In this presentation I will unfold an assignment given Visual Arts Teachers Education for secondary school on the subject Visual Art in Sweden, and I will present some artwork made by these students and myself as an artist/teacher/researcher. Widén (2016) discovered that visual art teachers tend to continue their own understanding of Art and that there is a tension between the artworld and the educational field and it´s needed a dialog between these two. I wanted my visual art teacher students to encounter working with contemporary, conceptual art methods and in this task they had to make their own rules for their work before walking. The walking is from the situationists from the sexties.
Ever since the Dadaists and the Surrealists, artists have worked by chance as a method of developing their artwork. Furthermore, the Situationist, and their experience and encounter by walking in the urban space, called this “derive” drift around the city. Psychogeography is an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting". I also wanted to be make an “weak” education as Biesta’s argument in The Beautiful Risk of Education—an education that moves away from an education that is “strong, secure, predictable and risk-free.”
I found that some of the students has to negotiate their self-image of future art-teachers when you not working in a non-traditional way. I concluded that working with contemporary conceptual art methods has strengthened the students’ ability to work differently in the subject visual art and give agency to do that. Future art teachers need to become brave so they can give similar assignments to their own students.