativas”, Esbrina, Barcelona, 2011, pp. 1-9 [on-line] [consulted 10 January 2011]. Available at: http://fint.doe.d5.ub.es/seminaris/ jornadesjoves/ Birbili, M. (2005) “Constants and Contexts in Pupil Experience of Schooling in England, France and Denmarck”, European Educational Research Journal, 4 (3), pp. 313-320. Carneiro, P. (ed.) (2010) “Challenges of education in contemporaneity: thoughts of a researcher. An interview with Bernard Charlot”, Educação e Pesquisa, vol. 36, pp. 1-16 [on-line][consulted 12 December 2010]. Available at: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1517-97022010000400012&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en. Charlot, B. (Org.) (2001) Os jovens e o saber. Perspectivas mundiais. Brasil: Artes Médicas. Geertz, C. (1973) "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture." In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Hernández, F. (2004) “Mapping Visual Cultural Narratives to Explore Adolescents´ Identities”. In Hernández, F. & Goodson, I. (Eds) Social Geographies of Educational Change. Kluwer Academic Publisher. Pp. 91-102. Hernández, F. (2007b) “Que todos os adolescents encontrem seu lugar de aprender”. In J. Murillo y N. Muñoz Repiso (Coord.) A qualificaçao da escola. Um novo enfoque. Porto Alegre (Brasil): ArtMed. Pp. 199-210. Macbeth, D. (2001) “On “Reflexivity” in Qualitative Research: Two Readings, and a Third”. Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 7, n. 1, 2001, pp. 35-68.

Author Information

María Reyes González Vida (presenting / submitting)

University of Granada, Faculty of Fine Arts

Painting Department

Granada

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