Social media, computer games and advertising. AI-generated images and fake news. We live in a digital era in which most of us, and children and young people especially, are constantly inundated with visual messaging – images for us to understand and analyse. At the same, political voices are often raised to demand that we eliminate or reduce the number of school hours devoted to visual arts and other aesthetic subjects.
How does that make sense? It doesn’t make sense at all, if you ask Tarja Karlsson Häikiö. She is a professor of visual and material culture in HDK-Valand’s teacher education programme in visual arts and sloyd. Her work is about educating the art teachers of the future, conducting research, and advising doctoral students. For Tarja, visual knowledge is vital.
“First of all, you need it just to live your everyday life and to orientate yourself in life, and second, you need it to gather information and evaluate it critically. Visual knowledge is important both on a general level and in terms of more subject-specific expertise,” she says. “If you’re a doctor, you need to interpret x-rays. If you’re a meteorologist, you need to read weather maps. But there’s also specific knowledge required in professions like urban planning and design.”
Visual ability is also connected to every other ability and school subject, Tarja asserts. “Everything is interconnected,” she says. “If you eliminate the aesthetic subjects, you’re eliminating an important piece of the overall development puzzle for children and young people.”
Visual knowledge is about freedom of speech and democratic values
Tarja can’t emphasise enough the importance of getting access to visual knowledge at an early age – both so that children have a chance to express themselves, which ultimately is about freedom of expression, and to help them understand and relate to the world around them. And that was the theme of her 2007 dissertation, “Children’s Aesthetic Learning Processes: Studio Arts in Preschool and Beyond.”
“In my dissertation,” she says, “I introduced the phrase ‘the analytical eye’. It means you have to be able to interpret what you see and even acquire the ability to do so early in life, since apart from learning it’s a matter of identity development and fundamental democratic values.”
In recent years, Tarja has devoted some of her working time to heading the National Graduate School in Visual Art and Sloyd Education, a collaboration among HDK-Valand, Konstfack, and Stockholm University. The Graduate School has educated working teachers from all over Sweden. This autumn, several of them presented licentiate theses. She notes, “One of these licentiate graduates, for example, adopts an egalitarian perspective. The fact is that boys get worse grades in the visual arts classes, but we can work didactically to counteract that.”
Cultivates artistic and aesthetic values in education and society.
During her own childhood, art and storytelling through pictures was an unquestioned part of everyday life. Her father often made visual stories for her – telling a story and drawing it in pictures at the same time – and she was encouraged to make her own drawings at an early age. “I was born in northern Finland,” she recalls, “and we moved to Gothenburg when I was seven years old. My parents were labour immigrants, but we had art and culture in our family. I have many relatives that are craftsmen and artists.”
Tarja describes the road she’s travelled to where she is now as somewhat circuitous. First she studied to be a textile designer and craft artisan and specialised in weaving church textiles. But instead, she became a preschool teacher and art instructor for preschool children, and later an elementary school art teacher, while simultaneously earning a master’s degree in teaching. After that, she worked with various school and cultural development projects before eventually deciding to get a PhD in art history and visual studies.
“I’ve always done many different things at once, and I still do,” she says. “I work on tons of different projects, I collaborate and I’m involved in various networks. It may seem a little all over the place, but the core of everything is just about the same – to cultivate artistic and aesthetic values in education and society.”
To work with teacher education is to work with hope.
Tarja has now been working at HDK-Valand for over twenty years. In 2018 she became a full professor. “It’s a position that comes with a lot of responsibility,” she says, “but also privilege. For a time when I was working primarily with education, I thought I had left the artist path behind. So I’m extremely grateful that now I can combine education with art and aesthetics.”
But there is one thing she misses from her early career: working with children – especially the youngest ones in the preschool world. But she also finds joy in getting to teach adult students like those in HDK-Valand’s art education programme. “To work with teacher education is to work with hope. There is so much power in these students. They are keen and interested, and they’re going to be able to make a difference in society.”
Text: Camilla Adolfsson, Freelance journalist
