Conference Agenda

In the art teacher training at the University of Lapland, my colleague and I have researched and systematically adopted differentiation as a perspective on the pedagogical studies of visual arts teacher students in the past year or so. Before these implementations, we have mapped in-service art teachers' practices and perceivings on differentiation in art education in lower secondary school (see Härkönen & Tuiskuvaara, 2025). This paper discusses what possibilities emerge to reperceive the core, objectives and methods of art education in a new and broader scope when it is examined through differentiation and for instance the crip-theory. The paper introduces our ongoing study conducted in the second-year art education students’ pedagogical course at the University of Lapland, Finland. In the course we have introduced, implemented and tested in practice how art pedagogy and teaching materials can be differentiated so that also those pupils with different learning barriers can reach the curricular learning objectives of art. The research question is: What are the new insights into art education obtained through implementing and researching differentiation perspectives in art pedagogics in art teacher training? Koneen Säätiö foundation has granted a research fund for Härkönen’s research of differentiation in art education between 2025–2027.

Our thinking follows Tomlinson’s (2014) broad definition of differentiation as a holistic approach to education that underpins all teaching design and delivery. Like inclusive education, differentiation aims to remove barriers to learning and support the participation of all students (Tomlinson, 2014).

Atkinson (2011, s. 82–89) discussed how teacher and learner identities are performed and what dominant coding systems inform the performance of these identities in school art education. Atkinson argues that compared to many practices in contemporary art that challenge our comprehension of the artist, objects and practices of art, school art practices tend to reproduce and confirm (though not exclusively) a particular conservative distribution of understandings and attitudes towards objects and subjects of practice (Atkinson, 2011). Teacher identities, perceptions and attitudes are often productions of their own background education, the values of surrounding societies, and global phenomena accessed through, for instance social media communities. Our research interest lies in increasing art teacher students’ awareness of their own perceptions of learning and art and how these might impact their future art teaching practices. Implementing differentiation methods into pedagogical thinking and examining curricular objectives enables us to make visible our privilege positions as educators, challenge our ways of perceiving art education norms.

Penketh (2020) stresses the dangers of apparent attempts to inclusion in art education: Support may be put in place to remove barriers to learning, but there is less emphasis on making radical changes to the ways teachers conceptualize inclusive practice. She warns against ignoring diversity and the opportunity it brings for a non-normative worldview in the construction of inclusive schools and teaching and proposes curriculum-level changes that would examine arts education teaching practices and entities from the perspective of crip-theory. The theory challenges our understanding of abilities and capability (ableism), and the attempt to "cripple" arts education curriculum means drawing attention to taken-for-granted assumptions about abilities that are reinforced through curriculum systems and practices (Penketh, 2020).

In Switzerland, Curriculum 21 positions art and aesthetic education as a key element of comprehensive schooling. It is framed not only as subject-based learning (e.g. visual arts, music, languages/literature), but also as an overall responsibility across subjects that promotes perception, expression, judgement, and creativity, while supporting students’ personal development and engagement with cultural diversity. In the Swiss field of art education, influential policy and program texts circulate among key stakeholders and shape prevailing understandings of what art education should achieve in schools (Manifeste Arts & Education, 2010; Mörsch, 2014). Expectations are ambitious: beyond acquiring artistic techniques, creative expression and competent reception of art, art education is also expected to generate transfer effects and even stimulate changes in classrooms and schools, thereby supporting school improvement (Abs et al., 2017).

Against this background, the present study examines art projects within a cantonal program in Switzerland that aims to support arts education through collaboration among teaching artists / art mediators, and schools, from a school improvement perspective. Analytically, we draw on a practice-theoretical perspective (Moldenhauer & Kuhlmann, 2021) that understands school improvement as change in social practices. From this viewpoint, transformation becomes visible when new practical or embodied knowledge emerges (new routines, forms of doing, and professional know-how) and when temporal-spatial arrangements are reconfigured (e.g., new uses of time, spaces, sequences, and organizational procedures) (see Moldenhauer & Kuhlman, 2021, p. 259). At the same time, the maintenance of these newly established routines and arrangements relies on ongoing efforts and persistence. We also attend to materialities (artefacts, spaces, infrastructures) that support or constrain the continuation of changed practices. We speak in this context about arts-based school improvement and focus on improvement processes aimed at strengthening the aesthetic dimension of everyday schooling and establishing a school profile, fostering art and creative and cultural processes in school life (Fuchs & Bösel-Fuchs, 2017).

We build on previous research indicating positive effects of art projects on schools (Buck-Pavlick, 2025) and on the students’ learning and development (Bowen & Kisida, 2023). While acknowledging ongoing debates about the purposes of cultural education (Shaw & Bernhard, 2024), we place an analytical emphasis on the qualification function of art education. From this perspective, art and aesthetic education offer a distinctive learning field in which questioning, experimentation and creative problem-solving can be cultivated, even if effects are difficult to measure empirically (Bilstein & Zirfas, 2017).

Within a partly retrospective mixed-methods design, the study addresses the following questions: (1) How do art mediators/ teaching artists translate specific art education conceptions – required in the application procedures - in project descriptions? (2) What experiences do external and internal school actors report in relation to the projects? (3) Which school-level changes are initiated in connection with the art projects? By combining document analysis, interviews and case studies, we aim to contribute empirically grounded insights into the conditions under which externally funded art initiatives move beyond isolated project effects and become embedded in school practices.

Educational research is often shaped by procedural approaches in which method is defined in advance, risking a separation between research design and lived educational experience. This study focuses on teachers’ everyday professional experience across different subject areas, exploring how attention to educational situations can be cultivated and researched through artistic practices. The paper examines arts-based and artistic research practices as methodological gestures that reconfigure how inquiry unfolds in education. Drawing on an ongoing doctoral study developed in the Portuguese educational context, it discusses how photography and fragmentary writing function as practices of attention rather than as techniques for data collection. Rather than proposing a new method, the paper argues for an understanding of methodology as an ethical and aesthetic orientation that shapes the researcher’s relation to practice, participants, and research material. The study contributes to current debates in arts education research and educational research methodology concerned with qualitative, arts-based, and reflexive approaches to inquiry.

The study is grounded in critical discussions within educational research methodology that question the dominance of predefined and instrumental models of inquiry. Within arts education research, arts-based research foregrounds aesthetic experience and meaning-making as central dimensions of educational inquiry (Barone & Eisner). In parallel, debates in artistic research emphasise practice as a mode of knowledge production rather than as the application of external theoretical frameworks (Borgdorff). Bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the framework conceptualises methodology as emerging through engagement with educational practice and shaped by attention, proximity, and ethical responsiveness. From this perspective, research in arts education is understood as a situated and relational practice that remains open to what appears within educational experience.

Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedic project sought to compile all human knowledge and promote its dissemination in the Enlightenment spirit of transforming thought. As a hegemonic, universalizing movement, the categorization of knowledge also produced normativity while claiming neutrality. Wikipedia emerged from a similarly democratizing impulse, developing community mechanisms to promote accuracy, often at the cost of excluding ambiguity/fuzzyness, indeterminacy/muzzyness - very important pieces for activating imagination. Can what encyclopedizes also be used to decyclopedize?

This question triggered the project Para uma Validação de Ornitorrinquices (ParVO) [For a Validation of Platypuses] <https://parvo.wikibase.cloud/>. ParVO emerged within the Breaking the Code project as a “hack” of the encyclopedic algorithm [1]. By mobilizing subversive strategies and tactics within the Wikimedia ecosystem, we (un)learn [2], [3] and challenge encyclopedic normativity in favor of situated knowledge [4], [5], as well as environmental and intersectional concerns [6], [7], within Arts Education and Research (AER). Yet decyclopedization remains superficial if it does not engage in the history of its own struggle. It is in this sense that we propose ParVO, with the visualization query platform, ecHoImages <https://echoimages.labs.wikimedia.pt/> for historicizing encyclopedic knowledge and its underlying structures. Thus, we begin with the question:

What historical-critical lines link these projects’ central role in organizing knowledge— from the Diderot-d'Alembert’s Encyclopédie to Wikipedia?

In this communication, we present a digital platform prototype for AER, that embraces error as a pedagogical and investigative catalyst. Within this same framework, we archive encyclopedic artifacts to historicize this gesture of totalizing knowledge, compiling knowledge, and establishing the universal [3], [8], [9], [10].

Accordingly, we are developing an archival platform that supports situated narratives, such as critiques of universalizing knowledge apparatuses, grounded in declared positionalities and intersectional perspectives. While we mobilize error and transgression as didactic and narrative ignition points, we also advance critical readings of what presents itself as neutral or natural. This counter-history that we bring is articulated recursively within the very structures of encyclopedic knowledge systems, whose logics have self-reproduced/disseminated across time and space.

For this talk, we present three cases featured on our platform that help us think through archives of decyclopedic practices in arts education: Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), and Wikipedia. Together with the platypus, a creature that challenged eighteenth-century taxonomies, these objects will serve as lenses for examining normative structures and their exclusionary processes.