The making of flower arrangements is about shaping and forming a product. It is also the content of a school subject framed by institutional curriculum in Swedish upper secondary school. The paper aims to highlight floristry education through analyzing a few assessment sequences regarding specific flower arrangements; among them bouquets, funeral arrangements and wedding decorations. The focus is on how students learn to create arrangements trough relational assessment, while making the product.

The students’ understanding of making workable decisions involves cultural interpretation (Lund 2008) and is an integral part of handicraft knowing.  The intention of the paper is to describe how vocational knowing is acquired within an educational setting, with a specific focus on embodied actions – given that gestures and communication reflect cultural values. As the student becomes familiar with the field – and feels secure – the knowledge of aesthetic expression starts to emerge in the form of assessment of the product.

In the study, floristry assessment activities are scrutinized and analyzed. Detailed descriptions of the interaction and the negotiations – that take place in the classroom setting –are discussed in the paper. Complex activities, like teaching, are seen as constituted by clusters of situated actions; as well as embodied speech acts. Assessment is seen as relational, interactive, dynamic with emphasize on the collaborative aspect of the activity (Gipps 1999). When it comes to the aesthetic side, there are no global guiding principles saying a specific flower arrangement per se is beautiful, and no formalized body of knowledge saying how a thing “ought” to look or not (Bernstein 2012).  Still, there are value-driven cultural aspects within the curriculum that make statements about norms and ideals; as well as prediction. Floristry education is a way of gaining professional vision (Goodwin 1994).

Tentative research questions include: What are the important aesthetic aspects regarding a specific flower arrangements? How is it expressed as an embodied act? What explicit and implicit rules or expectations are addressed in the assessment related to flowers as materiality? 

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