Evidence or Advocacy? Visual Arts Education in Denmark

Introduction This paper presents and discusses the current role of Danish visual arts education in the compulsory school system. Denmark recently implemented a major school reform “How to make a good school better” (Ministry of Education, 2014), that focuses on core competences in the subjects Reading and Math. The reform emphasizes an open approach to various constellations of teaching and learning and includes a national tool for increasing the assessment of core competences. I examined visual arts education in the new educational landscape based on the agreement between the government and a broad range of political parties and used national and international reports on schools since 2006 (Bamford & Qvortrup, 2006; Ministry of Education, 2012a, 2012b; UNESCO, 2006, 2010; Winner, Goldstein, & Lancrin, 2013). I examine the New Common Objectives Act for visual arts in school articulated in the reform (Ministry of Education, 2013, 2014). My aim is to discuss the impact of the educational discourse of evidence in which all school subjects are defined in the new reform. The discourse of evidence focuses on competences aimed at utility and future employment prospects. The new learning objectives for visual arts reflect a development that creates a paradox between the core of visual arts (to express impressions to achieve knowledge about the world) and the demand for a cognitive learning outcome. IT and media, innovation, and entrepreneurship are now implemented in school subjects in which students are taught that their visual expression should be useful to others. At the same time, the reform sets up learning objectives connected to technical skills for visual idioms such as painting, drawing, and sculpture. This gives rise to the question: Are we witnessing the vanishing of a former school subject in favor of a new hybrid of entrepreneurship, technology, and painting? Or has the Danish school system reached an evolutionary phase where visual arts and culture are a learning matter outside the school system performed by artists instead of art teachers and leave art teachers in charge of technical skills? Has the current development generated a new mode of advocacy in which the school subject exists only as a utility for external stakeholders?