Digital media promoting new approaches to subject specific didactics in visual arts education in primary school, high school, teacher education and university education

The symposium addresses current developments in visual arts education based on empirical projects from different levels of the educational system. The purpose is to discuss to which extend digital media can be seen as an integrated part of existing theory mainly based on developments from analog media or rather give rise to think subject specific didactics differently. Recent developments like visual culture, contemporary arts, social aesthetics, community art and co-creation all represent an approach to art production and appreciation where content, media and visual expressions unfold in societal, digital, collaborative, and transgressive constellations involving the art maker and audiences in social and relational projects processes of meaning making. These constellations contrast traditional virtues of separating visual arts education in drawing, painting, sculpturing skills as well as traditional analytical skills based on the idea of a ‘work’. Governmental requests for implementing IT in visual arts curriculum as well as the fact that students meet the educational system with experiences from using visual media seem to promote these current developments.
Based on these developments, questions of the symposium are: What is visual knowledge, what are visual skills and how can we understand visual competence in the subject domain of visual arts and across subject domains