Materiell-kollektiv praksis. En tilnærming til fagdidaktikk for kunst og håndverk utviklet i veveprosjektet : Veve i åpne dører

Abstract

This study inquires into the potential of a material-collective practice as a pedagogical approach for a world-centred arts and crafts education. It challenges the Norwegian individually centred education policy with its predefined and measurable competencies. This monograph examines and discusses the possibilities when teacher attention shifts from the acquisition of skills and production of objects to the students' encounters with each other, materials and their surroundings. The study's emergent research method, material-collective ethnography, is proposed as a method for teaching practice. This empirical study consists of micro ethnographic fieldwork during an outdoor weaving project with twenty two seventh-grade students and their teaching staff. Students were invited to nearby woods where they were asked to take a ball of yarn and tie the end to something and start moving around. Within a few minutes, the place was transformed and a net emerged in the trees. Three action cameras were used to collect data material during the fieldwork. The cameras were attached to the chests of two volunteer students and the researcher herself. The films from these cameras became material for the description and analysis of the weaving project. The material-collective practice is launched as a term for an art and craft practice as a specific understanding of the material and the collective rooted and grounded in Karen Barad's agential realism. Barad, with her back in physics, argues that the material world is a co-creator of both man and human reality. The dissertation study is based on relational and performative art didactics and developed by emphasizing creative work with materials. The didactic approach is inspired by contemporary community-based art practices. In the analysis, the emphasis is placed on how the students' existence as a subject is made possible in encounters with social and material reality. The result of the study is the formulation of material-collective practice as a less individualistic and less anthropocentric educational practice. Materialcollective practice as a pedagogical approach is characterized by the fact that (1) the teacher's professional knowledge and teaching are of great importance, (2) creative work takes place with materials and space, time and movement are highlighted as tools, (3) the creative process with unforeseen and unplanned events are emphasized and (4) the original and personal are not linked to the characteristics of an object, but the traces set in creative practice. The pedagogical approach proposed through material-collective practice can contribute to overall goals, values and principles for education where there is an aim for the school to open their doors to the world and its future, promote democracy, help students to master their lives and participate in community fellowship. The relevance is directed at the curriculum's three interdisciplinary themes Public health and life skills, Democracy and citizenship and Sustainable development.