In this article, I ask what becoming a sustainable visual arts teacher might look like, and how a sustainable teaching practice might be created. The problem for education, and teachers’ becoming, is that formal schooling presumes how life should be lived there, how the assemblage of learning should be composed and the prescribed identities of humans and objects. This article aims to explore visual arts teachers’ becoming as a relational and entangled process. A Deleuze and Guttarian framework for thinking about the becoming(- teacher) involves relational and differentiated co-becoming that fold, unfold and refold in the process of becoming. The research questions of this article explore the potentials of the concept of becoming animal to activate and facilitate thinking differently about visual arts teachers’becoming. By mapping the academic degree project of one visual arts teacher student, this research investigates how multiple lines of becoming a visual arts teacher change and intermingle through the degree project. The results shows that animal becoming creates new sensitivities, dilating one’s perception as a teacher. Sustainable teacher becoming involves the balancing (cat-)act of not only following molar lines of the curriculum, or the idols of pedagogy, but also making the curriculum come alive through molecular catbecoming. Becoming cat means opposing administrative burdens and showing one’s claws, as well as developing agility to find new ways of thinking, acting, resting, and finding space for playful inventiveness as a teacher.

Examination practice in art teacher education in Sweden is a part of the development of professional practice in compulsory, secondary and upper secondary education. Visual arts as a school subject entails a hybridity of artistic and didactic perspectives. In art teacher education, a double didactic perspective involves the learning of the student teacher and their future teaching of students in the visual arts. This article focuses on an examination of student teachers in the visual arts. An entry point is the methodology of a/r/tography, which entails exploring different subject positionings as artist, researcher and teacher in student teachers’ examination projects. Three examination projects were presented exemplifying how the use of art-based methods supports an understanding of subject didactics in the process of becoming a visual arts teacher. The examinations consisted of written academic texts and art-based explorative investigations in different visual media. The study also elaborated on how student teachers’ artistic production supports an understanding of the subject’s theoretical and practice-based content. The results indicated how a/r/tography can be used for reflected learning in becoming-teacher through student teachers’ efforts to encompass their future professional roles. The results also showed the challenges of student teachers in confronting their desires, doubts and fears in their learning processes during art teacher education.

This study takes its point of departure from a nationwide project called Visual Storytelling and the Art of Reading Images carried out in Sweden between 2019–2020. This national project, implemented by Läsrörelsen (The Reading Movement Association), aimed to develop the professionalism of educators and visual art teachers by offering an in-service training day to enhance their competence in visual storytelling and image interpretation. The aim of our study, which uses material from the project, is to contribute knowledge regarding the role of visual culture and visual strategies in school, particularly in visual arts education. The role of visual culture in education is to develop a critical perspective on images and cultural ways of seeing and making images. This approach involves focusing on the global and digital visual culture of young people’s daily lives and working on societal issues. Through teaching and learning how to analyse and discuss contemporary, complex images with others, as well as expressing oneself and communicating through image making, the use of visual strategies can bring pupil’s different opinions, thoughts, and feelings to the fore.

This research aims to examine government digitalization policies and steering documents in relation to school and visual arts education. We explore how these documents are lived in the everyday practice of two visual arts teachers. We borrow the term unicorn from the field of business finance and computer sciences. The unicorn represents private venture firms with over a billion dollars in valuation (Kotha, Shin & Fisher, 2022). These almost mythical economical values are built on techno-optimism and idealized expectations of a utopic future. 

The theoretical framework is built on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of segments. There are three lines in life; the molar line is a rigid line of segmentarity which leads to a calculated future which we as subjects are constantly plotting out with well-determined identities of things, aggregates as gender, social classes etc. The molecular line appears in the actualization of the present and breaks the molar lines. This happens as micromovements, tiny cracks that disorients and deterritorialize the determined identities and aggregates. The molar and molecular lines are constantly interfering and reacting upon each other as currents of suppleness or points of rigidity. The line of flight resists the molar and molecular lines and is rather like an explosion between the molar and molecular lines. More concretely, the molar line is made up by explanations, questions and answers. The molecular line is made up by silences, allusions, and interpretations. The line of flight is like a train in motion; it alter identities or erases them completely. However, the three lines continually intermingle (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004). 

The overarching methodology for this research is cartography. This entails mapping the intersections of digitalization policies, interviews with teachers and photographs of the storage rooms of the visual arts classrooms, and an in-service training day for teachers at teacher training programs organized by the Swedish National Agency for Education. 

As suggested in the title, we find that there is a “unicorn in the room” that needs to be addressed. That is, an administrative authority with techno-optimist approaches concerning a “smart and fast” high technology educational future. This is a molar line made up by already pre-determined futures. The visual arts teacher practice is a molecular line, open for interpretations, misunderstandings, inventiveness because of the lack of resources, and gaps between the policies of the state and its practice in education. 

This research is highly relevant concerning educational digitalization markets and the related situation of digitalization in the subject visual arts education. This research contributes with knowledge on digitalization policies and how they are enacted.

Den  här  utvärderingen  handlar  om  projektet  BILDBERÄTTANDE  och  konsten att  läsa  bilder.  Projektet  initierades  och  drevs  av  den  ideella  föreningen Läsrörelsen  under  år  2018–2020.  Läsrörelsens  landsomfattande  projekt  handlar om  vikten  av  och  konsten  att  läsa  bilder  ur  ett  pedagogiskt,  analytiskt  och konstnärligt  perspektiv.  I  denna  rapport  utvärderas  om  och  hur  projektets målsättning  att  sätta  fokus  på  bilden  och  lyfta  fram  att  det  är  grundläggande  för alla  att  lära  sig  läsa  och  tolka  bilder  nås.  Det  sker  dels  genom  att  synliggöra projektets  innehåll  och  form,  och  dels  genom  att  sammanställa  och  analysera undersökningens enkätsvar, intervjuer och fältanteckningar.   De tematiskt återkommande konferensföreläsningarna  har  enligt konferensdeltagarna  erbjudit en  hög  professionell nivå  genom de anlitade föreläsarna, inom ett  brett spektrum i ett bildvetenskapligt  och bildpedagogiskt fält.   Sammantaget  var  projektet  mycket  uppskattat  av publiken, och  konferensdeltagarna  anger att de har  fått ta del av  en mångfald av perspektiv  på bildberättande och konsten  att läsa bilder. Även  projektets idéskrift var mycket uppskattad av deltagarna.   Utvärderingens  viktigaste  resultat är att projektet  BILDBERÄTTANDE och  konsten  att läsa bilder  genom sin form och  sitt  innehåll  synliggör  bildens potential som en demokratisk  uttrycksform. Projektet pekar  på nödvändigheten av  läskunnighet  i  bild i  dagens föränderliga  samhälle, som  en demokratisk rättighet  för alla,  liksom rätten för barn och unga att  berätta  och uttrycka sig med bilder.   

The ongoing marketisation of education is a great loss for visual arts education since explorative learning processes are marginalised in favour of more goal-oriented learning. The empirical material analysed in this research derives from the visual art portfolio of a student from an elective university course in visual arts education. Working within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical framework, we examine the folding, unfolding, and refolding of aesthetic learning processes, suggesting productive concepts and practices. The analysis made us aware of our own pedagogical ideals and the loss of having to disassemble them, in line with the new curricula. The student’s visual learning process showed us how to reassemble new and explorative learning processes, assigning aspects of sustainability and an ethics of care in relation to environmental and social questions. We suggest strategies for learning in the folds, where educators are called upon to prepare students for an uncertain future. This demands a creative imagination, an ethical standpoint for negotiating the curriculum in line with differentiation by forming, inventing, and fabricating new concepts and images. 

The overall aim of the article is to make visible and discuss the entangled process of student examination in visual arts teacher education in Sweden. We do this by investigating one student’s visual and textual exam, where learning through artistic work, research exploration and teaching didactics merges into the becoming of a visual arts teacher. The merging of becoming artist, researcher and teacher seems to open up to uncontrollable learning processes where affect, ethics and fluid movements of becoming-other are imagined, actualised, articulated and materialised.

This article is about young people’s visual and verbal becomings through visual fabulations.The empirical material draws upon two educational research studies from visual arts and media practices, conducted by the authors. This research contribute with knowledge about the potentials of visual arts and media education to fabulate, speculate and thus generate future becomings, that might be realised. By analysing pupil’s fabulations, the potentiality of visual arts and media education becomes visible; for example unleashing creativity through experimental and open ended learning processes.

This article investigates changes in visual art education through gendered visual, pedagogical and theoretical interventions. The research material is derived from a combination of two independent research projects and examples from published research. The material consists of images and video diary recordings by young people, and researched didactic examples of working with gender in visual art education. Young people’s gendered cultures include a growing vocabulary of gender definitions and ways to ‘perform’ gender. At the same time, everyday life experiences are largely structured around binary gender logics. This article answers questions regarding the ability of visual art education to change and transform stereotyped thinking and the binary oppositions of gender. Analysing visual and verbal material from a post-humanist perspective, the findings suggest that visual art education should engage with the gender problem, and that it has the capability to dissolve gender binaries and stereotypical thinking by facilitating fabulation, imagining, speculation and fantasising about the future. Visual art education seems to benefit from focusing on learning processes that are open-ended and acknowledging the affect and visual desires involved in image making. These are driving forces specific to visual art, which have the potential to differentiate gendered stereotypes.