| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this essay is to further deepen the knowledge about the student experience of artistic visual methods applied in a university setting. The objective is also to explore the impact and contribution of aesthetic experiences and processes in higher education. The research field regarding students' experiences of teaching and learning through artistic visual methods is relatively unexplored (Cronquist, 2020; Harwood, 2007). This study is based on the assumption that aesthetic experiences are a form of learning (Aulin-Gråhamn & Thavenius, 2003; Austring & Sørensen, 2011; Eisner, 2002; Hetland, 2013; Karlsson Häikiö, 2014).
Furthermore, this study has a sociocultural perspective (Bakhtin, 1981; Dysthe, 2003; Marner, 2005; Säljö, 2000; Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1998) where learning is recognized as a communicative process where meaningful activities are at the center. Learning is more widely understood as a change in the individual's way of seeing, experiencing, and understanding different aspects of the world (Marton & Booth, 2000).
To investigate the purpose of this study, the author has conducted a case study at a preschool teacher program at a university. The case study consists of a workshop where the preschool teacher students at the program work with artistic visual methods to deepen the understanding of theoretical concepts. The empiric material is collected through a survey and through audio recording. The questionnaire is processed through a thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006). To describe and create an understanding of the aesthetic learning process, the workshop is analyzed through two lenses of aesthetic learning processes (Baccstig, 2021; Lindström, 2008b, 2012).
The result shows that the students experienced the artistic visual method as useful to develop an understanding of both their theoretical concept and aesthetic learning processes as a form of a cognitive process. The result of the study further shows that the students describe the workshop as exciting, interesting and that the workshop offered an opportunity to meet resistance (Bakhtin, 1981) in the process of deepening the understanding of theoretical concepts. Furthermore, the result shows that artistic visual methods can contribute to active learning environments and motivate students to develop new perspectives on a course content by processing the subject matter through an aesthetic expression.
The analysis of the workshop through the two lenses of aesthetic learning processes shows that learning in an aesthetic process can be described as a synthesis that holds both divergent and convergent goals, where the means to achieve these goals are both media-specific and media-neutral (Marner & Örtegren, 2003). Furthermore, the analysis shows that teaching through aesthetic learning processes contains simultaneous lines of both impression, expression and reflection. | sv |
