Conference Agenda

The Cultural Schoolbag, TCS, is a nationwide cultural-political scheme, within the formal Norwegian education system, offering arts and culture to all pupils in schools at all levels. It offers cultural experiences during school hours, contributing to the pupils’ formation, independent of pupils’ socio-economic background (Ruud et al., 2022, Borgen and Brandt, 2006). At the national level, the TCS is administered by Arts for Young Audiences Norway. It receives its mandate from the Ministry of Culture and Equality and the Ministry of Education and is responsible for managing/developing the TCS program, ensuring activities align with school curricula and fosters collaboration between the cultural and education sectors at all administrative levels. Countries in Europe and elsewhere have similar programs, although the scope in Norway is unique.

Since 2018, there has been an increased national focus on the Sámi arts and cultural offer included in the programme. In official documents from culture and education sectors’ authorities, there are clear ambitions and requirements that Sámi perspectives are to be included (Kulturdepartementet, 2021, Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017, Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2020). Also, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee delivered its report in 2023, describing the historical and contemporary effects of the Norwegianisation policy on the Sámi, the Kvens and Forest Finns. The report calls upon all sectors in the Norwegian society to contribute to change. The assimilating processes started among other places in the education system and this sector is key to future changes (Sannhets- og Forsoningskommisjonen, 2023).

In the TCS, this means on the one hand an opportunity for Indigenous Sámi artists to show their projects to pupils, developing their communication skills, and their artistic career. On the other hand, this might mean that the artists experience challenging and difficult encounters with pupils and teachers.

RQ: How do the Sámi artists touring in the TCS engage with this national cultural program and the pupils and teachers, and how do they prepare the artistic content? How do the schools prepare for the visits? Further, what is Sami art, is it just a tag for statistics, or is it something real, that both artist and audience can understand as a point of departure for their encounter?

This paper addresses encounters between Sámi artists and pupils. These encounters, being relatively short in time, must fit into the schools’ everyday learning activities, in an education system accommodating all pupils. There is an interesting stretch between what the school can possibly “offer” as an arena, and what the artists can “offer” artistically to the schools. Most artists are not pedagogically trained, but artists who often expose their personal, deep-grounded art that centres their identity as Sámi. They tour the TCS throughout the country, meeting pupils and teachers who might have knowledge of Sámi cultures, or not, or very little.

This stretch is similar to Somerville’s concept “abyss”, between Indigenous people and people from the majority society (Somerville, 2010). Telling stories, and grasping their meaning, is differently perceived from the one who tells the story, and for the one who listens (Somerville and Perkins, 2005). To understand this situation, she also uses the concept of “contact zone”, introduced by Pratt (Pratt, 1991, Pratt, 2008), and developed by Somerville and others (Danbolt and Kramvig, 2024, Clifford, 1997, Høvik and Kjeldaas, 2023, Knowles, 2020). They foreground situations where minorities and majorities meet, or clash. Encounters might become “zones of contestation” or “zone of discomfort” (Somerville, 2010), revealing power asymmetries. However, despite friction or disconcertment in postcoloniality (Verran, 2002), forms of communities, through art, culture and communication may occur across ethnicities and backgrounds (Danbolt and Kramvig, 2024, Danbolt et al., 2022, Morphy, 2003 [1994], Martineau and Ritskes, 2014).

This paper is situated within Arts Education research and forms part of an ongoing doctoral research project in Art Education. It is conceived as a critical literature review, informed by feminist, decolonial, and post-structuralist perspectives, articulated with the visual analysis of curricular materials used in Visual Arts Education.

The study examines how hegemonic regimes of visibility, rooted in the Eurocentric and colonial construction of Art History, shape Visual Arts Education curricula. Drawing on Foucauldian perspectives on discourse and power (Foucault, 1971), the curriculum is approached as a dispositif that organises what can be seen and legitimised as artistic knowledge. The empirical focus lies in the analysis of the visual itineraries of a Visual Arts Education textbook used in lower secondary education in Portugal, understood as a curricular and visual technology that stabilises particular artistic imaginaries while marginalising others.

The guiding research question is:
How do hegemonic regimes of visibility operate within Visual Arts Education curricula, and how can pedagogical practice contribute to their critical interrogation and dismantling?

Rather than framing curricular inequality as a problem of representational absence, this research approaches it as a structural and epistemological issue. From a decolonial perspective, the dominance of European art historical narratives is analysed as an effect of the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2000), reinforced by regimes of whiteness that operate invisibly within visual culture and education (Kilomba, 2019; Mirzoeff, 2023).

The theoretical framework brings together decolonial theory, feminist epistemologies, critical Arts Education studies, and visual culture research. Knowledge is understood as situated and implicated rather than neutral (Haraway, 1991, 2016), and arts curricula are approached as politically and institutionally structured rather than inherently emancipatory (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Mörsch, 2011).

It is important to emphasise that the practical dimension of this project, developed through the author’s work as a Visual Arts teacher, will be carried out throughout the doctoral research process and does not yet constitute a completed empirical field. Accordingly, this paper does not present final pedagogical results, but seeks to situate the problem of curriculum decolonisation through the identification and analysis of hegemonic regimes of visibility.

The specific contribution of this article lies in the analytical verification of the research problem, based on the visual analysis of the textbook’s image itineraries. This analysis reveals the persistence of an artistic imaginary that is predominantly male, white, and Eurocentric, inherited from the historical construction of Art History as a canonical and linear narrative. This masculine canon is understood as a performative and institutional construction rather than a neutral inheritance (Butler, 1990).

The concept of the atlas is introduced not as a finished pedagogical model, but as a relational epistemological and pedagogical strategy currently under development within the author’s teaching practice. Conceived in opposition to linear art historical narratives, the atlas operates through cross-temporal and non-hierarchical image constellations, supporting forms of critical spectatorship that recognise learners as active interpreters (Rancière, 2010).

Although situated in Portugal, the curricular structures analysed are widely shared across European Visual Arts Education systems, making the study relevant to broader debates within ECER Network 29 on curriculum, knowledge production, and decolonisation.

As educators, who we are, and what and how we teach, is shaped by many factors. Teaching is a personal process that shifts and evolves over time as “humans have an innate urge to learn and achieve” (Newman & Purnell, 2022, p. 2). Yet, this desire to learn can be stifled for both educators and students. Our experiences as teachers, researchers, and scholars are shaped by forces that may have been oppressive or may have inspired transformation. In recent years, the term reconciliation has been a topic that has seeped its way into the Canadian educational landscape, in the hopes of inspiring change. However, it also clearly shows the systemic barriers that continue to uphold inequities. These issues are not unique to the Canadian landscape and shape educational institutions in various countries around the world. In his work Freire (1993) stated that: “knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 72). As scholars who have been shaped by tenets of anti-racist education, we view a rethinking of our teaching practices, including how we assess learners as a re-invention of knowledge and opportunity for professional learning. Thus, our research question is focused on how action research and arts-based methods can be integrated to inform and enrich our understanding of decolonizing assessment in post-secondary classrooms.

The concept of decolonizing education has been shaped by the work of various scholars (Battiste, 2013; Smith, 2005; St. Denis, 2011; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Tuck and Yang (2012) clearly state that “decolonization is not a metaphor…. [and it] cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks” (p. 3). Mackey (2016) asserts that decolonization involves the unknown for settlers, emphasizing the need to embrace the journey without knowing where to go. These ideas shape our research and inform the adoption of a decolonizing theoretical framework through which to examine assessment at the post-secondary level.

Kovach (2009) and Ladson-Billings (2021) both state the need to situate ourselves in our social and cultural positions when conducting research. As a person of colour and an immigrant to Canada, and as a scholar of Metis heritage, we are compelled to disrupt the dominant discourses that have shaped our educational experiences and continue to shape post-secondary institutions. Dei (2013) reminds us “it is important to recognize how power and relations of colonialism and re-colonial relations have and continue to script us differently” (pp. 12-13). Therefore, it is imperative that we critically examine and question established methods of traditional assessment.

Working with students in Bachelor and Master of Education programs, we recognize the need for our practices to model transformation and incite change. It is not sufficient to discuss systemic racism and the need for decolonization, without engaging in this work as well. We have to examine and interrogate our practices and engage in new discourse with all our students. In the age of rapidly changing digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence that significantly impact Western traditional ways of assessing students, our exploration reflects our experiences in adopting arts-based practices in course activities and assessment at the post-secondary level. We acknowledge that while our research is based in a Canadian post-secondary context, discourses around assessment impact educators worldwide.

This presentation explores how images of the future, as they appear in collaboratively produced films, function as both research material and pedagogical practice within arts-based action research conducted with Indigenous youth in northern contexts. Drawing on media art workshops carried out at a Sámi upper secondary school in Utsjoki, Finland, and with students at Inussullivik in Narsaq, Greenland, the presentation centres on films created by the students and screened as part of the session. These films visually and narratively articulate young people’s future imaginaries in relation to land, ecocultures, and cultural continuity.

Rather than treating the films as artistic outcomes alone, the research approaches them as visual and narrative data through which learning processes, place-based relations, and youth perspectives become visible and open to analysis. The study is grounded in arts-based action research, which understands research as collaborative, situated, and practice-led. Knowledge production unfolds through artistic experimentation, embodied engagement, and reflexive dialogue with participants, emphasising learning through doing and iterative inquiry. Within this framework, future-oriented image-making is understood as a methodological tool that enables the articulation of values, hopes, and culturally embedded worldviews that may remain difficult to access through verbal or text-based methods alone.

Film screenings combined with short introduction was selected as the presentation format because they foreground the films themselves as research material and reflect the multimodal processes through which the future images were produced. In this sense, the films function both as empirical data and as a research outcome that is integral to the presentation of the study.This format enables audiences to engage directly with the visual representations of the future, while also reflecting on the methodological and pedagogical conditions shaping their creation and interpretation. By presenting the films as both empirical material and analytical entry points, the presentation contributes to research on arts education by demonstrating how artistic practice can function as a rigorous mode of inquiry into learning, ecocultures, and youth perspectives in Indigenous and Arctic educational contexts.