Out of Place : Resistance, Creativity and Play in Visual Studies Lessons

Sammanfattning: Both the Visual Studies classroom, and the subject of Visual Studies itself, may open possibilities for solving problems in creative, challenging ways, that in other contexts might be regarded as disruptive. My study deals with transgressive behaviour in Visual Studies lessons, and how such behaviour is understood and received by teachers. It grows out of my own experience of incomprehension and unease around surprising work produced by students in my own Visual Studies workshops, and my hypothesis that behaviour like this is a form of resistance to control. I carry out a focus group interview with children that I know from workshops that I have been holding every Saturday for two years, using visual elicitation to encourage them to talk about Visual Studies lessons in general. My intention with the interview is to develop insights into why children do things that are different from their teacher’s expectations, with the aim of increasing my understanding of the work that children do in Visual Studies lessons, benefitting my own teaching practice, and being useful to colleagues. Ideas from other studies that have to do with imaginative play and creativity help me to conceive of children’s unexpected behaviour less as of a reaction against rules and authority, and more as a response to the possibilities of a Visual Studies workshop. The visual component of my study, where I install a ping-pong table in Konstfack’s Vita Havet gallery, can be regarded as a correlative to the written part. Through placing signs on the table, and changing how it is arranged, I draw attention to the way that it seems to be regarded differently from other objects placed in public spaces around Konstfack. The work is implicitly concerned with decisions about which objects, behaviours and people are regarded as acceptable in which spaces. As in the written study, through focussing on elements that don’t seem to fit in, my intention is to better understand the system as a whole.