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Paatela-Nieminen, Martina and Tuija Itkonen: Posthuman children's voices on animals in Finnish art in a digital learning environment

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The artistic action of this paper explores posthuman voices about animals. The case study took place at the University of Helsinki at the Faculty of Educational Sciences where 11 teacher students and two Erasmus+ teacher students from Greece took part in a Visual Art Education didactics course (5 cr), a part of Art Education Didactics minor (25 cr).  As a collaborative action, the student teachers chose animal paintings from Ateneum Art Museum, part of the Finnish National Gallery. The art chosen are free for publication and on display at the museum. The students photographed the chosen paintings at the museum and then showed the photos to the Finnish-speaking primary 1 st  and 2 nd  graders (P12) at the European school of Helsinki (henceforth, ESH). The student teachers were divided in four groups each of which interviewed 3-4 children, first each of child individually and then together as a group.  
 
The starting point for artistic action was for each child to talk about the animal in the picture with a goal of exploring what young children might carry in their minds about animals. The student teachers encouraged the children to trust their own eyes, mind and imagination. The student teachers let the child talk freely and make their own stories about the picture. When the children were interviewed as a group, the student teachers asked the children a few questions based on an Ateneum application of a method called Visual Thinking Strategy. The Erasmus+ students interviewed the Finnish P12 teacher at the ESH for her thoughts on the importance for young children of learning to speak about art.  The artistic action continued with the children visiting Ateneum to see the original paintings and, run by the teacher students, to visualize a task and produce an artistic product in a workshop.  
 
After the collaboration between Ateneum and ESH, the students edited the interviews and arranged the digital material into Thinglink application. The artistic action for the teacher students was to develop a digital learning environment, in which they were to produce and arrange a variety of texts (visual, verbal, auditory) in varied forms including 360° photos, images, videos, illustrations, voices and writing. This learning environment grew to include multiple texts by children, artists and students. The teacher students became radicals through their action of delving into posthumanism and creating a digital learning environment through the multiplicity of voices.

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