Profile

Profile

FLAKS supports the development of courses and teaching in the areas of visual art, music, and theatre pedagogy in schools. Through studying the production of (contemporary) visual art, music, and theatre, teaching in practice is supported. Art-based education research that is related is carried out jointly with visual art teaching as well as drama teaching staff.

The operating profile parameters of FLAKS are:

•    Education research and course development
•    Action research and team-based research
•    (Contemporary) art, music and theatre

  • How is it possible to think differently about education research and course development in an educational environment that demands proof of efficiency and legitimacy? How can the thereof resulting unrealistic ambitions in terms of what can be optimized be rendered productive for the field of arts?

    FLAKS seeks to use cooperative projects to engage with educational policy issues in a critical, constructive and non-legitimizing manner. At the same time, (contemporary) visual art represents a potential means to subvert precisely those forms of economic logic (e.g. creative capitalism). They currently dominate debates on the role of education and the function of art education in a knowledge society, while simultaneously acknowledging that art in itself is also part of this logic, and that “the artist” acts as a blueprint for an alluring subjectivity.

    Practical learnings relevant for the work of FLAKS in an education research context are addressing not only complex societal as well as educational policy conditions that affect our subject areas, but also, in particular, observations from educational theory. Contrary to the paradigm of action research, according to which a question is derived from practice, we see benefit in the research of FLAKS also making theoretical educational issues and observations a starting point for questions. The search for a theory of education, as well as the reference to art, allows a differentiated view of values and teaching practices that are strongly influenced by routines and everyday constraints.

    Making education theory the starting point for action and team-based research processes means to raise questions that do not arise in everyday practice. However, these questions touch upon the prerequisites and assumptions – i.e. the implicit, subconscious foundations – of our own actions. As a result, dealing with considerations of educational theory first and foremost represents a complication for research-based professional practitioners. In a second instance however it allows them to gain a distinct understanding of the processes at work and to subsequently develop new differentiations. Creating a distance from one's own practice through research and the application of educational theory concepts ultimately widens the scope of one’s own activity. The task of FLAKS to expose the complexity of the subject-matter at hand implies questioning how teachers are able to communicate and teach the arts under complex and sometimes paradoxical conditions.

    FLAKS understands and promotes course development and education research not with the primary goal of optimizing teaching, but rather in terms of challenging teaching routines and established educational preconceptions. By engaging with findings of educational theory and the claims of visual art, music and theatre, these fields are put under scrutiny of professional discourse.

  • At FLAKS, the aim of trainees and university students conducting research – occasionally with the involvement of school pupils – is to render implicit and dissimulated (practical) knowledge visible. Thereby, both, a methodological transparency and a conceptual support by theory is pursued. Indeed, as a result of their artistic educational experience, both secondary school teachers and theatre pedagogues alike have specific knowledges that are highly valuable but rarely expressed, visible, or appreciated.

    The methodology of the research cooperation at FLAKS is based on action and team-based research undertaken as part of the “Arts Based Research in Education (ABER)” programme. This research-based focus links and expands the sociologically informed approach of action and team-based research to include art-based strategies and methods. The inclusion of art-based processes allows FLAKS to draw on the plethora of approaches and methods from art-education practice and the fine arts to research education issues. Thereby, we can implement specific professional knowledge into the research projects that serve art, music and theatre education.

    After a trial period of research in mixed teams, team-based research was identified to be most suitable for achieving FLAKS’s transdisciplinary perspectives, aims and goals. Team-based research allows for different forms of knowledge along to differences in perspective to be integrated and used for engaging with research questions.

    The establishment of an art-based action and team-based research initiative, in turn, is a response to the resulting challenges from undertaking research into art-education scenarios on the basis of their event character. Art-based is a tentative and iterative way of investigation that enables reactions to effects and results of a research process opening up varied opportunities.

    For more information, please refer to action and team-based research, as well as to ABER.


  • Researching visual art, music and theatre contributes to a social and democratic self-understanding that enables many options and impulses for the development of teaching in artistic subjects and art education. The aim of our research at FLAKS is to realize the potential the arts have in supporting educational processes in specialized subject-specific approaches, in teaching practices in schools, and also in the teachers’ and theatre pedagogues’ training. By focusing on the “potential for using contemporary art practice in teaching”, we give the work of FLAKS both a profile and an orientation.

    Our aim is to take the field of contemporary art as a basis for art education processes in schools. Thereby we prioritize self-reflecting, critical, and deconstructivist artistic approaches. We are interested in art as a form of reflection and generator of insights into the school system and beyond. Our interest in research thus is diametrically opposed to a technical understanding of research that is driven out of a need for legitimacy. We indeed do not pursue flow-on effects, the ability to leverage artistic expression for the benefit of mainstream subjects, or train people adequately for the workplace. In turn, our interest lies in a contradictory and multifaceted form of art education and investigation associated with contemporary alternative points of view.

    Our research methodology extends the repertoire of social-science methods by incorporating artistic procedures. The reason for this is that it is particularly useful on the one hand in challenging truisms by revealing differences, and on the other in demonstrating the performative nature and fragility of knowledge generation. Our overall aim is to achieve an invigoration of art-specific research trends, allowing a tentative response to be made as to what the research reveals. Through associated forms of knowledge (abductive and hypothesizing), an attempt is made to draw attention to the general in its specificity – in full awareness of the imponderability and constitutive inseparability of interpretations and constructions. In this respect, artistic procedures align with the theoretical approaches of post-structuralism that interpret the essence of things and relationships not as conclusive, but rather as contingent.

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