The Value of Art Education: Cultural Engagements at the Swedish Folk High Schools 3031140605, 9783031140600

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SOCIOLOGY OF THE ARTS

The Value of Art Education Cultural Engagements at the Swedish Folk High Schools Henrik Fürst Erik Nylander

Sociology of the Arts Series Editors

Katherine Appleford University for the Creative Arts Epsom, UK Anna Goulding Northumbria University Newcastle, UK Dave O’Brien University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK Mark Taylor University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

This series brings together academic work which considers the production and consumption of the arts, the social value of the arts, and analyses and critiques the impact and role of cultural policy and arts management. By exploring the ways in which the arts are produced and consumed, the series offers further understandings of social inequalities, power relationships and opportunities for social resistance and agency. It highlights the important relationship between individual, social and political attitudes, and offers significant insights into the ways in which the arts are developing and changing. Moreover, in a globalised society, the nature of arts production, consumption and policy making is increasingly cosmopolitan, and arts are an important means for building social networks, challenging political regimes, and reaffirming and subverting social values across the globe.

Henrik Fürst • Erik Nylander

The Value of Art Education Cultural Engagements at the Swedish Folk High Schools

Henrik Fürst Department of Education Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

Erik Nylander Department of Behavioural Sciences & Learning Linköping University Linköping, Sweden

ISSN 2569-1414     ISSN 2569-1406 (electronic) Sociology of the Arts ISBN 978-3-031-14060-0    ISBN 978-3-031-14061-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the feedback received from the following persons: Patrik Aspers, Agnieszka Bron, Tom Chabosseau, Eve Chiapello, Shai M.  Dromi, Jun (Philip) Fang, Diana Holmqvist, Staffan Larsson, Martina Nordqvist, Dave O’Brien, Julia Pennlert, Max Persson, Johanna Pettersson Fürst, Megan Pugh, Sofia Pulls, and Rebecca Ye. We have also received valuable feedback from the students of the folk high school teacher programme at Linköping University. While this book is an original work, the main parts of the material were collected during our time of evaluating art education at the folk high school for the Swedish National Council of Adult Education. During the evaluation, the folk high school teacher Sanna Levelius collected parts of the interview material and wrote the report with us. As with this book, Henrik Fürst was the lead author of the evaluation. Filippa Millenberg collected another ethnographic data material that proved useful for this book. We are grateful for Levelius’ and Millenberg’s contributions of empirical material and for sharing it with us and a wider English speaking audience. Henrik Fürst wants to acknowledge the following sources for providing funding for this book project: Stockholms arbetareinstitutsförening, Carl Cederblads minnesfond, and the Swedish Research Council Grants 2018-06708. We also want to thank Henrik Bromander and Anneli Furmark from whom we borrowed graphic material depicting the Swedish folk high

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schools and their art students. Finally, we want to thank all the students and teachers from the folk high schools taking part in this research. February 2023

Henrik Fürst Erik Nylander

Contents

1 What Is the Worth of Art Education?  1 2 What  Is Daily Life Like? Institutional Characteristics of the Folk High School 25 3 Who Engages? The Social Dispositions of Students 49 4 What  Engages? Students’ Accounts of Art Education as Hothouse, Home, Happening, or Hospital 67 5 What Counts? Selection Tests as Gatekeeping 89 6 What Happens in Class? Testing Students’ Engagements117 7 How  Are Teaching and Creating Art Combined? Worth and Vocational Dilemmas Among Teachers141 8 Is Art Education Worthwhile?165 Appendix: Methodology179 Index183

About the Authors

Henrik Fürst  holds a PhD in Sociology from Uppsala University. He is Associate Professor of Education at Stockholm University. Erik  Nylander is Associate Professor of Education at Linköping University.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 3.1

Depiction of a folk high school from Henrik Bromander’s (2015, p. 11) graphic novel Course in Self-destruction (our translation and lettering). (Picture reproduced in agreement with the authors of the book) Cropped image from Anneli Furmark’s graphic novel Fishes in the Sea (2010, p. 18). (The illustration is reproduced in agreement with the author of the book. The English translation was prepared by the author for a French translation of the graphic novel)

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 4.1 Table 5.1 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 8.1

The number of enrolled folk high school students per area of art education by age and gender: Autumn terms 2005–2010 Share of folk high school students in five areas of art education by the highest level of education among the parents: Autumn terms 2005–2010 Share of folk high school students in five areas of art education by country of origin among their parents: Autumn terms 2005–2010 Four modes of engagement within art education at the Swedish folk high school Five public orders of worth in art education at the Swedish folk high school Folk high school teachers’ responses to employment as an economic precondition for art-making Folk high school teachers’ responses to art-making as a precondition for employment Folk high school teachers’ responses to teaching experiences as a precondition for art-making Five public orders of worth in art education at Swedish folk high school

53 56 60 69 92 144 145 146 171

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CHAPTER 1

What Is the Worth of Art Education?

Most students who venture towards careers in the arts know that their chances of “making it” as a full-time artist are slim: very few people achieve substantial esteem or income from their artistic creation alone (Brook et al., 2020; Frenette & Dowd, 2020; McRobbie, 2016; Menger, 2014). Yet, in the past few decades, the number of people aspiring to live off their artistic work in a professional manner has increased. For example, the expanding interest in pursuing artistic career trajectories holds true for musicians (Coulangeon, 1999; Nylander, 2014; Perrenoud & Bataille, 2017), writers (Fürst,  2017, 2019; Lahire, 2010), and visual artists (Abbing, 2002; Gustavsson et  al., 2012) across vast geographies of the increasingly postindustrial Western world. Nevertheless, the artists who receive payment and remuneration for their work face considerable uncertainty around how they will be compensated and their professional status. Working artists often end up combining income from their art with income from work in an adjacent vocational field or an altogether different “breadwinning” profession (Buscatto, 2004; Gerber & Childress, 2017; Heian et  al., 2012; Lahire, 2010; Lindström, 2016; Menger, 2014). Yet, that does not seem to prevent students from studying the arts.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7_1

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Ever since the great expansion of higher education from the 1960s and onwards, new generations of students have opted for specialisations within the arts, regardless of their presumably slim chances for labour market success (cf. Alper & Wassall, 2006; Gustavsson et al., 2012; Menger, 2014). In 2020, for example, Swedish folk high schools’ art programmes together enrolled some 14,250 full-time students on an annual basis, with music being the most popular area of focus (6176 students), followed by visual arts (3605 students), other popular areas of focus are scenic arts (1836 students), plastic arts and handicraft (1763 students), and creative writing (870 students) (Folkbildningsrådet, 2021). Across the Nordic countries, folk high schools provide voluntary, grade- and tuition-free education to any adult learner. In Sweden alone, there are more than 150 publicly funded folk high schools, which offer both “second-chance” education, comparable to upper-secondary qualification, and specialised courses ranging from introductory levels to prestigious, advanced programmes.1 The specialised art programmes in various aesthetic areas currently comprise around 25–30% of its entire long-term course provision in terms of participation weeks, a percentage that has been on a steady increase in the past few decades (Fürst et  al., 2018; Nylander, 2014; Nylander & Östlund, 2018). The Nordic folk high schools are a century-old institution that provides ample possibilities to develop artistic skills and competencies, regardless of whether the students want to make a living out of it or not.2 The students usually rely on a generous study grant-loan scheme from the state to cover their daily living expenses, and the schools’ funding comes primarily from the state and municipal governments. As with other institutions for adult education and learning, the state does not enforce a standardised or uniform curriculum in the folk high schools. These schools also have 1  While “folk high school” is the most common English translation of the Swedish term folkhögskola, its student body is very heterogeneous in terms of age groups, and few participants are teenagers (which could be a common misunderstanding by associating with English “high schools”) (Merritt, 2020). The specialised courses in art education we study here are difficult to place within the formal hierarchies of formal schooling as it contains both “college-­level” programmes and introductory courses (Fürst et al., 2018; Nylander, 2014). 2  Folk high school form has been studied in countries as far apart as Poland (Kulich, 2002), Tanzania (Bhola, 1984; Dahlstedt & Nordvall, 2011), Germany (Käpplinger, 2017; Zeuner, 2010), and the United States (Paulston, 1980) to mention just a few noteworthy examples. Although the folk high schools in the Nordic countries are far from monolithic, they probably share a stronger family resemblance than the spread of the folk high school idea globally.

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considerable autonomy to develop their educational programmes as they see fit (Larsson, 2013). The institutional flexibility of the folk high schools’ programme planning activities, with little to no limitations on the school’s social selection, grading standards, or curriculum content, make them reflect and mirror the changing interests and engagements of the population as a whole (Fürst, 2018;  Käpplinger, 2017; Larsson, 2013; Nylander & Holmer, 2022). As the folk high school participation is voluntary but does not yield formal degrees or technical certifications, they constantly have to change their programmes to match the varied demands of society and its zeitgeist (Krause, 2019). While the folk high schools have been claimed to be a very Nordic school form (Korsgaard, 2019; Skovmand, 1983), the art programmes in the Swedish schools generally bear some resemblance to art education in other countries and other institutional contexts: there is a strong emphasis on “learning-by-doing”, teachers offer guidance to refine the students’ technique and develop their individual artistic identities, they offer affordable housing and a strong sense of community among the student groups.3 Even if the collective interest in studying art at a post-compulsory level seems to have increased in the past few decades, politicians are not necessarily thrilled about these developments. For example, within the European Union, employability has become the dominant governing principle for “up-skilling” and “re-skilling” the population (EC, 2000, 2011). Education is often framed as an investment in “human capital”, that is, something that should preferably be directed to sectors that advance future financial gains (Brown et al., 2020). Since the track record of art students seems to offer rather slim prospects to be “accounted for” as 3  In some ways, folk high schools resemble “free schools” in the United States, which, according to Swidler, were most popular in the 1960s and 1970s but have, with a few exceptions, disappeared (1976, 1979). Unlike Nordic folk high schools, which secure much of their funding from the state, these independent free schools seem to have been self-­organised and privately funded. They had open admission, alternative curriculums, and were organised not via central leadership but with the interest and active participation of the students in mind. Swidler writes that they focused on autonomy, self-direction, and emotional openness, with diffuse, particularistic, and intimate relationships between teachers and students (Swidler, 1976). A stark difference here is that the folk high schools are offered to any member of society above 18 years old. Some elements of the folk high schools programmes might roughly compare to the American “community colleges” (Bagley & Rust, 2009; Brint & Karabel, 1989), whereas other elements compare to “liberal arts colleges”.

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valuable in this narrow learning-for-earning paradigm, art education is often framed as a poor and risky educational choice in public discourse.4 Supporters of the arts have responded to the narrow and reductionistic learning-for-earning paradigm with arguments that the arts do have considerable economic value. National governmental agencies use the concepts of cultural and creative industries to measure and promote the inherent value of art in society for the general economy. Cultural workers have also increasingly become important for creating and enriching commodities, events, performances, and stories with a public appeal and pricing power (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020; Sholette, 2011). Art education can thus serve as an important conduit for providing cultural competencies for the cultural or creative industries and the burgeoning enrichment economy. Many studies have also shown that, while former art students do not necessarily work as professional artists after graduation, their education provides them with skills, networks, and experiences that prove to be both, directly and indirectly, beneficial to the labour market (Bille & Jensen, 2018; Fürst, 2019; Gerber & Childress, 2017; Martin & Frenette, 2017; Oakley et al., 2017). The education-to-work transition might not always follow a linear pattern, but art students often end up in arts-related work (Fine, 2017; Frenette & Dowd, 2020; Fürst et al., 2018; Martin & Frenette, 2017). Research has also shown that art education fosters artistic interests and refinement of skills and appreciation of art, which is necessary for any type of culture to be consumed and appreciated in the first place (Becker, 1982; Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020; Fürst et al., 2018; Gustavsson et al., 2012; Menger, 2014; Strauss, 1970). In this book, we want to highlight the attractions of art education that go well beyond the narrow economic outcomes of the labour market integration, let alone rosy dreams of achieving winner-take-all fortune and fame. We do so by focusing on Swedish high schools as a case that allows us to understand the stakes of art education and lifelong learning at a granular level. The broad array of courses offered at the Swedish folk high 4  Snyder (2017, 2018) has characterised this neoliberal rationale as a type of “politics of inevitability” in which the fundamental question of what kind of society we want to build and what moral values we want to be cultivated are subsumed under an imperative of progress and productivity. According to Snyder, “the politics of inevitability” ultimately lead to political backlash. Based on the cases of the Russian Federation and the United States, Snyder highlights that the temporal politics of neoliberal governance has already begun to shift towards what he calls “politics of eternity”, that is, a backwards-looking populism based on nationalist myths of an eternal present.

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schools, which span both elite and more amateur-oriented programmes, makes them particularly appealing as empirical sites for uncovering the plurality of values encountered within art education. The folk high schools also offer a broad repertoire of aesthetic course offerings, which allow us to explore the patterns of valuation that cut across different art forms. We have especially examined programmes in music, visual arts, and creative writing. Rather than assuming that all actors involved in post-compulsory education seek professional recognition or success in a predetermined occupational field, we start with open-ended curiosity about the variety of ways ordinary students assign value to the study of art. Indeed, when we look carefully at how both teachers and students attribute value to art education, we see a richer, more varied scope of artistic engagement than any single metric could uncover. In other words, our overarching aim with this book is to unravel why students and teachers see art education as worthwhile and provide a larger sociological view on the forms of valuation which is giving shape to art education at Swedish folk high schools.

1.1   The Institutionalisation of Art Education and the Metamorphosis of the Folk High School While folk high schools have existed in the Nordic countries for more than 175 years, their role in large-scale artistic enculturation is a more recent phenomenon. Art schools have existed for a long time in Europe, for example, in the form of art academies of sixteenth-century Italy that aimed to teach candidates life drawing and classical history and elevate the status of their craft (Houghton, 2016). However, for most art forms and as a mass phenomenon, the institutionalisation of art education was not very widespread until the mid-twentieth century (Childress, 2017; Faulkner & Becker, 2009, pp. 88–93; Fine, 2018; Oakley et al., 2017). Before the institutionalisation of formal art education, scholars have mostly described artistic training and enculturation from informal master– apprentice relations or through inner virtues and autodidactism of talented and gifted individuals (Kris & Kurz, 1981).5 The conventional form of these master-apprentice systems consisted of “the master” providing 5  One of the more famous examples of a master–apprentice relationship is the Mozart siblings, who learned to compose and play piano from their father, a composer, violinist, and conductor (Elias, 1994).

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lodging, food, and learning experiences, and the apprentices’ time culminated with the production of what was known as a “masterpiece” (Houghton, 2016). In its extreme version, “the charismatic myth” of the artist, art is not learned at all but based on a mythical and divine power that manifests itself as an inner calling (Kris & Kurz, 1981). After the Second World War, against the backdrop of industrialisation, higher living standards, the expansion of leisure time, emerging youth cultures, and the rapid expansion of higher education, numerous emerging artistic expressions were gradually incorporated as legitimate objects of formal schooling. Artistic genres like jazz, folk music, film-making, or creative writing had very little institutional support until their artistic status received wider societal recognition and gradually subsumed as legitimate objects of formal schooling (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 24). Incorporating these art forms into the formal school system has been claimed to change the valorisation of the artistic work and elevate the perceived importance of academic credentials for artistic careers (cf. Bourdieu, 1993; Faulkner & Becker, 2009; Fine, 2018; Gerber, 2017). Of course, the particulars of these histories, how various art forms have acquired the status as legitimate objects of formal training, and what kinds of schools and institutions have been involved in this differ greatly from place to place and over time. The case of art education at Swedish folk high schools is both exemplary of some of these broader historical trends and quite unique. The first Swedish folk high school was based on influences from the neighbouring country of Denmark and was launched in 1868 (Gustavsson, 2017; Larsson, 2013).6 The early educational orientation of the folk high schools was based on the needs of the broad and highly ambitious class of landowning farmers. Under the influence of both the enlightenment and national romanticism, the early folk high school programmes were oriented towards national history and literature. The schools contained a strong emphasis on cultural knowledge, such as poetry and songs, which were seen as vital ingredients “to awaken” any slumbering “soul” (Korsgaard, 2019). In a time when Latin was the dominant school language, the folk high school was supposed to be for the vernacular, to build national language and useful knowledge. The practical necessities of these agricultural communities, for example, the political education they needed 6  In the mid-nineteenth century, the first few folk high schools were founded in Schleswig-­ Holstein, in the contemporary border region of Germany and Denmark (Korsgaard, 1997, 2019; Zeuner, 2010).

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to take up posts in local governing assemblies and the training they needed to increase productivity in farming activities, were also important for their emergence (Lundh Nilsson, 2010). The number of Swedish folk high schools grew from south to north, and at the start of the twentieth century, 30 folk high schools were established across the country (Håkansson, 2019, pp. 53–54). Up to this point, the Swedish folk high schools were typically run by the regional governments. In the early twentieth century, the  folk high schools started to transform, and social movements and organisations pertaining to civil society increasingly started schools as part of their mass organisations around a range of material and spiritual “causes”. This change had to do with the modernising Swedish economy and the ramped-up demand for a class of organisational functionaries attached to the popular movements in civil society. The folk high schools were adopted as a tool to educate further “their own people” and for recruiting people in the local communities for their civic and political causes. The ongoing democratisation gradually changed the emphasis of the folk high school curriculum towards citizenship and various communitarian ideals formulated by these civil society organisations (Korsgaard, 2019; Larsson, 2013). Many schools launched in the interwar period to the mid-twentieth century had civic organisations as their sponsors or custodians (Berndtsson, 2000; Furuland, 1971). By the 1950s and 1960s, the entire Swedish school system had been reformed by the state. These broader reforms involved a fully comprehensive school system that had made a unified nine-year elementary school universally accessible (Husén, 1961). In 1968, the creation of municipal adult education (Komvux) provided universal access to a “second chance” at secondary school, which further diminished the need for folk high schools. Under the threat of redundancy and aided by emerging forms of youth culture, the Swedish folk high schools once more started to re-orient their programmes and  curricula. They were now increasingly orienting themselves towards the cultural sphere (Hartman, 1993; Korsgaard, 2019; Nylander, 2014). This reorientation had been made possible by legislation in the 1950s that allowed the folk high schools to provide more specialised and niche curricula than in the past (Larsson, 2007, p.  78ff). Based upon their institutional autonomy, these schools introduced numerous specialised courses in music, art, and handicraft, and later photo, film, and creative writing. Many of these aesthetic subjects had been part of the programmes offered at the folk high schools for a long time but were now increasingly profiled as subject areas in their own right. Aesthetics and art education went from being a

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set of subsidiary subjects for the edification of spiritual and political causes to areas of speciality in which the enculturation of the students could be concentrated to a single artistic expression or genre. Korsgaard (2019) attributes this postwar “awakening” to the strong political influences of the youth generations growing up in the 1960s and onwards. The folk high schools’ turn towards culture and the arts coincided with the rising enthusiasm among adolescents and young adults for constructing their own “cultural identities” in connection with emerging forms of youth culture, the use of recording equipment, and mass media consumption (Arvidsson, 1991, pp. 99–101; Bohman, 1985; Korsgaard, 1997, 2019). Although higher education was undergoing a tremendous expansion in the latter part of the twentieth century, its artistic academies and institutions could not meet the growing and widespread demand for cultural and artistic knowledge acquisition. In addition, most higher educational institutions were focused on safeguarding an established cultural canon. The universities and art academies could not renew their curricula and teaching philosophies at a pace and direction that satisfied the new “radical” generations of the 1960s and 1970s. Folk high schools, which offered no grades to students and were seen as more progressive and demo­cratic, being deprived of their previous institutional niche, largely stepped in to fill this gap. Towards the turn of the twentieth century, the upper-secondary school system in Sweden underwent reforms of deregulation and marketisation, which further increased the volumes of students in the aesthetic programmes at the upper-secondary level (Börjesson, 2012a,b; Nylander, 2010). At the same time, the artistic institutions active in higher education (conservatories and art institutes) remained limited in terms of meeting this ramped-up demand for training in various cultural fields. The stage was set for the folk high schools to continue their orientation towards the world of arts. Today’s folk high schools exist in many countries, such as Germany, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Finland, Austria, and Tanzania, and their histories and programme offerings differ. However, no other country seems to have developed such a large infrastructure of cultural provision as the Swedish folk high schools.

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1.2   The Larger Landscape of Artistic Training In Sweden, the art education provided at the folk high schools is incorporated into a much larger landscape of artistic training. There is both competition and interdependence among the various institutional actors involved in cultivating knowledge in the creative arts. To fully understand the segment in which the folk high schools are engrossed, we also need to recapitulate some of these other institutional actors. Municipal cultural schools serve 11% of all children and youth aged 6–19, providing part-time artistic training in various fields outside of mandatory  schooling, with music being the largest subject area (Tivenius, 2008). Music is also studied in elementary school and in specialised programmes at upper-secondary schools, universities, and conservatories. The Study Associations, run by civil society actors, also organise most of their leisure-based “study circles” in the musical and cultural domain. Approximately 227,200 individuals participated in different artistically oriented study circles in 2020 (Folkbildningsrådet, 2021, p. 58). Creative writing is sometimes included as part of the core subject of Swedish at elementary and upper-secondary schools but mainly offered in elective courses at upper-secondary schools and at university level. There are both private creative writing schools and public ones, and within the study circles provided by the Study Associations, many participants engage in reading circles (Rydbeck, 2021). Visual arts are also taught in elementary school and offered as a non-­ mandatory course at upper-secondary schools. There are many full-time preparatory programmes in visual and plastic arts within higher vocational education, an educational form that engaged some 2500 full-time students within the arts as of 2020 (Myndigheten för yrkeshögskolan, 2021). These programmes often provide similar training to what is offered in folk high schools. The students can hone their artistic techniques and develop portfolios with which they apply to higher-level art academies or architecture programmes (Melldahl, 2012). Sweden has internationally been regarded as a role model for integrating art subjects into the public school system (Bamford, 2006). Nevertheless, many of these subjects were removed by politicians from the

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mandatory curriculum of upper-secondary programmes in 2011 to make more room for “core subjects” and specialisations along other vocational and academic tracks. Furthermore, as a governmental response to the Covid-19 pandemic, both folk high schools and higher vocational education have increased substantially. However, these reforms and the added funding were mainly channelled away from art education towards other vocational programmes where there was a perceived demand or more immediate labour supply shortage such as health care, construction or digitalisation (Ye et al., 2022). Compared to other lifelong learning systems throughout Europe, Sweden has been heralded as a “universal regime” with a strong emphasis on solidarity, egalitarianism, and social citizenship (Esping-Andersen, 2003; Verdier, 2018). Comparative research on national lifelong learning systems provides valuable insights into how broad historical developments, state policies and instruments help compose different regimes of “valuation”. However, Verdier (2018) points out that an increased hybridisation is taking place within the national education and lifelong learning systems. Sweden has been regarded as a reference society in providing universal access to lifelong learning  but has  rapidly introduced reforms taking it towards an “organised market regime”. Additionally, the prospect of typifying entire countries along with broad categories like “corporatist”, “academic”, “universal” value-regimes (Verdier, 2018) or according to a typology of “welfare regimes” (Esping-Andersen, 2003) misses out on the great variation of valuation taking place within countries, between different kinds of educational providers, or among the participants and teachers themselves.7 That is why we believe that the question of the valuation of art education should be tackled at a more fine-grained level of analysis. While we argue that there are indeed general patterns in how value is formed in the art education of folk high schools, it is through the careful study of competent actors and their valuations and justifications that we can determine what these patterns are.

7  For example, in fine arts schools in the United States, traits like eccentricity, experimentation, and ability to talk about culture seem to be emphasised in ways that might strike a Swedish art student as odd (Fine, 2018; see also Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976). In contrast, China’s “art tests prep schools” have historically put a very high demand on students’ technical skills and gradually introduced more individual expressions as forms of differentiation (Fang, 2020).

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1.3  How the Worth of Art Education Is Studied To understand “what is at stake” in art education, we employ theoretical concepts and methodological principles derived from pragmatic sociology.8 Based on the premises of this analytical framework, we seek to unravel the pluralistic forms of valuation practices that occur among common or ordinary actors on an everyday basis as they coordinate and test their cultural engagement (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Indeed, when we look carefully at the ways that both teachers and students attribute value to art education, we see a richer, more varied, and contested scope of engagements and justifications than what is commonplace to discuss in art education or the sociology of the arts. When Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot set up their research group Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale in 1984, one of their main ambitions was to study the normativity of social life and the moral orders of worth mobilised by common actors as they coordinate their actions in situations of uncertainty (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Rennes & Susen, 2010).9 Since then, other French sociologists have tried 8  In the English translations and within the anglophone reception of this research tradition, several labels have been suggested, such as “sociology of convention” (Bessy & Chauvin, 2013; Diaz-Bone, 2011; Imdorf et al., 2019), “sociology of épreuves” (Barthe et al., 2013), “sociology of conventions and testing” (Potthast, 2017), or “French pragmatic sociology” (Jagd, 2011). For our argument, what we refer to here as pragmatic sociology is consistent with the research referred to under these multitudes of labels which, for better or worse, contest about describing a research tradition that itself has become quite diverse. The heterogeneity of this tradition is evident not just by the polysemantic use of labels deployed to describe the research paradigm. Boltanski himself has dismissed the idea of a coherent programme under labels such as “pragmatic sociology” or “pragmatic sociology of critique”, referring to it both as an “alleged research tradition” and, at best, a “generational phenomena” (see esp. Boltanski, 2016, p. 34). 9  The group jointly set up by Boltanski and Thévenot took their name as a homage to Albert Hirschmann, whose book L’économie comme science morale et politique was published in French that same year (Hirschman, 1984). What came to be known as “pragmatic sociology” or “French pragmatism” bears family resemblances to a multitude of influential academic traditions and intellectual predecessors within the social sciences and humanities writ large, ranging from American pragmatism (e.g. John Dewey) and Durkheimian sociology (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu) to Actor-Network Theory (e.g. Bruno Latour), phenomenology (e.g. Alfred Schutz), ethnomethodology (e.g. Harold Garfinkel), and post-analytical philosophy (e.g. Ludwig Wittgenstein). For a brief historical overview of these developments, see Corcuff (2011), and for a practical companion or “user guide”, see Barthe et al. (2013).

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to take seriously the justifications and critiques formulated by common people, as they engage in everyday interactions, and the role of tools and tests in stabilising reality by affirming, qualifying, and validating it in various ways. Common actors are, in this tradition, seen to have a near-universal capacity to argue about just and unjust arrangements, a capacity to criticise and to move between different ways of engaging and arguing about value. According to Heinich (2020, p.  89), the question of the value or the worth of something is the “result of the whole set of operations by which a quality is assigned to an object, with varying degrees of consensus and stability”. Once a certain “order of worth” is recognised among common actors, societal institutions, such as schools, often endorse it, which are fundamental for rendering stability and endurance to any given definition of value.10 We have also made use of the pragmatist idea of critical moments occurring when common actors are challenged with regard to their preconceived and habitual notions of reality (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999).11 To catch the plurality of principles adopted during the critical moment of evaluation, we also draw on the concept of tests or trials (épreuves) (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). To affirm and validate a given definition of reality and reduce the inherent uncertainty of events, actors 10  For example, Boltanski and Thévenot’s early research was partly concerned with the making of social taxonomies and socio-professional categories that became “conventions” in the public realm (cf. Bessy & Chauvin, 2013; Bruno et  al., 2016; Desrosières, 2008; Desrosières & Thévenot, 1996; Salais et  al., 1986). More recently, their framework has gained popularity outside of the francophone world and extended to various educational and cultural settings, including student mobility (Leemann, 2018), the evaluation of grants in the visual arts (Peters & Roose, 2020), literary studies (Dromi & Illouz, 2010), and cultural heritage (Heinich, 2021). 11  While we refer to the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, the study of justification in (American) sociology has a long history (Kadushin, 1968). As early as 1935, Paul Lazarsfeld (1935) conducted a study on the importance of asking the why question. Perhaps more well-­ known is the work of Charles Wright Mills (1940) about motive as something not motivating action but about producing a satisfying answer to the question of “why?” and making actions legitimate. Explanations for untoward actions are given by justifications where one accepts responsibility but not the occurrence of the (unfavourable) event (Austin, 1956; Scott & Lyman, 1968). Neo-institutionalism is another strand where justification and legitimation are central, especially how organisation outwardly becomes legitimate by myths and ceremonies (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). The conversational turn has also seen some work on reason-­ giving in conversation and discourse (Flinkfeldt, 2016; Tilly, 2006; Van Leeuwen, 2007).

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make use of material arrangements and tools to help make sense of the world. Paraphrasing Boltanski (2011, p. 75), one could say that these tests set certain boundaries for what is possible and that they help stabilise and fix reality by confirming “what is the case” and “what matters”. For example, when teachers at Swedish folk high schools seek mutual agreement on which students are worthy or appropriate for enrolment, they are engaged in a “selection test”. We explore the arrangements and negotiations taking place during this gatekeeping process, which helps us discern the assertion, sometimes implicit, of what an art education “is good for”. The justifications for selecting students need to refer to public perceptions of the common good to make these choices appear legitimate and just. Since we want to provide a comprehensive and pluralistic understanding of the worth of art education, we zoom in on situations of contestation, where tensions between rival orders of justifications manifest themselves in practice. One area of contestation could arise, for example, if the gatekeeping to art school, both want to compose a fair representation of various social groups and build their selection on the valorisation of more individualised notions of the “uniqueness” or “originality” of any given performance. In the more recent work of Thévenot (2009, 2014), the relationship that common actors have with the world is explored through a typology of regimes of engagement. To some extent, the idea of engagement can be seen as a continuation of a long-standing interest in the various “investments in form” that actors use to coordinate their actions and attune themselves to one another (Boltanski, 1987; Boltanski & Thévenot, 1983; Salais et al., 1986; Thévenot, 1984). According to Thévenot (2014), the framework of analysing modes of engagement is particularly apt for exploring individual concerns that people experience in their everyday lives, which are often taking place beneath the level of the compounded forms of “the common good” that was thoroughly outlined in his early work with Boltanski (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006). Thévenot (2014) distinguishes three basic modes of engagement, exploration, familiarity, and the individual plan, between which individuals alternate. We found all three forms in our own study of art education, sometimes distinct and sometimes overlapping, such as when students explore a craft or an idea during their artistic training, get wound up in feeling at home at the folk high school, or plan for a career within the arts. However, we also noted a fourth mode of engagement, when students described their time at the folk high school as a respite and way of trying to better their health

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through art or by being at the school. Accordingly, we add a new form of engagement to Thévenot’s list: the recuperative mode. In the final half of the book, we make use of both private engagements and public forms of justifications concerning the value of art education to interrogate the fragility and vulnerability of learning artistic skills and competencies in the folk high school environment. Looking at art education from the vantage point of pragmatic sociology thus requires us to be attentive to situations when alignment and misalignment with ways of being at the school occur in practice and when more generalised evaluation principles prove difficult to deploy and commensurate to a unified structure. For example, the vocational identities of the art teachers often traverse both a space for art creation and a space for teaching art, which require them to find ways to navigate potential value conflicts between the two spaces. Our observations draw on a wide range of empirical material. We have conducted interviews with groups of current students and with individual teachers and former students. We also draw on two ethnographies that cover the concrete ways in which students of visual arts and creative writing are being “put to the test” through various exercises in situations underscored with considerable uncertainty. We also sent a survey to the art education teachers. We examined registry data covering the social background of 24,000 former art students, which helped us capture their dispositions and place in the wider social landscape. Appendix 1 includes further details about data collection and analysis, which, taken together, helped us unravel multiple dimensions of worth.

1.4  Outline of the Book The book moves through a series of empirical vantage points to cover how students engage with art education, how art education is valued, and what the folk high schools do to promote, train, and test cultural competencies. In this introductory chapter, we have sought to sketch out the research problem and the theoretical underpinnings, as well as present a brief history of the institutional setting, the folk high school, where it is all playing out. Chapter 2 describes the institutional properties and tensions central to participation in the art programmes offered within the Swedish folk high school in greater detail. We argue that some of the totalising concepts that

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have often been adopted to study communities formed under institutional constraints fall short of providing a comprehensive picture of daily life in these schools. However, even though the experiences of these art students cannot be reduced to a totalising concept, such as “total institution”, “communitas”, “heterotopia”, or “psychosocial moratorium”, we think that these concepts offer us some partial truths that are helpful when sketching out the further complexities and variations of engagement involved in these students’ daily lives. Chapter 3 uses Swedish registry data to map out the collective enrolment patterns from a birds-eye-view when factoring in the social characteristics of the students who are attracted to the arts programmes. These public statistics show that most students attend folk high school as an intermediary “prep school” after finishing upper-secondary school but before pursuing a professional or vocational career. While there is fairly strong internal variation between the different cultural expressions, the students are often of middle-class origin, women, and born in Sweden to two Swedish-born parents. The chapter thereby provides an empirical foundation to understand where the interest in artistic engagements is strongest in social space and simultaneously points to limitations in such approach. In Chap. 4, we look more closely at how students describe their engagement in art education in their own words. In particular, we deploy and develop Thévenot’s model of modes of engagement to show that there are at least four forms of artistic engagement that matter for these students: individual plan, familiarity, exploration, and recuperation. Based on the forms of engagement that the students verbalise, we seek to distinguish common denominators about their attractions to the arts and education in the arts that make their participation seem worthwhile. We typify these operations of common actors into four types of what art education resembles to them: a hothouse, happening, home, or hospital. While Chap. 4 covers values that are largely construed as personal and private by the students, Chap. 5 explores those valorisation processes that relate to the established values of the common good. In particular, we use the critical moment when teachers operationalise and justify evaluations of prospective students during their selection tests. These selection tests are not without tension as there can be several ways in which students may be seen as appropriate for an art programme. Their gatekeeping practices and justifications for selection vary greatly depending on the prestigiousness and status of each programme in the wider universe of art education.

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While all gatekeepers put their prospective students “to the test”, some emphasised inspirational value dimensions related to artistic uniqueness or originality, while others emphasised the school’s communitarian ethos, trying to form functional groups or promoting inclusiveness, egalitarianism, and civic engagement. Chapter 6 shifts to everyday classroom practice. Through ethnographic accounts in which students and teachers work alongside one another, we follow how different forms of engagement and values become relevant through concrete moments where the students are put to the test. The tests may, for example, involve group exercises where students’ ability to cooperate and explore an artistic idea is tested or a test of what it takes to pass as a fiction writer through the oral critique from presenting an individual writing assignment to a group of fellow students. These tests are part of embracing or modifying the way students engage with material artefacts and each other but are also meant to develop a critical capacity to valorise and evaluate each other’s work of art as it progresses. Students’ self-directed learning and the romantic notion of finding one’s voice and personality in the aesthetic expression are emphasised, but they also encounter paradoxes and problems when elevated among the teachers. Chapter 7 deepens our understanding of the teachers working in the folk high schools and how they transverse or combine their vocational identities as teachers and artists. Drawing on survey data, we illustrate the vital role art education has in the functioning of the labour market by providing teaching possibilities for ordinary artists. However, we also show how these vocational groups tend to take different positions in juggling their art-making, strategies for receiving recognition from the art world, and their positions as teachers of post-compulsory art education. Depending on the teachers’ commitment to spaces of making art and teaching art, they enact different vocational strategies on a continuum ranging from compartmentalisation to full synthetisation. In the concluding Chap. 8, we argue that the plurality of cultural engagements at the folk high schools offers a great avenue to widen the discussion on the value of art education. Art education at the Swedish folk high school thus offers a great vantage point to grasp the diversity of what art education is “good for” and the pluralistic forms of values and justifications used in reference to individual and common pursuits.

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Rydbeck, K. (2021). Från Oscar Olsson till Shared Reading: läsargemenskaper i svensk studiecirkelkontext. In K.  Abrahamsson, L.  Eriksson, M.  Lundberg, M. Myrstener, & L. Svensson (Eds.), Årsbok för föreningen för folkbildningsforskning. Föreningen för folkbildningsforskning. Salais, R., & Thévenot, L. (Eds.). (1986). Le Travail: marchés, règles, conventions. INSEE: Economica. Scott, M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33(1), 46–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/2092239 Sholette, G. (2011). Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. PlutoPress. Skovmand, R. (1983). Samspillet mellem Nordens folkehøjskoler indtil anden verdenskrig. Universitetsforlaget i Aarhus. Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The Bodley Head. Snyder, T. (2018). The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Tim Duggan Books. Strauss, A. (1970). The Art School and Its Students: A Study and an Interpretation. In M. C. Albrecht, J. H. Barnett & M. Griff (Eds.), The Sociology of Art and Literature (pp. 621-34). Praeger. Swidler, A. (1976). What Free Schools Teach. Social Problems, 24(2), 214–227. https://doi.org/10.2307/800340 Swidler, A. (1979). Organization Without Authority: Dilemmas of Social Control in Free Schools. Harvard University Press. Thévenot, L. (1984). Rules and Implements: Investment in Forms. Social Science Information, 23(1), 1–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901884023001001 Thévenot, L. (2009). Postscript to the Special Issue: Governing Life by Standards: A View from Engagements. Social Studies of Science, 39(5), 793–813. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0306312709338767 Thévenot, L. (2014). Voicing Concern and Difference: From Public Spaces to Common-Places. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 7–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.905749 Tilly, C. (2006). Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons... And Why. Princeton University Press. Tivenius, O. (2008). Musiklärartyper: en typologisk studie av musiklärare vid kommunal musikskola. Örebro universitet. Van Leeuwen, T. (2007). Legitimation in Discourse and Communication. Discourse & Communication, 1(1), 91–112. https://doi. org/10.1177/1750481307071986 Verdier, É. (2018). Europe: Comparing Lifelong Learning Systems. In M. Milana, S. Webb, J. Holford, R. Waller, & P. Jarvis (Eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning (pp.  461–483). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­55783-­4_24

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Wright Mills, C. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5(6), 904–913. https://doi.org/10.2307/2084524 Ye, R., Chudnovskaya, M., & Nylander, E. (2022). Right Competence at the Right Time—but for Whom? Social Recruitment of Participants in an Expanding Higher Vocational Education Segment in Sweden (2005–2019). Adult Education Quarterly, 074171362210804. https://doi. org/10.1177/07417136221080423 Zeuner, C. (2010). Vuxenutbildningens början i Schleswig–Holstein. In A. Nilsson & F. Lundh Nilsson (Eds.), Två sidor av samma mynt? folkbildning och yrkesutbildning vid de nordiska folkhögskolorna (pp. 57–81). Nordic Academic Press.

CHAPTER 2

What Is Daily Life Like? Institutional Characteristics of the Folk High School

2.1   Introduction: Depicting Daily Life at the Folk High School Because the origin of the folk high schools dates back to the nineteenth century, when almost all Swedes were farmers and lived in the countryside, these schools are still fairly widely distributed across the vast geography of Sweden. Many folk high schools are located at a commuting distance from more urban environments and located in old buildings with considerable historical pedigree. This image of the secluded and old schools surrounded by forest is also popularised in fictional accounts of the folk high schools. For example, in Henrik Bromander’s (2015) graphic novel Course in Self-destruction (Swedish: “Kurs i självutplåning”), the reader encounters a group of young, fragile, and culturally oriented students engaged in scenic arts in a summer course. The school is spatially cut off from the rest of society and portrayed as a boarding school miles away from the nearest village, surrounded by lush forestry, with special places for mushroom picking and a lake (see Fig. 2.1). Even if the folk high school students increasingly seem to opt out of living in these boarding schools, and not all schools offer boarding facilities, this kind of enclosed and cloistered  environment still provides an important imagery of how folk high school life should be. The bucolic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7_2

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Fig. 2.1  Depiction of a folk high school from Henrik Bromander’s (2015, p. 11) graphic novel Course in Self-destruction (our translation and lettering). (Picture reproduced in agreement with the authors of the book)

scenery depicted in Bromander’s narrative and the fragility and drama of the type of life enabled by the boarding school are all part of common conceptions of the Swedish folk high schools. Many art programmes are still located in this kind of secluded boarding school environment, creating a regulated learning environment that encapsulates the physical, moral, and intellectual elements of the students’ lives. In the following, we will analyse group interviews on how students talk about their daily lives and depict the folk high school as an educational institution. We will seek to trace what institutional characteristics give shape to their experiences. In particular, we focus on the issue of how the life of art students is instituted: that is, how similarly situated people encounter a socio-material arrangement for their school life that create regularised patterns of behaviour. Throughout the chapter, we show how folk high school students conceive the institution as detached spaces, physically secluded from the pace and routines of everyday life. However, many student groups also opt for commuting to these schools during the day, which creates tensions between those that live “within the bubble” and those who travel to school on a daily basis.1

1  While our interviews focused on the art school students, there is a large body of participants in generic courses (Swedish: “allmän kurs”) who often take classes to get an uppersecondary degree and often live separately from the students in the specialised courses.

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2.2   Boarding School Students and Living Off the Grounds In the following interview, we met two students, Elisabet and Sofie, who live in a boarding school in the countryside, akin to the one depicted in Bromander’s graphic novel. To reach the nearest town, only one bus leaves the premises once an hour, a bus ride that takes them an hour to complete. The main building of this school, which is an old castle, is located near a lake and surrounded by forest. This particular folk high school is quite typical of the countryside boarding schools by being majestic, historic, and idyllic, but at the same time, a bit worn down. The life at the premises and proximity to classrooms, student dorms, restaurants, and sports and leisure facilities create an enclosed space of highly structured and regulated life for these students. This structure and regulation are visible in the specific times when having breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the canteen. The boarding school format also makes different leisure time activities possible based on spontaneity and impulses among the groups who chose to live there. Interviewer: What is it like to live at the boarding school? What happens in the evenings, for example? Elisabet: A lot of different things. Sofie: Yes, it feels like things are happening everywhere. Elisabet: It feels like we start an hour earlier than the day students. Because we have breakfast at eight o’clock, everyone gathers in the dining room and spend an hour to have breakfast together [laughs], and then we go to class. We have dinner from quarter to five. Yes. And in the evenings, it can be like … we have a Facebook group, so it could be someone who writes “now we’re watching a movie in this dorm” or “now we are having a joint writing session”. You can hang out as much as you want and do your thing. So, it’s huge … things are happening all the time. Sofie: There is a sauna and table tennis. There is a gym as well. Some people dance. In the gym, there are only a few dumbbells. Elisabet: But the most beautiful thing, I think, is that you simply stay on the premises. If you do not feel finished with what you are working on during the day at half-past three (in the afternoon), you may stay.

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Sofie: Mm. You can go to the facilities whenever you want. Elisabet: Yes, even on the weekend, if you’re here too. Yes, it’s very nice. (visual art students)

As illustrated by this conversation, boarding school students’ lives are cloistered and concentrated on the school premises. Students have a hard time leaving, as they live far away from the nearest town. However, the total experience of living and going to school in the same place is not considered a problematic issue. Rather, to have this kind of life tends to be perceived as a luxury and a unique affordance. The difficulty of exiting the premises is seen as an enabling condition for oneself to enjoy the artistic engagements and extra-curricular activities available to them at the school. In contrast to the repressive nature of some totalising experiences, such as asylums and prisons, the controlled environment may play another role at the folk high school. The students above do not want to leave their cloistered way of life. The facilities provide all the infrastructure and provision they need to develop themselves socially, creatively, physically, and mentally. Some students call this total experience “living in a bubble”. However, not all students at the same school rent a room in boarding facilities. To be a “day student” may be enabled by living close enough to the school for it to be considered “within reach”. Students may also be day students by having housing elsewhere due to having a family, having bought or rented an apartment elsewhere, or being engaged in part-­ time work. Interviewer: You who do not live here in the boarding school area, how come you decided to live outside of the school? Nina: I want to save money. The convenience of being able to relax a bit on the weekends. I also work extra sometimes. Yes, I guess it’s just the financial aspect, I think. It would be fun to live here because it is a different type of community when doing so. I still feel that we are a pretty nice bunch of people on the bus ride to school. So it’s okay. [laughs] Saga: The reason why I do not live here is in part that I have an apartment in [a town at a commuting distance], so it’s a cost issue. It’s quite expensive to stay here too. Since I live with my boyfriend, I do not want to move away from my partner to be here [laughs]. Even though it would certainly have been fun to be here, it does not feel practically feasible. Had

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the overall situation been different, I absolutely would have considered doing it. Mikaela: Yes, for me, it’s probably just about money. I have a student apartment in [the closest town] as well, which I’m not so eager to sublet [laughs]. I have subleased it before, and it has not gone so well. But as a matter of fact, I really want to live here; it’s just that I could not cope with arranging everything with my apartment and stuff. Interviewer: Do you still come here on the weekends? Or are you keeping your distance? Nina:  It has not happened [that I have been here during the weekend]. Saga: No, not yet. It has not happened as of yet. But the idea has been broached. Elisabet: I think it may happen. But then I think it will be a bit … I mean, we have to … We have … Under the beds, you can pull out an extra bed, so we do have room for everyone. [laughs] (visual art students)

To be a day student in a boarding school environment means living in between two worlds compared to their boarding room comrades. The total experience of folk high school enculturation so evident among the boarding school students is not as prevalent among the day students. Instead, these students seem semi-detached from that “life in a bubble” they imagine as a formative experience that they are missing out from. Sometimes these students do not live on the premises for strictly financial reasons, as indicated above, but their choice is often related to having commitments and engagements outside of the folk high school that prevents them from going “all-in”. These daytime students often experience the boarding school premise and its inhabitants as a different world. While it is possible to move in and out of the boarding school, the day students are naturally not as fully engrossed in the activities on campus all through the weeks. Therefore, they are slightly outside the strong community spirit cultivated in situ. Consequently, the day students tend to be slightly equivocal about their loyalties and a general sense of belonging. Most students at the folk high school are young adults aged 18–25 (see Chap. 3). Hence, the boarding school and life at a folk high school are shaped by the norms and lifestyle of youth, and young adults. For the older participants, the lifestyle of these “youngsters” paired with the cloistered and regulated institutional environment can leave them with a

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sense of unease or distancing, which risks full-on disidentification. The boarding school environment may not resonate with their ways of living and being. Interviewer: Do you live here? Louise: I’ve had a room here for two months, but I will move out. Interviewer: Why is it that? Louise: I feel too old to live in a boarding school, and I usually live in [the city], it is possible to commute. […] Interviewer: What is happening at the boarding school? […] Louise: We read to each other some evenings; some have set up role-­ plays. So smaller social arrangements. I think I have been writing most evenings I have been here. Interviewer: You said you felt too old. Louise: Yes. I have previously lived in a student hallway at the university for a while, and I feel I have commitments in [the city] that I want to be able to continue pursuing. But it is also a long way to commute, so I initially thought it would be worthwhile giving it a try to stay here. But now I feel it is too much that pulls me back to [the city] all the time and things that I cannot pause. I have resigned from my job, so I have no work to do this year, but I still have things I have to do, sometimes, stuff that I cannot put on hold. Yes, I feel you have a different life now when you are 36 than what I had when I lived in that university student dorm. Interviewer: Have you been involved in these leisure activities? The yoga group and other activities. Louise: No, I’ve been pretty … I think I have been quite a lot on my own when I have been here because it is also nice to take time for yourself. I am very rarely alone once I am in town, so then I have taken the opportunity to sit in my room and write. […] It’s just nice to have some peace around you. I have been participating when we have had more like “class events” or stuff with the whole group. Like when we have had public readings and such. (Louise, woman, creative writing student)

Even though the boarding school offers ample opportunities to participate in leisure activities after-hours, students may find themselves left out of the culture nurtured at the school. While Louise describes a voluntary form of self-isolation, it also seems as if she could not participate as a fully

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legitimate member in the informal “youthful” activities that were going on in the after-hours. In justifying her recent decision of a partial exit from the total experience of living and studying at the folk high school premises, she highlights that she is older than most of the  other participants. She had already lived her “student-dorm-life” when enrolled at a university. Louise thus explains the move she is currently undergoing, from boarding school to a daytime student, as related to pull and push factors. The main push factor relates to the clash she experienced when being exposed to youthful student culture at a more mature age, while the pull factor relates to her previous commitments in the life she lives in a town outside of the bubble. The students are responsible for upholding some of the regulations and informal sanctions necessary to stay at the school collectively, such as ensuring the dishes get washed, rules for bringing guests, and when to be in one’s room. The expectation from the teachers resides on extra-­ curricular aspects of personal growth and social tactfulness, as well as artistic refinement. The folk high school years also aims for the students to mature in collective chores and sociability. A process of transformation that might happen in the studio, on the scene, or in the rehearsal room. The emphasis on domestic chores necessary to organise life beyond the classroom also brings about deliberations around domestic life. Interviewer: The folk high school with its boarding school arrangement is perhaps a little different from other kinds of schools? Linda: Yes. I have lived alone before. So, I thought: “Yes, but if you move here, not so many of the other students have lived away from home before, it will probably be very noisy” and so on. Yes, it’s messy at times. But it’s nice to have people around you all the time, and you can choose for yourself: “Now I want to be by myself”, then I still have my own room. Petra: A sense of community also develop  when you partake in some classes and meet across the various programmes and course profiles. I have never lived on school premises myself because I have children. I feel like it would be too much living in this castle with a child [laugh]. So, I can miss it a bit. You miss so much of the things going on, things happening on evenings and weekends when you really cannot participate. So, that is basically a community feeling you are missing. Nevertheless, everyone is so amazing once you come back to school. It’s such a warm feeling when you arrive. Everyone really embraces you.

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Laura: It’s a very good way to test how it is to live on your own, away from home. I’ve not done that before. It’s very smooth because life is quite regulated and structured here while at the same time, and in many ways, it is not. So, you learn a lot. (visual art students)

In this extract, we meet three students who talk about their experiences and concerns about living or not living on the premises. The folk high schools with boarding facilities provide the option of living off or on-­ campus, an alternative that presents the students with a choice of how deep into the folk high school bubble they want to situate themselves. Life in the boarding school offers temporary exit strategies, particularly retreating to one’s room, but is oriented to an intensified fellowship with a strong institutional ethos. Similarly to Louise’s who recently decided transition off-campus, Petra has chosen to remain at home, living with her child. She shares that this choice leaves her slightly envious of the other students as she is being left out of what “happens on evenings and weekends”. Regrettably, she misses out on the full “community feeling”. At the same time, she claims that “everyone embraces you”, indicating that she feels welcome once she does come to campus. However, the comment might also be interpreted as a cry for embracement once she reappears at the site, given the experience of not partaking in outside school activities. Laura describes the situation of the folk high school as combining regulations with a sense of freedom. This duality of regulation and structural constraints, on the one hand, and a sense of freedom to experiment and create produce a certain type of dynamic that we find typical of folk high schools. The boarding school experience of a particularly cloistered way of life may create a strong sense of community. The flip side is that it is easy to feel like one departs from the implicit norms based upon which the community of the students’ fellowship is built, or that one experiences incomplete integration into the imagined community formed by living on the premises 24/7. The image deriving from the experiences of student life in the boarding school environment is closely related to whom is accompanying them to live on the premises. If most students are in the middle of a transition from youth to adult life, then their efforts “to live on your own, away from home” can produce an environment conducive to that way of life while

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simultaneously pushing out individuals who have no intention to live that kind of life, or regard themselves as “done” with youth and “youth culture”. The students who are well adjusted to the implicit and explicit conventions that govern the institutional culture at the boarding school tend to find that it is a cosy, homely, and cloistered environment conducive to simultaneously growing as a person and as an artist in the making. However, these institutions’ relative totality or partiality is experienced differently depending on how adjusted the students are to the life-forms that populate the campus and the various programmes.

2.3  Artistic Freedom and Enculturation For some students, the schools’ regulatory and cloistered institutional characteristics and the folk high school teaching methods enable artistic freedom, voluntarism, and self-cultivation. The folk high school is known for having no standardised national curriculum, which has allowed them to morph and change over time (Larsson, 2013). It is up to each school and the principals and teachers to formulate and conduct artistic programmes according to a highly flexible and localised curriculum. It is a school form with no formalised grades and a reputation of being relatively “progressive” when it comes to building the educational content around the interest of its students. However, these liberal features of an educational institution also make them appear rather unstructured and weakly defined in curricular content or code (Bernstein, 1964; see also, Swidler, 1976, 1979). The grade-free environment carries a specific meaning among the students and departs from their previous schooling experiences. Charlotte: There is an openness, as everyone is talking about; it is incredibly nice not to be guided by any grading criteria. The absence of grades sets the structure of our classes and what you do, but it is like a freer inquiry to find something of one’s own. Kerstin: Yes, and everyone is taken seriously and taken care of somehow. The drive is your curiosity, approach, and you get pushed and helped to get in the right direction and move on. Our differences are taken very seriously. I think it was a fantastic situation, in contrast, to be working on my own. Linn: Yes, I was surprised by that too. Kerstin: You see it with professional eyes here.

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Linn: Like the first time, we had a supervision meeting, and my supervisor wanted to see my sketches. I had done these kinds of sketches for the first time in my  entire life. The sketches were awful, not looking good at all, I thought. I was a bit like, nothing is good, and I still return there sometimes, and the teachers always see something good in what you do, even if it looks like crap. So, for these first croquis pictures, my supervisor says, “But don’t you see this sensual line you have drawn”, “No, I do not see that, but thanks”. Like the fact that even though you may not have done anything that looks great at all, the teachers pick out that little thing that they think is good, like … yes, that they encourage everyone, even though you may not have had the best week in your life. That is something else from hearing at your high school, “Yes, you have not done this the right way”, which was the reason why I did not continue to stay on there. Kerstin: Then there are all these guest teachers. Many guest teachers are visiting. Some come here and work for a week, and others just come and have a lecture about their art and their way of doing things, and we get opportunities to have masterclasses with them. You can gain a lot from many people’s perspectives and help to see where you are going and what is happening. I think it is very valuable. (visual art students)

These students relate the grade-free and non-criteriological school assessment to the trust they feel towards voluntary engagement in learning, where their own commitment towards refining the artistic craft take center stage. The folk high school teachers’ initial nudging and constant affirmations have allowed them to find their way forward in their artistry. In bringing forth a “sensual line” during their first croquis exercise, the art teacher provides existential and artistic affirmations. These affirmations transforms a “potentiality” of the student’s initial moves into a trial-and-­tested reality. Kerstin, who is more experienced than Linn, highlights the professional gaze of the guest teachers doing masterclasses and how these artists talk about and showcase their work. The exposure to a great variation of guest teachers’ works “helps to see where you are going and what is happening”. A commonality in many of these narratives is the appreciation of freedom to explore a craft based on their level of complexity and interest, instead of being regulated by formalised guides for obtaining a certain grade or reaching a certain  progression based on standardised criterion imposed in a “one-size-fits-all-manner”.

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The students who are accepted directly from upper-secondary school, as alluded to by Linn, usually feel a contrast between their previous school experiences and the kind of education enacted at the folk high school. The teaching method at the folk high school tend to emphasise learning a technique and way of working rather than focusing on the actual finished product or performance. Although it might not always be necessary to finish an exercise, there is still an in-built progression of exercises, assignments, and tests that is meant to stagger the complexity of the artistic activities. Saga: They talk a lot about being working process-oriented and not result-­oriented. I thought at first that the pressure would ease up here; you put a lot of pressure on yourself. And it eases, but the thing is that the process-­orientation affects efficiency in the other direction [than I thought]. Because you feel great freedom to try your best, it is nice to spend time here and invest yourself in  doing things. That is why many people stay more hours than school hours to do their work, which is different from my previous education. You become more involved and invested precisely because you have more freedom. Sofie: Mm, yes. I thought there was a similar atmosphere at my previous folk high school; everyone was involved differently from what I experienced in upper secondary school. Carolina: It’s evident that this is a hobby that people have had for a long time and an interest they have rather than something they have to do. I thought it would be the opposite of what people are thinking now. As in, even more intense. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are very intense, but I thought every day would be kind of a bit more intense and that people would go crazy. [laugh] Carolina: Like people who think: “All or nothing for art!”? Sofie:  Maybe it’s that when you do not have clear guidelines, it becomes easy to try to do your best all the time. It’s like, you raise the bar? Carolina: Yes, that is true. Sofie: And because they say things like, “If you feel satisfied with what you do, then you can stop there”. Like when we’ve made these sculptures. Many of us are not satisfied [laughs]. “No, now I have to straighten it out a bit”. Nina: We may not have become crazy yet, because there is still quite a lot of structure to what we will do. We might go crazy this spring when we have our projects? Carolina: Mm, exactly. Well, this is still just the beginning. (visual art students)

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Engaging in and gradually developing artistry is a voluntary choice and not something that is explicitly demanded of the students. For one of the participants above, the voluntary nature of these artistic programmes, in not having a formal syllabus to follow or grades to worry about, initially led to expectations to be able to “take it easy”. However, contrary to these initial presuppositions, the intensity and pressures were building up as she embarked on her artistic training. The micropolitics of self-governing students, in combination with the institutional characteristics of the folk high school, proved fruitful; the bar was raised, in this case, by the students themselves. The teaching philosophy presupposes a commitment and artistic intentionality by leaving it open to the students to push themselves and focus on the processes rather than the result. It is primarily the relation the students have among  themselves, their peers, and the teachers that are emphasised as driving these advancements. Art education is not a means to an end but a space where they develop a habit of working in a given craft. At the same time, the teachers describe a method of teaching where they are moving from a more structural curriculum centred on various techniques (that they are currently pursuing) to an entirely project-based and free work scheme, come spring. Access to rooms and equipment for art-making is used for boarding school students to further deepen their commitment to their art projects and learning trajectories. Tuva: I love the format of folk high school. Interviewer: Yes. What is special about the format? Tuva: One has access to the facilities. It’s worth its weight in gold. And if you go to folk high school, I think you should take the time to be down there in these facilities and take advantage of the whole week and be in school all the time. Then, of course, you will experience dips in your mood when you go here. But the overall experience is lovely. You can go straight down to the facilities on weekends and evenings. (Tuva, woman, visual art student)

The organisational set-up associated with the folk high school is a kind of “open-door policy” in which access to equipment, instruments, studios, practise facilities, and rehearsal rooms are secured, sometimes 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. This infrastructure creates a sense of creative

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freedom for boarding school students while also being cloistered and regulated. As shown by the students above, having constant access to the schools’ affordances without any direct supervision or bureaucratic control may compel the students to use the facilities eagerly and develop a sense of ownership over the whole art-making process. In a regulatory sense, the students are called upon by the environment to “better go straight to the facilities on weekends and evenings”, “take advantage of the full week”, and “not let this opportunity go to waste”. These calls shape not only the expectations but also the self-government and work ethics of the students at the school. Hence, being at the folk high school is an educational framework with very loose ramifications paired with implicit expectations that the students commit themselves to self-­ cultivation, engage with the materials, and see its meaning. Part of the sense of having a communal experience for boarding school students and students who live close by is to be active in groups and events at the folk high school. The students can organise these groups alone in a reoccurring fashion, for example, yoga time, skateboarding, table tennis, and sauna. Other activities and groups are organised more spontaneously or improvised on the spot. In some schools, the staff plan and organise evening activities at the beginning of each term and gradually let the students themselves manage their leisure time. Interviewer: Are there any activities that the folk high school organises in the evenings? Johannes: It does not feel like the school organises much, but we have to do it ourselves. Victoria: Wasn’t there something at the beginning of… Joakim: In the beginning, it was quite a lot. Robert: A little bit of evening coffee. Joakim: For the first three weeks, it was like six meetings. Then you were like “well, that was it…”. Fredrik: Getting to know each other. Robert: But you have free access to the gym. Victoria: There are some people in the shared living space that sometimes just say, “yes, but hey, I’m doing a jig-saw puzzle over here. Come join”. Fredrik: And then yesterday I saw some people who played badminton as well, some students from here. (music students)

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The participants in this group interview talk about the lack of organised events designed by the school staff. When the students gotten to know each other, they were left to plan leisure activities independently. There are differences between activities organised at the school and how students freely engage in such activities. In another school, the participants depict a slightly different organisational setup. People systematically get together to share a specific interest and break away from their everyday routines, but it varies greatly. Oliver describes the experience of “living in a bubble” and his efforts to breaking this bubble, if only to distinguish one day from the next. Interviewer: I’m also thinking about what is going on at the boarding school. Do you join the others who play music, or are there some other tings going on? Leo: Hanging around with everyone. Interviewer: Mixing? Oliver: It varies from person to person. I don’t think I am so churchy. I mean … Two weeks ago, I hung out with a couple of people from the bible study group and started knitting. Leo: Yes, the knitting group. Oliver: Yes, knitting group as well. I was the only guy among… an age span of 20 to 70, and I was the only guy who just started knitting with them. Because I needed like … because it’s easy to end up on autopilot here, you can barely make out one day from one another. But just doing such a thing as knitting and just hanging out and baking or something like that. It’s great fun. (music students)

The shared activity, in this case, knitting, could be a way of integrating students at the folk high school across its various subfields or subject areas. Even though Oliver does not identify with the Christian faith, he has started to hang out with some older women from bible study class to learn knitting. As he engages in a shared activity with these women, he disrupts his routines and cloistered way of living as a musician at the school. Hanging out with the Christian knitting community led him out of his musical cloister.

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2.4  Mumbo Jumbo A common conception is that the folk high school is a good fit for people with a strong passion for exploring a specific artistic craft. At the same time, the folk high school also has a derogatory image of being “new age”, “hippie”, or “mumbo jumbo” (Swedish: flummig).2 The pejorative terms used to delegitimise the hippie counterculture are used to ridicule the school form and, perhaps even more so, its artistically engaged student communities. Even in the folk high school images portrayed by its students, there is an overarching tension between the school being a place of seriousness, commitment, and in-depth inquiry and being a “hippie” environment without a defined knowledge base or the necessary structure for teaching and living. The image of the folk high schools seems to stem from the institutional properties of voluntarism, weak classification, flexibility, and the loose border between formal and informal relations. Elias is a former visual art student and recalls his experiences from his time at a folk high school as being akin to a very bohemian lifestyle. Elias: I remember that we could choose some subjects. I had a lot of visual art, croquis, and photography in the regular courses. I did many other things as well; we had special events with poetry readings in the evenings and so on. It feels exceptionally typical for a folk high school. We had poetry readings in the evenings in this cottage, and then we arranged free movement dance3 and … You know, all that bohemian stuff. It feels like it’s so … I almost feel like laughing at it all, it feels like it’s so typical, but it was all that strange stuff. (Elias, man, former visual art student)

Looking back and recalling the years of folk high school studies in hindsight, Elias describes the typical conception of the folk high school, where much communal engagement is expected, including things perceived as pretentious or odd from an outsider’s viewpoint. With a slight touch of embarrassment for living up to the cliché image, the former student shared that they practised “all that bohemian stuff” like poetry reading and liberating dancing. 2  The Swedish term “flummig” is evoked in relation to the experiences of folk high schooling lacking a straightforward English equivalent. 3  Free movement dance is a way of dancing to reach mindfulness or ecstasy and enhance sexual desires, commonly associated with tribal and “premodern” societies.

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Other students talked about, for example, learning about herbal medicine in their free time. Overall, these student cultures exhibited an openness to heterodox knowledge forms formulated outside Western academic institutions and before the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. These connections between mysticism and the alternative communities of artistic enculturation are hardly incidental. To evoke liberating dance and alternative knowledge forms, the students both re-institute their alternative version of community-spirit and seek inspiration beyond the mundane life forms of modern society. While inspiring for the students, the marginality and low status that these new-age-inspired subjects generally possess in society helped create the label of folk high school as an alternative educational institution or as rather “spaced-out”. The presupposing notions of being a bohemian and slack learning environment also serve as backdrops to the surprises that the folk high school participants experience once they enrol. The seriousness of the endeavour re-occurs as a common theme throughout these interviews. Once admitted to the folk high school, they meet expectations from the teacher, other students, and themselves to perform well. Interviewer: What has surprised you? Mikaela: That it is … I do not know how to express myself. But the seriousness of it all. Or that it … it’s a bit … I do not know how to formulate this myself properly. But I have thought that being  here would be more of a way to take it easy [laughs], but at the same time do something with my time. That has not been the case, but it…. Nina: It’s mandatory stuff. Mikaela: Yes, one is still required to do things. Nina: Yes, exactly. Mikaela: There are expectations. (visual art students)

A consequence of the voluntary nature of the course is that people tend to carry out the task regardless of the material or scholastic reward structure (Menger, 2014). For example, music student Lukas talks about the experience of singing in a folk high school choir and contrasts his experiences at the folk high school to experiences from times when his educational trajectory was mandatory.

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Lukas: It’s a serious choir, compared to the previous ones, even those in upper secondary school. The differences between them are that you are expected to practise the choir parts here, and I have not done that in the others. In these [other choirs], the teacher has been accustomed to “no, no one practises here”. (Lukas,  man, music student)

The music student went from a situation where the folk high schooling was considered relaxing and fun to being confronted with performance expectations. Students who refrained from working on their own did not assign to the tasks of shared commitment to the craft, and implicit expectations from the teacher broke the trust-based form of the school’s learning culture. In this case, the communal expectation is one of doing what you are assigned to do, as the contribution of everyone was essential to continue with and refine their collective art project, like singing in a choir. For some students, such as Victor, coming to the folk high school is the first experience of being in a room with people who share the same intense interest in an artistic craft such as creative writing. The quote below highlights the seriousness of the open and process-oriented teaching method and showcased the intoxicating feeling of coming together with like-­ minded people. Victor: So, it was like my first contact with the world of folk high schools, and it was a super positive experience. It was the best thing I had ever experienced. To meet other people who write and take their writing process seriously, and be able to dare tell others you were a writer. The whole thing of coming out as a writer was uplifting and intoxicating. (Victor,  man, former creative writing student)

As Victor looks back on his years in the folk high school, he concludes it was a transforming experience. Their enrolling in the writing programme meant taking themselves more seriously as aspiring writers, a difficult vocational commitment to “out” to others. At the folk high school, he could, for the first time, earnestly engage in the writing process and devote time to talk to others about matters related to this craft.

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2.5  Dark Stories While the interviews generally paint a bright story of life at the folk high school, there are also darker stories. The institutional structures create the freedom to explore art in a controlled and regulated environment, where control, or lack thereof, becomes the source of transgressions. Many of these students came to the school to explore further a vulnerable state of participation and precarious sense of artistic worth. Creating texts, paintings, and music to externalise oneself, one’s feelings, and inner thoughts is a delicate activity. This theme is explored further in Chap. 6. Interviews, especially in groups, have difficulty getting close to, at times silenced, experiences of personal violations at the school. It may come more easily to the students to talk about the positive aspects of their life at school. These interviews were conducted a couple of months before the #MeToo movement, which publicised many allegations of sexual abuse and sexual harassment. However, we heard rumours of sexual harassment at a folk high school even before the interviews. While it was not common to hear dark stories, the ones heard came from personal interviews with former participants, having some distance to the events and more eager to speak freely about things past. Interviewer: Yes, was there anything you could feel you were missing? […] Elias: Yes, so without being too critical of [my school] … and I know that many of my … people I still keep in contact with, some … when we’ve talked about my time at folk high school, some people think that these teachers were an absolute catastrophe in terms of pedagogy. They do not … I mean, it is not a university […] For example, at [my school] [the teacher] had been together with both a former student who became a teacher and yet another student who became a teacher. So, there was a certain kind of disturbing [inbreeding] […] I mean, people smoked hashish there at the time. It was like, it was a lot more, as teachers and students partying together and it was a bit like these unclear boundaries … I think there were still some remnants of it left at the time I was there. Today it may be completely different. I think that maybe I would have wished that there were at least some teachers who were perhaps more like “real teachers”. (Elias, man, former visual art student)

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The story told by the participant, who had a generally negative impression of the folk high school culture and also talked about its “mumbo jumbo” aspects, shows the transgression of the boundaries between students and teachers. This former student was disturbed by a teacher’s serial romantic entanglements with students who also got employed as teachers. Students smoking weed and teachers and students partying together paint a picture of a school culture in disarray. The student wanted to distance himself from the remnants of that folk high school and especially the behaviour of his teachers. Following the public allegations during the #MeToo movement, at least one folk high school was outed for having harboured teachers who had sexually harassed students. Newspaper articles revealed that students had informed the management about sexual harassment at the school without any consequences  for the alleged  teachers. This event was the most publicly displayed #MeToo event taking place at a folk high school. However, as indicated above, there are in all likelihood similar events that has occurred but not been made public. These potentially “hushed” transgressions have made their way into contemporary fiction. The social cleavages between students at generic courses offering second-chance education and the specialised artistic courses and sexual misconduct of teachers and students are common themes. For example, Amanda Svensson’s (2014) book Everything I Said to You Was True (Swedish: “Allt det där jag sa till dig var sant”) explores sexual misconduct at a folk high school. In Henrik Bromander’s (2015) graphic novel Course in Self-destruction, the charismatic and renowned teacher of the summer course in performing arts is eventually revealed as a sexual predator. The institutional structures of the folk high school have been used as a backdrop for literary depictions in a number of books (Fürst, 2022). In stark contrast to the accounts that depict the school as liberating and allowing artistic exploration, these darker stories convey behaviours that are morally problematic. The idyllic scenery of the Swedish country-side is juxtaposed to misconducts and moral transgressions.

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2.6  Conclusions In this chapter, we have shown an overarching tension in the students’ talk  of the learning environment encountered at the folk high schools. Generally, the folk high school is portrayed as an enclosed environment characterised by a high degree of social control and seclusion. It is also an environment where freedom, transgression, and liberation are valued and embraced. However, the folk high school is not a monolithic educational institution, nor are the lived experiences of its art students easily summarised based on a single trope or concept. The many folk high schools that provide artistic programmes carry the potential for personal and creative enculturation that allows individuals to explore a creative engagement rather than the pressures of adjusting to the labour market and conforming to norms prevalent in society. The persuasiveness in how the art students come to identify with the school, the artistic programmes, and the localised communities of practice differ from school to school, from programme to programme, between cohorts and individuals. The life the students live at the folk high school could be conceptualised in different ways. For students enrolling in folk high schools with a boarding school format, life tends to be rather regulated, cloistered, and under some degree of self-governed predictability and control (see also Brändström & Larsson, 2011). The structuring principles for the institutionalised life in these schools are, in these cases, akin to that of a total institution (Goffman, 1961, p. 11). Much in the same way as described by Erving Goffman, the life-form of the art students enrolled in a boarding school environment tend to converge the essential activities of modern life under the same roof. This corresponds to Goffman’s classical definition of a total institution: A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. (Goffman, 1961, p. 11)

Examples of total institutions include mental hospitals (Goffman, 1961), boarding schools (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009; Wakeford, 1969), cargo ships (Sandberg, 2014; Zurcher, 1965), military units, and monasteries (Sundberg, 2015, 2020). According to Durkheim (2013, p. 119), the emergence of boarding schools and their cloistered regulation of life should be understood as an extension of the monastic idea of

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monopolising both the physical and intellectual elements of the interns’ existence. Its residential purpose is as important as its educational function. As exemplified in the original case of Goffman’s mental hospitals, the concept of total institutions encompasses and emphasises personal regulation and the repressive nature of the total institution. Living and studying artistic subjects in the boarded folk high school can mean that student are cut-off from wider society with like-situated individuals. All core activities such as study, sleep, eating, exercise, and leisure are organised in the same space. Although the boarding school students tend to live a rather enclosed and routinised life, they also differ in important aspects to the institutional environments, as explored by Goffman. Contrary to asylums or mental hospitals typically characterised by involuntary participation and rather repressive institutional rules, these boarding schools are voluntary and based on freedom of participation (Larsson, 2006). Therefore, the folk high school is closer to what Sundberg (2020), in her study of Catholic monasteries, has called a voluntary total institution. To delineate a voluntary total institution from Goffman’s more repressive and involuntary counterparts, it can be worth emphasising that it is as much the students who “make use” of the folk high schools as it is the folk high schools that is making use of them. The popularity of voluntarily immersing oneself in such a controlled environment highlights the liberating character of a formally administered and regulated way of life, which might not be associated with art students as they are often seen as “bohemian” and “free-spirited”. Nevertheless, daytime students do not experience the folk high school as this (voluntary) total institution. The rounded way of life is not controlled to the same extent as it is for those students who have chosen to live 24/7 on the campus grounds. In terms of an autonomous universe, the student’s lives in the folk high school are shaped by its own rules and procedures that mirror and distort established cultural conventions, becoming a space for exploration and freedom within the wider society. When considered a space for exploration and transition, the folk high school is akin to a psychosocial moratorium (Erikson, 1956, 1988). The psychosocial moratorium is a space allowing adolescents, young adults, and at times persons of other ages to try out new identities, roles, and career possibilities without making long-term commitments to these identities, roles, and careers. While Erikson maintains that some persons may remain in this moratorium indefinitely, the idea is that people find themselves in this moratorium and make provisional commitments to identities, roles, and careers.

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While the psychological moratorium emphasises individual experiences within enclosed spaces, the appeal of art-oriented folk high school studies seems to derive from their collective sense of belonging and its strong institutional ethos. The way many of these students experienced liminality and strong comradeship, partly shielded from the values and principles that govern the rest of society, also resembles the notion of communitas (Turner, 1969). Turner (1969) saw communitas as an anti-structural social entity in which members could share experiences, typically a rite-of-­ passage, and gradually move from one state to another, similar to a psychological moratorium. Particular youth cultures and political avant-gardes have exemplified communitas, like the Beat Generation and feminist fanzine-­makers (Gunnarsson Payne, 2006; Mitchell, 2017). Foucault’s (1998) heterotopia could be a final candidate for a catch-all concept for depicting the folk high school. This concept covers the ground of the folk high school in being detached from the rest of society, a space of otherness, and an escape from other repressionist spaces and norms in society while also mirroring it. While the original concept of a total institution is about being within the hegemonic rules of society, heterotopia does a better job of emphasising the organised efforts to escape from such regulations and norms. Nevertheless, the folk high school is not a fullfledged heterotopia considering the lack of sharp demarcation lines dividing the folk high school from the rest of society. It remains a space for the reproduction of power relations and norms as much as it provides room for alternatives. Neither total institutions, heterotopia, psychosocial moratorium, nor the formation of communitas fully captures the breadth, complexity, and ambivalence of the folk high school as an institution. One reason for the difficulty of capturing the institutional characteristics of folk high schools based on these notions might be that they were all developed a similar point in time: the 1950s and 1960s. During that time, the institutional forms of governance were thought to be more all-encompassing and often exclusively operating as instruments for social domination. While we want to highlight how institutions play an important role in helping reinforce reality, there seem to be reasons to depart from these totalising conceptualisations originating in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, these concepts give some flavour to the material environments and spaces in which these arts programmes occur. The mix of boarding school and daytime students, the perceptual change of institutional control and authority in society, the weak classification of the art

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curriculum, and the ability to transgress boundaries for communication through technology hamper the cloistered way of living at the folk high school. Participation within the folk high school does not necessarily lead to the experiences, transformations, and sensations that these totalising concepts imply. The monopolising of the moral frameworks and physical dispositions is not a totalising force, and the actors involved seem to use the school form in ways that cannot be predefined. Still, the institutional properties of these schools do seem to offer their participants a sense of psychosocial belonging, collective effervescence, and alternatives to the prevailing norms and life forms. In conclusion, the partial match of the concepts and the empirical reality of the participants’ life show that folk high schools are open to different engagements, moral frameworks  and ways to live. These latent possibilities of activities and experiences are based on the institutional autonomy that the school form enjoys and the particular setup of each school and its student corpus.

References Bernstein, B. (1964). Elaborated and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences. American Anthropologist, 66(6), 55–69. Brändström, S., & Larsson, A. (2011). A Total Institution Within Reach? Music Education at Framnäs Folk High School in the 1950s and 60s. Finnish Journal of Music Education, 14(2), 60–71. Bromander, H. (2015). Kurs i självutplåning. Ordfront Galago. Durkheim, É. (2013). The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France. Taylor and Francis. Erikson, E.  H. (1956). The Problem of Ego Identity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4(1), 56–121. https://doi. org/10.1177/000306515600400104 Erikson, E.  H. (1988). Youth: Fidelity and Diversity. Daedalus, 117(3), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­94-­017-­6269-­4_6 Foucault, M. (1998). Different Spaces. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault Volume 2 (pp. 175–185). Penguin. Fürst, H. (2022). Arrival to a Fictional Total Institution: The Swedish Folk High School As a Liminal Space in Literature. Sociologisk Forskning, 59(3), 321–340. https://doi.org/10.37062/sf.59.23571 Gaztambide-Fernandez, R. A. (2009). The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School. Harvard University Press.

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Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Anchor Books. Gunnarsson Payne, J. (2006). Systerskapets logiker: en etnologisk studie av feministiska fanzines. Institutionen för kultur och medier/Etnologi, Umeå universitet. Larsson, A. (2006). Folkhögskolans internat mellan hem och samhälle. In E. Mårald & C. Nordlund (Eds.), Topos: essäer om tänkvärda platser och platsbundna tankar (pp. 152–166). Carlsson Bokförlag. Larsson, S. (2013). Folk High Schools as Educational Avant-Gardes in Sweden. In A.-M. Laginder, H. Nordvall & J. Crowther (Eds.), Popular Education, Power and Democracy: Swedish Experiences and Contributions (pp. 72–96). NIACE National Institute of Adult Continuing Education. Menger, P.-M. (2014). The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty. Harvard University Press. Mitchell, A.  C. (2017). Liminality and Communitas in the Beat Generation. Peter Lang. Sandberg, C. (2014). On Board the Global Workplace: Coordination and Uncertainty on Merchant Ships. Department of Sociology, Stockholm University. Sundberg, M. (2015). A Sociology of the Total Organization: Atomistic Unity in the French Foreign Legion. Ashgate. Sundberg, M. (2020). The Politics of Monastic Life: Opportunities for Exit and Voice in a Voluntary Total Institution. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 61(1), 103–127. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0003975619000171 Svensson, A. (2014). Allt det där jag sa till dig var sant. Norstedt. Swidler, A. (1976). What Free Schools Teach. Social Problems, 24(2), 214–227. https://doi.org/10.2307/800340 Swidler, A. (1979). Organization Without Authority: Dilemmas of Social Control in Free Schools. Harvard University Press. Turner, V. W. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Routledge & K. Paul. Wakeford, J. (1969). The Cloistered Élite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School. Macmillan. Zurcher, L.  A. (1965). The Sailor Aboard Ship: A Study of Role Behavior in a Total Institution. Social Forces, 43(3), 389–400. https://doi. org/10.2307/2574769

CHAPTER 3

Who Engages? The Social Dispositions of Students

3.1   Introduction: Who Engages? In Anneli Furmark’s graphic novel Fishes in the Sea (2010) (Swedish: “Fiskarna i havet”), the reader encounters life at a folk high school by following a young woman studying visual art. When entering the visual art course for the first time, she sketches her impressions of her fellow students (see Fig. 3.1).1 At the centre of the illustration is a young “cute but angry-looking” woman flanked by a man who appears to be psychologically unstable, a male teacher wearing what is for old men in this culture is an archetypal corduroy jacket, another “really serious” man with a beard. There is also a handsome (but already married) man, an over-enthusiastic older woman, and two younger girls, one extrovert and an introvert. The stereotyped student group varies considerably in age, gender, and mental outlook. Their relationship to one another seems intertwined with their corporal dispositions and generational belonging. The informal hierarchy 1  Using literary depictions as empirical material for sociological studies has a long history, as does the idea among fiction writers that they contribute to understanding society as a whole (Lepenies, 1988). One way of using literary depictions in sociological research is to have the literature as a point of comparison for an ongoing investigation (Fürst, 2016, 2022). For a study in pragmatic sociology, where spy novels and detective stories are used for exploring modernity and the nation state, see Boltanski’s (2014) book Mysteries and Conspiracies.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7_3

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Fig. 3.1  Cropped image from Anneli Furmark’s graphic novel Fishes in the Sea (2010, p. 18). (The illustration is reproduced in agreement with the author of the book. The English translation was prepared by the author for a French translation of the graphic novel)

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among them is mainly derived from their physical attractiveness or “sex appeal”.2 It is easy to imagine that the folk high school participants portrayed in Furmark’s graphic novel are engaged in somewhat different artistic and personal pursuits depending on what generation they belong to, their social dispositions, and general outlook on artistic practice. The folk high schools offer a plethora of educational provisions and make room for creative projects that vary significantly from one another within the same group. Nevertheless, the recruitment structures for the arts programmes are still, in important ways, patterned by the participants’ gender, age, and social origin. While some dimensions of art education tend to be better captured by graphic novels than research (sex appeal, emotional states, excitement, etc.), these cultural representations can only hint at the social composition of art education as a whole. To outline the participation patterns in the art programmes offered by all the folk high schools, we show the frequencies of educational attainment within the various aesthetic profiles and the demographic and social characteristics of previous cohorts from 2005 to 2010 (see Appendix 1). In what follows, we zoom in on three dimensions of particular importance to how these participation patterns are socially structured: (i) age and gender, (ii) parental education, and (iii) country of origin. We have distinguished between six broader areas of artistic training: creative writing, music, scenic arts (including dance, film, and theatre), plastic arts and crafts, visual arts, and other aesthetic subjects.3 Given that there are many possible variables about the  dispositions and social background and numerous fields of practice, this “social cartography” will be somewhat schematic and based on the overarching patterns of participation. After having provided a birds-eye point-of-view of educational attainment along these demographic dimensions, we conclude this chapter by foregrounding another approach through which educational and cultural trajectories can be studied by  covering the critical capacity and justifications of the actors involved. 2  On the topic of the erotic rank of people, see Zetterberg (1966). For a more contemporary approach, see Kaplan and Illouz, (2022). 3  This taxonomy of classifying artistic areas is inherited from Swedish nomenclature and unfortunately contains a large category of miscellaneous “other subjects”. Furthermore, the distinction between visual arts and plastic arts is highly dubious as many visual arts programmes contain sculpture and ceramics as integral parts of their curriculum.

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3.2  Age and Gender As we demonstrated in the previous chapter and the graphic illustration above, attending aesthetic courses at folk high schools tends to differ based on when in life course participants decide to engage in it. Looking at the age structure for all artistic profiles combined, most students tend to be relatively young, the age 20–24  years (35%), and a considerable number of students are between 25 and 44 years (30%) of age. However, slightly more than a quarter of students are older than 44 years, either in the age range of 45–60 years (16%) or at retirement age, 65 years, and older (11%) (Folkbildningsrådet, 2021). This pattern illustrates that the folk high schools’ artistic programmes are not only a “prep school” for those who seek to gain entrance into more advanced educational levels, such as music conservatories, theatre academies, or art academies. There is considerable generational heterogeneity in the student population that patterns their engagements in important ways. The enrolment structure  also differs considerably based on age and gender and the number of enrolled students (see Table 3.1). Aggregated level statistics can easily obscure that some of these artistic areas are dominated by young student groups, and others are dominated by more mature and “non-traditional” students. Music is the largest and most popular area of training and contains the profiles with the youngest and most gender-­ balanced attainment record. Visual and plastic arts attract a much greater share of women, especially women in the elderly age cohorts. The scenic and performing arts of dance, theatre, and film have a similar age composition to music, although these programmes, to a greater extent, attract young women. Creative writing is another aesthetic profile dominated by women, especially among the older age cohorts.4 Overall, the aesthetic provision attracts more women than men, with roughly two-thirds of the student population being women (Fürst et al., 2018). This overarching gender structure has not changed much over time. As of 2020, women still made up 67% of the total student population. Figures are roughly the same for the period 2005–2010. The gender imbalances between men and women in the aggregated statistics seem 4  Even after cross tabulating the participation based on age and gender pertinent differences might remain, as some courses might cater to “senior citizens” and others are targeting students on an intermediary level seeking enrolment to higher education or artistic academies (Nylander & Dalberg, 2015).

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Table 3.1  The number of enrolled folk high school students per area of art education by age and gender: Autumn terms 2005–2010 Area of aesthetic training

Age group

Men (%)

Women (%)

Total (n)

Total (%)

Creative writing Creative writing Creative writing Creative writing Creative writing Creative writing Creative writing Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Scenic arts Scenic arts Scenic arts Scenic arts Scenic arts Scenic arts Scenic arts Plastic arts and craft Plastic arts and craft Plastic arts and craft Plastic arts and craft Plastic arts and craft Plastic arts and craft Plastic arts and craft Visual arts Visual arts Visual arts Visual arts Visual arts Visual arts Visual arts Other aesthetic subjects Other aesthetic subjects Other aesthetic subjects

−19 20–22 23–25 26–35 36–55 56– All −19 20–22 23–25 26–35 36–55 56– All −19 20–22 23–25 26–35 36–55 56– All −19 20–22 23–25 26–35 36–55 56– All −19 20–22 23–25 26–35 36–55 56– All −19 20–22 23–25

1 8 9 9 3 1 29 17 27 7 4 2 2 48 7 18 7 4 1 0 34 1 5 3 4 2 2 17 3 10 5 5 2 1 24 3 9 6

6 19 13 18 10 9 71 16 24 6 5 6 3 52 20 34 10 6 2 0 66 10 25 12 12 18 11 83 12 27 12 11 13 5 76 8 24 11

54 200 159 198 94 77 746 2426 3781 934 614 647 328 7432 834 1623 541 311 77 7 3095 360 977 496 530 680 414 3278 1058 2511 1166 1097 1021 399 6728 301 953 510

7 27 21 27 13 10 100 33 51 13 8 9 4 100 27 52 17 10 2 0 100 11 30 15 16 21 13 100 16 37 17 16 15 6 100 10 33 17 (continued)

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Table 3.1 (continued) Area of aesthetic training

Age group

Men (%)

Women (%)

Total (n)

Total (%)

Other aesthetic subjects Other aesthetic subjects Other aesthetic subjects Other aesthetic subjects

26–35 36–55 56– All

7 3 1 28

13 13 7 72

592 479 239 2927

20 16 8 100

overall to grow wider with the increasing age structure of the participants. The older the student population, the wider the gender disparity. Older men make up a very small proportion of the participants, especially so in the scenic and plastic arts. Conversely, it is not uncommon to encounter older women who opt for artistically oriented folk high school studies as they approach the retirement age, especially so within visual and plastic arts and crafts. This pattern might highlight the folk high school’s importance in pursuing art for aesthetic exploration or recreation among women throughout their life course. In contrast, men’s engagement is more limited to pursuing art education at an early career development stage (see Chap. 4). In problematising attainment patterns for post-compulsory art education, the absence of older men is typically not addressed. So how shall we interpret these participation patterns? One possible interpretation for the general gender imbalance is provided by Wikberg (2013), who has explored gender and art education at the upper-secondary school in Sweden. Wikberg argues that her informants perceive art education to be “femininely marked” as it involves processes where the expression of feelings is key. This gendered  conception of art education  might be more widespread among older generations than it is among the youth generations. In contrast to the femininely marked status of ordinary art education, the professionalised art world remains associated with masculinity in many ways. So, whereas the appeal of taking “risky” educational choices is not gendered, the latter art education comes in as an option the more gendered the choice becomes. It might be that the early engagements in the folk high school hinges on the charismatic myths of “the uncreated creator” of the arts which, at least historically, in important ways shaped by the idea of masculine geniuses  (Kris & Kurz, 1981; Nochlin, 2018).  Once the students come of a more mature  age  the educational realm of folk high school training in the arts is more thoroughly embedded in other  sensibilities and virtues typically associated with femininity such as personal care, emotional maturity, and fostering.

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Comparing the gendered participation patterns to similar types of specialised art education in other countries, we can see that these gendered recruitment structures are far from unique to Swedish circumstances and conditions. For example, in a report about “recent graduates” (2015–2017) of art education in North American high schools, undergraduate and graduate institutions, participation was shown to be predominantly oriented towards women up to the age of 39 years of age (Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, 2017).5

3.3   Parental Education Besides gender and age, another dimension explored in educational sociology is the inherited resources of art students tied to their family of origin. One way to explore the formative role played by the social origin of these students is to break down the enrolment patterns based on the highest educational attainment obtained by the students’ legal parents. Educational level among parents is often used as a proxy for what Bourdieu and Passeron (1979) famously called “inherited cultural capital”, namely the dispositions developed during childhood used to appreciate, understand, and valorise art and culture  (Bourdieu, 1984). While the social position that these art students were born into does not necessarily correspond to the highest educational level of their parents, educational qualification can still be considered as a suitable indicator for understanding more about their positions in social space. Table 3.2 portrays the distribution of the highest educational attainment among the parents of the students enrolled in art education at the folk high schools. The presentation is based on the students’ parents who have studied at the highest level as classified by Swedish educational nomenclature. For example, if the folk high school student had a mother who finished a PhD and a father whose highest educational qualification remained at an upper-secondary level, the student would go down as having a parent who achieved a PhD. Based on this data we can see how most art students between the years 2005 and 2010 came from families that have “invested” heavily in education throughout life course. Educational merits from universities and higher education were relatively common, especially on the mothers’ side, while the  Although these “arts majors” are at a more advanced level than most folk high school programmes, the study included majors in, for example, creative writing, music, and visual arts, thereby offering comparability to our own investigation. 5

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H. FÜRST AND E. NYLANDER

Table 3.2  Share of folk high school students in five areas of art education by the highest level of education among the parents: Autumn terms 2005–2010 Area of artistic training

PhD Post-upper Post-upper level secondary secondary (%) 3 years 2 years or PLUS_ less SPI (%) (%)

Upper-­ secondary 3 years (%)

Upper secondary 2 years (%)

Pre-­ No In secondary data total 9 years or (%) (%) less (%)

Music (N = 7432) Visual arts (N = 6728) Creative writing (N = 746) Scenic arts (N = 3095) Plastic arts (N = 3278) Other aesthetic subjects (N = 2927) Art education in total (N = 24,206)

4

41

16

9

12

4

14

100

2

28

16

11

19

6

19

100

5

39

15

5

10

2

23

100

3

37

19

12

17

3

8

100

2

23

14

10

19

8

25

100

3

30

15

10

17

5

20

100

3

33

16

10

16

5

17

100

share of students from families without any type of upper-­secondary diploma was generally low.6 The most vivid illustration of the links between the parents’ educational investments and the formation of interest in art education may be the 6  It’s worth noting that roughly 17% of the students have parents that were not listed in the official Swedish statistics registry as of 2015, which means that there is a fairly big chunk of data missing for being a full registry-based study. The fact that relatively few students came from families whose parents had short upper-secondary programmes as the highest registered studies (16%) indicates that working-class origin is rare, as the Swedish school system was long divided between short and long programmes at the upper-secondary level, where the short programmes were more vocationally oriented.

3  WHO ENGAGES? THE SOCIAL DISPOSITIONS OF STUDENTS 

57

extreme overrepresentation of PhD-holders among these parents and legal guardians. The share of PhD-holders amounted to roughly 0.5% of the Swedish population in 1985 and 1% of the Swedish population in 2016, whereas the folk high school cohorts tend to range from 2% to 5%.7 Table 3.2 also conveys a fairly stark variation between the various areas of artistic training, with creative writing, music, and scenic arts (dance, film, theatre) being characterised by a much stronger density of highly educated parents compared to the plastic and visual arts. Among the creative writing and music programmes, most students had parents who had attended “postupper-secondary education” (typically university). The density of offsprings of Swedish PhD-holders was also particularly high in these artistic fields. On the other end of the spectrum, we find plastic or visual arts with a higher share of families with upper secondary school as the highest form of educational attainment. In general, it is especially from the mothers’ side that the post-upper-secondary merits steam from, and the fathers have lower educational merit or no education registration (Fürst et al., 2018). However, because the average age of those attending these artistic profiles also differs considerably from one another, it is hard to draw any conclusion from this outcome, as the parents did not necessarily belong to the same generation with the same possibilities of attending higher education.8 As we saw from the previous section, the generational structure of the recruitment differs considerably, making it difficult to benchmark the statistics on parental education against a given time and taxonomy that renders it meaningful. The role of educational and economic resources accumulated throughout multiple generations has a well-documented effect on selection processes within the arts. Nevertheless, it is challenging to dissect the more precise dynamic of how and why these outcomes might come about (cf. Brook et al., 2020; Nylander & Melldahl, 2015; Oakley et al., 2017). The data presented above demonstrates that higher educational attainment and privileged social origins cultivate an interest in art education and might  mitigate some of the inherent risks of such educational pursuits. The pertinent privileges enjoyed by “inheritors” within the arts is no guarantee for successfully applying to prestigious arts programmes. Nevertheless, it seems to be a useful perspective in understanding implicit 7  The study of “recent graduates” (2015–2017) of art education in North America shows that students also came from very educationally privileged families, where as much as 19% of their parents had obtained a doctoral degree (PhD, MD, JD, and similar) (Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, 2017). 8  For a statistically grounded depiction of educational investments and the average years of schooling in different generations in Sweden during the 2000-century, see Melldahl (2015).

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and explicit forms of valuation in selection processes that are championed across a wider range of cultural sectors and aesthetic fields (cf. Brook et al., 2020; Nylander & Melldahl, 2015). The higher the informal status structure of an aesthetic field in folk high school, the more fierce the competition becomes and the more socially exclusive the educational provision tend to be (Fürst, 2018, 2019; Nylander & Dalberg, 2015;  Nylander & Melldahl, 2015). Yet, without acknowledging the radical openness and indefiniteness involved when the engagements in the arts are evaluated and assessed, there are no way to explain the popular appeal of applying to art programmes that is most selective or pursuing an artistic career in the first place. Furthermore, the social origin is not reducible to the social origin or the parents’ educational investments. To finalise our exposé of the students’ dispositions and social background, we will now explore how art educational attainment relates to the country of origin of students and their parents.

3.4  Country of Origin When looking at attendance to specialised art education is important to consider the ethnic composition of students or their social background in terms of country of origin. Previous studies have highlighted the wide-­ spread inability of educational providers of arts programmes to appeal to a more diverse student population by country of origin and ethnic diversity. For example, art education students in North America tend to be of “white” social origin, and as little as 5% of the students are reported as Black or African American (Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, 2017). In the data provided by Statistics Sweden (SCB), it is not possible to distinguish the participants’ ethnic identities. Still, the educational attainment registries allow researchers to outline the country of origin of both the art students themselves and their parents. To provide a broad overview of the relationship between country of origin and participation in post-­ compulsory artistic training, we can use these registries to distinguish between four different categories of folk high school students: . Born in Sweden with two parents born in Sweden. 1 2. Born in Sweden with one Swedish-born and one foreign-born parent. 3. Born in Sweden with both parents born outside of Sweden. 4. Foreign-born.

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For the period we have the most detailed data on enrolment, 2005–2010, the Swedish population was composed of roughly 75% Swedish-born individuals with two parents born in Sweden (i). Another 7% were Swedish-born with one foreign-born parent (ii), whereas 4% were Swedish-born with two foreign-born parents (iii). The number of (iv) foreign-borns has gradually increased from 2005 to 2010 but comprised roughly 14% of the total Swedish population.9 When comparing the general population to the share of folk high school participants within the arts, we can see that the artistically oriented programmes are more oriented to Swedish-born students with parents born in Sweden. Having at least one (9%) but most often two parents born in Sweden and themselves being born there (79%) is highly conducive to participation in post-compulsory artistic training. Conversely, it is much less common to find students with two parents born outside of Sweden (3%) or for the students to be born in a foreign country (7%). The lack of students born in a foreign country is striking as the number of foreign-­borns in the general population is more than two times higher than what we find looking at the art students in isolation. In the “second-chance” education programmes outside of the arts, which were also offered at the folk high schools during this period, the share of foreign-borns rose from around 22% in 2005 to 30% in 2010 (Nylander & Östlund, 2018). This goes to show that the folk high schools are a viable option for foreign-­born students, but they have not yet managed to attract them to the art-­oriented program offers.  As is evident by Table 3.3, the various areas of art education also differ regarding the appeal and the rates of enrolled students of different backgrounds. Among the three areas we have zoned in this book, music, visual arts, and creative writing, the music profiles have the most homogeneous and “nativist”  recruitment base regarding parents’ and students’ birth countries. Creative writing attracts students of “mixed” Swedish backgrounds but not students of foreign backgrounds or second-­generation immigrants. The visual and plastic arts have a slightly higher share of foreign-born students enrolled, but they are still not close to the benchmark within the general population. Looking more closely at the genres picked up and placed on the “curriculum” as worthy of post-compulsory training can shed some light on “whose culture” has become institutionalised in these schools. For example, during the autumn of 2009, the study positions devoted to western 9  https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistikefter-amne/befolkning/befolkningens-sammansattning/befolkningsstatistik/

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Table 3.3  Share of folk high school students in five areas of art education by country of origin among their parents: Autumn terms 2005–2010

a

Area of artistic training

Born in Sweden with two parents born in Sweden (%)

Born in Sweden with one Swedish-born and one foreign-born, parent (%)

Born in Sweden with two foreign-­ born parents (%)

Foreign-­ No borns info (%)

In total (%)

Music (n = 7432) Visual arts (n = 6 728) Creative writing (n = 746) Scenic arts (n = 3095) Plastic arts (n = 3278) Other aesthetic subjects (n = 2927) Art education in total (n = 24,206) Swedish population in totala

83

8

2

5

3

100

76

10

3

8

3

100

73

12

3

6

6

100

77

10

4

7

2

100

79

9

2

8

2

100

78

10

3

7

2

100

79

9

3

7

3

100

75

7

4

14

–

 100

Statistics from Statistics Sweden (‘Statistikdatabasen’, n.d.)

art music comprised 21% of all available positions in music, another 18% were mixed programmes with various music genres, 15% were enrolled in jazz programmes, and another 15% nordic folk music. Importantly, despite their widespread popularity, genres of hip-hop, RnB, electro, and reggae music were hardly featured at the folk high school. This lack of popular music genres might relate to the difficulty of  studying these genres in upper-secondary schools and music conservatories, but can potentially also be one of the reasons for why the social origin of these students are so centred around inborn Swedes (Nylander, 2014). In a more recent follow-up study on the social origins of art students at folk high schools, the participation in all arts programmes for 2017 was

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further scrutinised based on country-specific analysis (Rutgersson et  al., 2020). This report showed students born in the Nordics (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark)  and contrasted this with students of european and non-european decent. Among the aesthetic profiles, the Nordic-born students amounted to 80% of the full student population, which is high in relation to the population as a whole. Furthermore, only some 9% of the art education participants in 2017 were born outside of Europe, which means that the structural under-recruitment of foreign-borns, especially students of non-European origin, has remained very stark compared to our original study (Fürst et al, 2018; Rutgersson et al., 2020). In the general Swedish population in 2017, 18% were born outside of Europe. This number indicates that a structural gap has remained at roughly half of what can be expected if the art students were to reflect the Swedish population as a whole. Another point of reference would be to compare the art programmes to general courses or “the second-chance” educational programmes provided by the folk high schools. By 2017, these largely compensatory programmes had a student population of 43% foreign-borns (Folkbildningsrådet, 2018). Mapping out both first and second-generation migration status thus helps us pinpoint another decisive factor for enabling students to pursue post-compulsory artistic training. These results suggest patterns of inclusion and exclusion in art education related to the country of birth. The registry data does not allow much speculation as to why this is the case. Still, establishing a given cultural repertoire as “worthy” of artistic training, the uncertainties of pursuing artistic careers, and the lack of concerted efforts to break with the structural under-recruitment of foreign-borns, are likely to be intertwined and influencial factors. These findings can be disturbing and provide ample ground for critical reflections on how folk high schools can break their prevailing recruitment structure. Nevertheless, the findings are hardly surprising insofar that previous research has highlighted similar patterns of exclusion. For example, several scholars have pursued studies that critique art education precisely because it reproduces prevailing racial and ethnic inequality, tends to contain Eurocentric curricula, and build on problematic norms around whiteness and western culture (Carpenter II et al., 2018). However, as for the Swedish folk high schools, these results can be considered particularly problematic  as  the policy formulated by the state for financing these schools  includes ambitions of “strengthening democracy”, “reducing

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prevailing gaps of educational inequality”, and promoting “an increased participation in cultural life”.10 The rough proxy “country of origin” to measure exclusion and inclusion haunts the study of art education and the creative industries a like (Brook et al., 2020). Admittedly, using registry data on birth locations as exclusion indicators can be considered  problematic. For example, it does not allow us to account for processes of racial discrimination or experiences of cultural alienation. Such differences might be considered more decisive than having parents that migrated or for these students themselves having moved to Sweden at a younger age. Another reasonable objection is that these demographic  variables on mobility among the parental generation might contain intervening influences from other pertinent social forces, such as those related to social class or parents’ educational level (Nylander & Melldahl, 2015; Nylander & Dalberg, 2015).

3.5  Conclusions In this chapter, we sought to understand the social underpinnings for engaging in art education at Swedish folk high schools. Based on several variables related to social origin, gender, and age, we provided a picture of the overarching enrolment patterns for folk high school education within the arts. After mapping out these broad recruitment patterns, based on registry data covering various artistic subfields, we can now conclude that the art programmes at the folk high school are predominantly populated by students from social groups with relatively strong positions in the labour market. Their parents tended to have obtained tertiary education and were for the most part themselves born in Sweden. The results are not very surprising as the cultural fraction of the middle classes tends to see voluntary and “risky” investments in art education as a more legitimate and worthwhile endeavour than families of working-class backgrounds or those who migrated to Sweden (see e.g. Allelin, 2022). 10  The Riksdag (Swedish Parliament) has established overall objectives for the folk high schools. They have been summarised into five goals. That the folk high schools shall: (i) “strengthen and develop democracy”, (ii) “make it possible for people to influence their own lives and create commitment to participate in social development”, (iii) “eliminate educational disparities and raise the level of enlightenment and education in society”, (iv) “bridge educational gaps and raise the level of education and cultural awareness in society”, and (v) “broaden interest in culture and increase participation in cultural life” (Folkbildningsrådet, 2014, p. 12).

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However, there seems to be an overarching dilemma facing the folk high schools’ artistically oriented programmes which relates to the tension between freedom and control outlined in Chap. 2. The folk high schools art programmes sets itself apart from other educational arrangements such as mandatory schooling or tertiary education. This distinction from other arrangements builds on the institutional characteristics of the folk high schools, which are flexible and adjustable to how various actors want to organise their activities, define their use-value, and engage together socially and  culturally. This feature is connected to an old and arguably endangered idea of edification or bildung, where educational endeavours are an open-ended process of personal enculturation and not based on a predefined template, vocational role or standardised curriculum (Gustavsson, 2017; Korsgaard, 2019). However, in granting the folk high school autonomy and freedom, it is difficult to control and manage them as organisational entities. The cultural program  offerings that are currently institutionalised as worthy of being studied at the folk high school, paired with a strong emphasis on self-directed learning activity, tend to appeal more to privileged social groups already embedded in Swedish “highbrow culture”. As the current educational offerings of these schools and their emphasis on spontaneity and personal development do not attract social groups that are prioritised target-groups by the state and fall short of the ideals of representing the “folk”  (demos), they are constantly at risk of being questioned and problematised. According to Boltanski (2011), selection processes for educational programmes can be studied from two quite distinct vantage points. In the first perspective, which we have sought to deploy throughout this chapter, educational participation is studied from a position of externality. It aims to unravel the entire system of power relations within which educational activities occur. The landscape of educational provision is then objectified, looking at the social morphology as a map of structural relationships between peoples. At a safe distance from the actors involved, we can outline the relationship between these agents based on broad-based recruitment patterns such as their gender or social origins. As the prospective students seek to enrol on a given programme, they are typically found to enter into a universe that is already highly saturated and stratified based on the collective history of social forces “laid down upon them” (cf. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979). This collective history is greatly facilitated by population registers and is typically found to harken back to the inherited and

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acquired resources, the track records of previous generations of students and the relationship between a given programme and the professionalised field of artistic practice. The attainment patterns of art schools and programmes are thus related to the unequal distribution of resources and relatively forceful demographic variables. The researcher can therefore substantiate critiques towards the universe of education, for example, by highlighting its role in reproducing social inequalities, maintaining prevailing power relations, or conditioning the students’ chances for success in education and work (cf. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979; Brook et al., 2020; Nylander & Melldahl, 2015). From this critical sociological vantage point, education is primarily seen as a prefabricated system of relations within which participants are forced to place themselves. The researcher’s role becomes akin to “unveiling” the inherent power dynamics from a position of externality (Boltanski, 2011). A common critique directed towards the work produced within pragmatic sociology has been the lack of attention oriented to these classical sociological problems. These pertinent social forces arguably condition action before it becomes operationalised in concrete acts of valuation and qualification and might be conceived as propelling the  cultural engagements we shall explore further in the upcoming chapters (Boltanski, 2011). However, Boltanski (2011) also outlined, another perspective of selection processes that is more attuned to the sensory experiences of the actors who partake in the educational realm. It centres on selection as a practical problem of situated action, coordination, and evaluation. Within the tradition of French pragmatic sociology, a long-standing focus area has been the varied forms of engagement common actors use as they coordinate their actions and make sense of the world. From this vantage point, the study of selection processes for art schools should not start from a detached and decontextualised map based on a set of composite variables. Instead, the study of selection processes should show how valorisation is operationalised in practice. In order not to deprive the social world of its unity and to be able to dig deeper into the meaning-making processes that characterise ordinary actors, we need to turn to the pragmatic level of social action. Towards this level of situated practice, we will turn next by exploring these multiple forms of engagement that students themselves express as important (Chap. 4) and the normative framework and principles of evaluation used by the gatekeepers in the selection processes of new students (Chap. 5).

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References Allelin, M. (2022). Pathways to Aesthetic Education in a World of Profitability. YOUNG. 30(5), 490-510. https://doi.org/10.1177/11033088221086082 Boltanski, L. (2011). On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Polity. Boltanski, L. (2014). Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1979). The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture. The University of Chicago Press. Brook, O., O’Brien, D., & Taylor, M. (2020). Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality and the Cultural and Creative Industries. Manchester University Press. Carpenter II, B. S., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., & Kraehe, A. M. (Eds.). (2018). The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan. Folkbildningsrådet. (2014). Folkbildning’s Direction & Intent: On the Role and Tasks of Swedish Study Associations and Folk High Schools in Current and Future Society. https://www.folkbildningsradet.se//globalassets/aktuella-­projekt/ vagval-­vilja/direction-­intent.pdf?epieditmode=true Folkbildningsrådet. (2018). Folkbildningsrådets samlade bedömning: Folkbildningens betydelse för samhället 2018. Folkbildningsrådet. https://www. folkbildningsradet.se//globalassets/rapporter/regeringen/2019/samlad-­ bedomning-­2018_webb.pdf?epieditmode=true Folkbildningsrådet. (2021). Folkbildningens betydelse för samhället 2020. https:// www.folkbildningsradet.se/globalassets/rapporter/2021/folkbildningsradets-­ samlade-­bedomning-­2020.pdf Furmark, A. (2010). Fiskarna i havet. Kartago. Fürst, H. (2016). Christofer Edling & Jens Rydgren (red.), Sociologi genom litteratur. Skönlitteraturens möjligheter och samhällsvetenskapens begränsningar. Arkiv förlag. Lund 2015. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, 46(2), 82–85. Fürst, H. (2018). Skrivarlinjer och den skönlitterära debuten. In A.-M. Laginder, E. Önnesjö, I. Carlsson & E. Nylander (Eds.), Folkhögskolan 150 år (pp. 325–341). Föreningen för Folkbildningsforskning. Fürst, H. (2019). Debutant! Vägar till skönlitterär debut och ett särskilt uppmärksammat mottagande. Uppsala universitet. Fürst, H. (2022). Arrival to a Fictional Total Institution: The Swedish Folk High School As a Liminal Space in Literature. Sociologisk Forskning, 59(3), 321–340. https://doi.org/10.37062/sf.59.23571 Fürst, H., Levelius, S., & Nylander, E. (2018). Kulturell bildning i folkhögskolans regi: Deltagare och lärare på estetiska profilkurser. Folkbildningsrådet. Gustavsson, B. (2017). Bildningens dynamik: framväxt, dimensioner, mening. Bokförlaget Korpen.

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Kaplan, D. & Illouz, E. (2022). What is sexual capital? Polity Press. Korsgaard, O. (2019). A Foray Into Folk High School Ideology. Folkehojskolernes Forening i Danmark. Kris, E., & Kurz, O. (1981). Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. Yale University Press. Lepenies, W. (1988). Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge University Press. Melldahl, A. (2015). Utbildningens värde: fördelning, avkastning och social reproduktion under 1900-talet. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Nochlin, L. (2018). The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. Routledge. Nylander, E. (2014). Skolning i jazz: värde, selektion och studiekarriär vid folkhögskolornas musiklinjer. Linköpings universitet. Nylander, E., & Dalberg, T. (2015). Jazzklass: Folkhögskolan som intermediär utbildningsinstitution. Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, 20(1–2), 100–126. Nylander, E., & Melldahl, A. (2015). Playing with Capital: Inherited and Acquired Assets in a Jazz Audition. Poetics, 48, 83–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. poetic.2014.12.002 Nylander, E., & Östlund, T. (2018). Folkhögskolans samtidshistoria: deltagare och kursutbud 1997–2016. In A.-M.  Laginder, E. Önnesjö, I.  Carlsson & E.  Nylander (Eds.), Folkhögskolan 150 år (pp.  361–376). Föreningen för Folkbildningsforskning. Oakley, K., Laurison, D., O’Brien, D., & Friedman, S. (2017). Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, and London’s Impact on Cultural Labor Markets. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(12), 1510–1531. https://doi. org/10.1177/0002764217734274 Rutgersson, T., Tannå, S., & Timgren, K. (2020). Mångfald och förnyelse? Folkbildningsrådet. Statistikdatabasen. (n.d.). Retrieved April 14, 2022, from www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/ Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. (2017). 2015, 2016, & 2017 Aggregate Frequency Report Recent Graduates. Retrieved November 13, 2021, from https://snaaparts.org/uploads/downloads/Reports/SNAAP-­1 51617-­ Recent-­Grads-­Aggregate-­Report.pdf Wikberg, S. (2013). Art Education – Mostly for Girls?: A Gender Perspective on the Art Subject in Swedish Compulsory School. Education Inquiry, 4(3), 22630. https://doi.org/10.3402/edui.v4i3.22630 Zetterberg, H. L. (1966). The Secret Ranking. Journal of Marriage and Family, 28(2), 134–142. https://doi.org/10.2307/349268

CHAPTER 4

What Engages? Students’ Accounts of Art Education as Hothouse, Home, Happening, or Hospital

4.1   Introduction: Understanding Forms of Artistic Engagement In the work of Thévenot (2009, 2014), the relationship that common actors have to the world is explored through a typology of engagements.1 To some extent, the idea of engagement can be seen as a continuation of a long-standing interest in the various “investments in the form” that ordinary actors utilise to commensurate and coordinate their actions and attune themselves to one another (Boltanski, 1987; Boltanski & Thévenot, 1983; Salais et al., 1986; Thévenot, 1984). Put differently, engagements “are forms of coordination that enable the individual to act in more stable and reliable ways across various situations” (Leemann, 2018, p.  862). According to Thévenot (2014), the framework of analysing modes of engagement is particularly apt for exploring the individual concerns people experience in their everyday lives. These individual concerns often take place beneath the level of the compounded forms of “the common good”, which was outlined in his early work with Boltanski (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006). Thévenot (2014) distinguishes between three basic modes of engagement: exploration, familiarity, and the individual plan. In a 1  A previous version of this chapter was published in the form of an article in Acta Sociologica: “The Worth of Art Education: Students’ Justifications of a Contestable Educational Choice” (Fürst & Nylander, 2020).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7_4

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pragmatic fashion, individuals are seen to alternate between these modes of engagement to successfully coordinate their actions with others and conform to prevailing social norms. In what follows, we will relate the students’ accounts to four modes of engagement. These modes of engagement symbolise what makes participation in art education worthwhile to these students. In Table 4.1, each form of engagement is outlined concerning its principal relationships, stakes, objectives, main modality, time orientations, and the metaphors used to describe the engagement. While this model builds on Thévenot’s (2009, 2014) schema of appropriate action, we have found it necessary to modify it slightly to better represent the context of artistic engagements in post-compulsory art education in the Nordics. Firstly, we have included an additional mode of engagement that centres on recuperation, corporality, and health. Secondly, besides the dimensions found in Thévenot’s original model, we added the dimensions “time orientation” and “metaphor” to our model. We study the great variety of engagement in art education through the student’s accounts of their educational choice. When we reconstruct the sensibilities, rationales, and interests behind the educational choices in the artistic realm, we believe it is useful to be attentive to these rather intimate and mundane forms of coordination. As the students often pursue these activities without claims to justifications referring to “the common good” while still differing from one another in how they qualify their relationship to themselves and the surrounding world, the continuity of the forms of engagement is worth exploring further.

4.2   Four Modes of Engagement Within Art Education In the following sections, each of the modes of engagement outlined in Table 4.1 will be presented based on the four basic metaphors of art education: hothouse, happening, home, and hospital. Under each heading, we will discuss what engages these students, what is at stake, and how they differ in principal objectives. While these regimes of engagements are presented as separate “logics of action”, it will be evident that students often embrace multiple engagements at once, which is necessary to coordinate with themselves across time and in any given space (Thévenot, 2014). To assume that actors are capable of multiple engagements means that actors

Relationship

Functional Companions Spontaneous Corporal

Mode of engagement

Individual plan Familiarity Exploration Recuperation

Aspiration Cohesion Personality/voice Health

At stake Career Ease Excitement Recovery

Objective Projection Routine Improvisation Wellness

Modality

Future Past/Current Current Past

Time orientation

Table 4.1  Four modes of engagement within art education at the Swedish folk high school

Hothouse Home Happening Hospital

Metaphor

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are seen as competent in navigating and code-switching between engagements depending on the situation and the formatted environment they happen to find themselves. Art Education as Hothouse A conventional understanding of art education sees it as a hothouse for “things to come”. Seeing art education as a hothouse for artistic growth, among preparations and aspirations that ultimately aim at a vocational career, does not mean that education creates predictable outcomes.2 Even among students who engage in art education as an individual plan and seek to maximise the chances of success, uncertainty and ambiguity are pervasive conditions for their studies. Uncertainties in art education encompass issues about one’s relative worth or status as an artist-to-be, and the relative worth of the work one does at present and in the artistic field in the future. This uncertainty about career prospects is reflected in ambiguities about career choices. Both in a narrow and a broad sense, taking a step towards preparing for a career related to the arts is an important facet of the engagements encountered in artistic programmes. Some artistic programmes and folk high schools are perceived to be hothouses for creative growth, providing resources for venturing or developing creative abilities for gradually making one’s way into a professional career related to the arts. As a hothouse, the folk high school involves individual responsibility for making a career and students activation to engage in a plan for the future. Interviewer: We have talked about the future; you said you did not know what to do? Emma: No, I don’t really know, but I hope to work artistically somehow and perhaps not full time. I really don’t know if 2  Drawing on 70 interviews of students at the Art Institute of Chicago, Anselm Strauss (1970) develops five loose categories of types of students. The explorative work done by Strauss through this classification has some similarities to our types. What Strauss denotes as “Career artist” aligns with those with a firm occupational commitment. “Art as haven” links to art students that have failed or drifted at something else, making art education a refuge. “Moratorium types” are those who delay occupational commitments by participation in art education. “Vocation and avocation” are the split career ambitions of some students to make art and have another job. “Art as a general way of life” are highly engaged students, having had the world of art opened to them. In this chapter, we hope to systematise further and develop an understanding of the plurality of ways art education engages different student groups.

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you will ever be able to make it within this type of vocation. At the moment, I think it would be really nice to get deeper into making costumes and such things for, say, the theatre, musicals and film. So, I do not know; I hope I will be able to paint and create things myself. Or that is something I will do as a sideline thing? Ultimately, it is really about what you do. (Emma, woman, visual art student)

As part of Emma’s compound account, no strong attachments have been made to make art part of her individual plans. She is aware of the open-endedness of her art education participation and ponders about the future of different individual plans that may be realised. On the one hand, she sees education as a way forward in her artistically oriented trajectory and through the interests she has developed through the course. On the other hand, she also claims that several artistically related vocations may be available as an alternative to her, like becoming a costume designer. The folk high school appears as a place for transitioning and maturing into a decision and choice of an individual plan for the future. More generally, the underlying uncertainty regarding the possible career trajectories and careers becomes a topic of her future-oriented imagination. She tries to mitigate the ambiguities of career choice by pondering the future labour market in various ways, some of which sound more “realistic” or within her reach. Participation in an individual plan is thus not always straightforward but becomes a way to coordinate one’s action and something evolving and put to the test throughout art education. The ambivalent situation for students is somewhat remedied by the folk high school setting that allows for some idleness and exploration creating the image of folk high school as a Home and Happening. Other students are more determined about the goal of their educational engagements. For example, Oskar describes the vision of attending the jazz course as a means to become a successful and professional musician eventually. Oskar: The goal is just to work with music, no matter which path I take. […] Interviewer:  Interviewer: You want to continue on the beaten path? Either through more music education at university or…. Oskar: Yes, I´ll give it a try. Otherwise, I would not be here. That’s why you’re here. The major reason is that you always have people to play with here. In a genre like jazz, it is as necessary [to play with others] as practising by oneself. To practice by myself, I can do that anywhere. But the scene is not as if I could go down there every day and jam in some jazz club. (Oskar, man, music student)

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This student sees education as a necessary ground to practice with others, get a foot in the door, get contacts, and move forward in his career (see e.g. Bille & Jensen, 2018; Childress & Gerber, 2015; Fürst, 2019; Nylander, 2014). His mode of engaging with the arts might be seen as “instrumental” or “functionalistic” from the vantage point of a romantic calling (Kris & Kurz, 1981). He describes the necessity to attend school as a product of a “changing scene” where you no longer can expect to learn the craft by jamming with others in some jazz club (Faulkner & Becker, 2009). The gradual institutionalisation and academisation of the art form have resulted in Oskar going to school to find people to play music with. His temporal orientation is split between the necessity to practice here-­and-­ now and his long-term dream of working with music professionally in the future. The “scene” may have shifted from the jazz club to the art education, furthering the image of the folk high school as a hothouse, where talent is cultivated and developed together with other committed students. For others, the course may just be one in a series of art programmes attended at various folk high schools and where several steps towards realising one’s dream of becoming a professional artist are in the process of playing out. Tuva:  I think I will use samples from my work and apply to art school. Interviewer: You mean for higher education or art college? Tuva: Yes, higher education. I have already taken art courses at folk high schools for six years; it is time to take the next step. […] You get the necessary experience and craft skills in how creative processes work from these kinds of courses. Actually, not that many people know what these creative processes looks like. Many people think about the pleasure of making art, but the creative process is something you need to learn. That is important if you want to attend higher education or if you want to start your own business directly after the course. (Tuva, woman, visual art student)

Tuva separates her engagement in an individual plan from being engaged in exploration. The individual plan is set on  developing a skill set necessary for a career in the arts, utilizing the explorative creative competence she acquired at the folk high school for career progression. The hard-nosed attitude to art-making as a professional career is thus separated

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from mundane ideas of “art” as being about creativity and pleasure. This student prides herself on figuring out this central aspect of career-making related to the creative process. According to her, this type of knowledge must be acquired at the folk high school when it functions as a hothouse for creative development. The student has had a lot of experience from the folk high school and considers that her many years at this preparatory level should be more than enough for her to engage in a more elaborate plan to take “the next step” within the educational system of the visual arts. The many years she spent within the same type of school might relate to her gradually changing her mode of engagement towards a more career and forward-oriented focus. The student is also correct in her observation that the educational route to becoming a professional artist in visual arts may be very long and may be developed in steps (Frenette & Dowd, 2020; Gerber, 2017). The folk high schools do not have as prominent positions here for visual arts as they do in jazz or creative writing (Flisbäck, 2006; Fürst, 2019; Nylander, 2014). For students in visual arts, it is not uncommon that students attend multiple folk high schools and other preparatory programmes before becoming enrolled in the right “art academy” (Börjesson, 2012; Flisbäck, 2006; Fürst et al., 2018; Melldahl, 2012). The selection test deployed at the art academies and universities involves a portfolio of artwork being assessed and judged qualitatively. To be in this preparatory stage of the folk high school may be dragged out until the students do not meet the entry requirements of where they seek to go next (see also; Gerber, 2017; Nylander, 2014). The dreams of the future can be both what the student wants to do and what the student expects will happen, which provides plenty of room for tension and contemplation among students accounting for their individual plans. Interviewer: You said you had a realistic idea of what will happen and an ideal reality. Tell me more about that. Louise: I hope that I will be able to work 80% and write, perhaps work 75%, but it depends on the employer. My goal is absolutely to have something published. I also hope to collaborate with others, to be in an environment with people who love text, writing and reading. I have been missing a social space and context for texts. There is some kind of community, context and connections that come from being at this folk high school

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course too. […] I do not know about the situation at other folk high schools, but it is a really great environment to be in. You sit down by a large window and write; it is almost … you almost get this uncanny self-awareness because this is not what my regular life looks like. Lea: No, it is a special place. It looks like you are sitting down and writing “the next great novel”. Louise: You can feel the pressure too. Perhaps it will not be “the next great novel”. (creative writing students)

These creative writing students have found themselves in the habits and ease of the folk high school as a home, where one can contemplate while staring at the scenery through a window, but they also find themselves formulating plans for the future. What they do at the folk high school could have consequences for their future and creative life as writers. They are in a position where they are expected to produce texts that can be considered not only for publication but may be of some importance to literary life. They attend a creative writing programme of high esteem and highlight the importance of this school as a creative environment, a community of lasting relationships within a given artistic field. They deliberate around the possibilities of combining work and their craft. Their artistic engagements can be prolonged and sustained over time to make room for realising an individual plan to be published. As the students have internalised the idea that what they write may come to matter and imagine themselves as professional writers in the future, they engage in an individual plan that seems presented to them by the formatted environment of this particular artistic programme and its material environment. Our next chapter will clarify that artistic programmes come with different statuses, orientations, and integration into established artistic fields. Different artistic programmes may thus objectively propel a student in a career and work on the subjective perceptions of students’ believed capacity to become accomplished within a given professional artistic field. The ordinary engagements in art education include many students who treat school as a hotbed for things to come. These form-giving operations are different from one another depending on what school they attend and within which artistic field they engage themselves. The abilities and experiences gained from engaging with art education as a hothouse are akin to stocking a “portfolio” with symbolically important resources (credentials, knowledge, and relations) (cf. Faulkner, 1983; Gerber, 2017; Menger,

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1999). The time orientation of the engagement in an individual plan has a strong orientation towards the future. The many aspirations verbalised often try to deal with the many uncertainties involved in pursuing artistic careers. However, as evidenced by the narratives above, art education may also fill other purposes in the students’ lives and be the scene of other forms of artistic engagements. For example, it can provide a collective identity of belonging or build on a shared engagement in a creative exploration process, two dimensions we will turn to next. Art Education as Happening The folk high school as an educational institution brings spaces to explore an artistic interest or a craft. Many folk high school students are simply trying to bring excitement and novelty to their life by exploring something they care for “here and now”. The excitement of exploring a craft or interest comes from the folk high school offering a happening that breaks with routines in ordinary life. Here, educational endeavours in the arts may be necessary time-off from other demands in education or work. Interviewer: Why did you apply for a writing course? Frida: I do not know. I have probably always written fiction but never really dared to admit that I actually want to write. When I had resigned and left that whole [restaurant industry] behind me, I just said to myself, “yes, but then I’ll do something I really enjoy doing”, then it became creative writing. (Frida, woman, creative writing)

For Frida, it is unclear why she applied to the folk high  school. Her stance furthers the idea of uncertainty circumventing the school choice and where students’ educational choices may not be based on much deep-­ seated reflection. Resignation from a stressful job opened up a break in routines, and the existential question of what the student wanted to do emerged. Contemplating on this issue meant admitting that what she wanted to do was write, much in line with the idea of finding “an authentic self” (Taylor, 1989). Prioritising the enjoyment and self-exploration that she felt when writing fiction seemed to have been a difficult process, while she seems happy to have made such a move for her own sake. Frida is curious to explore the craft and turn her attention away from workplace demands to a free and open-ended form of artistic engagement.

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Sometimes, the exploration of a craft is combined with attempts to create individual plans, as discussed above. Nevertheless, it is also clear that folk high school becomes an adventure, or related to a “gap year”, to dwell on something of great personal interest, explore a craft, and make something “new” happen in life. The inspiration from exploration may lead to realising the viability of an imaginary plan. When the folk high school becomes a venue for venturing indecisive students, it is purposeful in another way, as many students have a need to contemplate what to do with one’s life in a personal and professional sense. The folk high school as a happening may be the kind of jolt the students seek. Interviewer: What was the reason for applying for this course? Cecilia: Yeah, I graduated from upper secondary school and then it was like, what should I do now? I did not know if I wanted to study at university or what I wanted to become. But I did know I enjoyed writing, and that was like the only thing I have heard that I am good at, so I thought I should give it a chance. But then I postponed it, I went abroad instead, and now I am back after one year abroad. What should I do now? Then I remembered. I applied to folk high schools to attend these creative writing courses for a while. So, it fits me well because I still do not know what to do. I applied to be able to try creative writing and see if it is something I would like to do professionally in the future. (Cecilia, woman, creative writing student)

Similarly to the previous interviewee, Cecilia has wandered through different situations where the question of what to do next has appeared. Cecilia feels uncertain about many things in life. Still, the creative writing class offers both a break from deciding what to study at the university and a means to explore if writing in and of itself can be something she could work with professionally in the future. Hence, the engagements among the students are not always separated from each other but may work in concert, as here, being in a state of exploration may lead to individual plans for the future. The pressure to make such individual plans can be daunting. The folk high school may be an escape from demands to make commitments about the future and instead have a “fun” time. A young music student, Daniel, says he never plans for the future and that the mere thought about the future and what to do creates anxiety and stress.

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Daniel: I do not think about the future. It is too much stress. Interviewer: What do you experience as stressful? Daniel: To have to think about what to do. You have to do something. I do not know. I have never had any plans for the future. (Daniel, man, music student)

The folk high school thus allows the students to be grounded in a meaningful activity, something they enjoy while wandering and persevering under strong normative pressure of taking future-oriented action. To engage in a mode of exploration can be used to fence off the imperative of voicing aspirational and instrumental career ambitions. The folk high school may thus be at least a temporary escape from making individual plans in life. The fact that the folk high school does not focus on attaining a grade or diploma is described as a relief and a source of inspiration among many art students. The situation allows them to be less preoccupied with perfection or perform in relation to some predefined evaluation standard. Petra provides a vivid example of this attitude, which is perceived as a break from more regular grade-oriented education. Interviewer: If you compare the educational situation here with other educational situations you have been in, does it differ in any way? Petra: Mm, it does. Now it’s been many years since I went to upper-secondary school, but it is… it does not kill your creativity to be here. Because you have this space to express yourself, and you are encouraged to think and feel for yourself. All the time. You are supposed to find your own way through this type of schooling. Going back to the situation you encountered in upper secondary school, it’s not like that at all. “You have to do this and this in order to get a pass”. So you have to strive for perfection all the time, instead of finding out what you actually want to work on and what you actually want to express with what you are doing and move on. I think you get more locked into a given form in the regular school system if you compare upper secondary school to the folk high school. It is much freer here, and you dare to talk, you dare to voice your  opinion and express yourself based on that. (Petra, woman, visual art student)

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The lack of a predefined and fixed curriculum enforced upon all students on a “one-size-fits-all basis” allows the folk high school teachers to be attentive to each individual’s creative process and exploration. As this student experienced the normative and regulatory control of the upper-­ secondary school as very rigid and standardised, the experience of having more fluid goals and leaving open the curriculum to improvisation and spontaneity was percived as a real revelation. Yet, much of what is going on in art programmes at boarding school extends well beyond the sensations and excitement of creative flows or the joy and despair of doing art while meditating over other possible career trajectories. Art Education as Home As we demonstrated in Chap. 2, a vague but recurring notion of studying at the folk high school builds on its strong community spirit and routinised rather cloistered way of life. Part of what engages and attracts students to the various folk high school programmes offered within the arts is a “unique” experience, which participants call “the folk high school experience” (Swedish: “folkhögskoleupplevelsen”). Rather than only coping with stress, postponing inevitable career choices and dealing with the many uncertainties stemming from doing cultural work and planning for a career, there is also attractivity in engaging in art education that has to do with the sense of familiarity. The folk high school experience builds on the strong social bonds and companionship that the students form during their artistic studies and is linked to the routines and milieu at the folk high school as a home that brings a sense of collective belonging. To grow and develop as a human being, often transitioning from youth to young adulthood, is described as a central experience by the alumni students. For August, a former participant in one of its music programmes, the folk high school is, in retrospect, as much about personal growth and enculturation as it is about writing and producing music. Interviewer: What do you experience as most rewarding considering your time at the folk high school? August: Good question. I think it is the opportunity to try to write in so many different ways, to write and produce music. To grow as a human being.

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Interviewer: Is it something you feel has made a lasting impact? August: I think I have found a way to express myself, the whole thing of, on the one hand, living there, and on the other hand, the personal growth, to be able to take responsibility. The whole concept [of the folk high school] helped me grow as a person. […] A significant part of a folk high school is the social aspect of living at the folk high school. It gives you so much more than just attending the classes during the day. (August, man, former music student)

For many students living at the folk high school is the first time living away from home, as seen in Chap. 2. The boarding school experience was rewarding for August. In qualifying what he sees as the long-lasting impact of these engagements, the social dimension comes to mind just as much as the artistic cultivation. The autonomy of living on the premises seems to have offered August a way to mature and take responsibility, something he associates with the environment. Hence, the folk high school may build a familiar engagement at the moment but may also have a lasting impact on self-formation. To be taken care of and have routine and ease of knowing what will come next is part of the familiar engagement in art education at the folk high school. The educational offerings in which belonging and cosiness are emphasised are also part of the expectations that the students carry with them on what folk high schools is all about. Camilla: Many of my friends have talked about folk high schools. I also know about them, but my friends have talked very positively about them, that they have a great sense of belonging and are just like very, very cosy and worthwhile. I thought, yes, and then I wanted to try it because many people have had such positive experiences [laugh]. (Camilla, woman, visual art student)

The aura of the folk high school is a place of belonging, sharing communal bonds, joy, and an interest in a craft, art form, or musical expression. The fact that the folk high schools are the first step away from home for some of these participants might help explain the need to recreate a “home-away-from-home”. Due to the popularity of the boarding school option among students studying of arts programmes, the domestic and artistic engagements collide rendering the  rather bohemian lifestyle

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associated with the world of art is paired with the routines and cohesion of institutionalised schooling. Nevertheless, as we saw in Chap. 2, it is also evident that the folk high school harbour darker sides, where the familiar bonds are turned into various forms of harmful transgressions. Art Education as Hospital In the previous sections, we drew inspiration from Thévenot’s original model of three modes of engagement. Art education can be understood as a hothouse for cultivating artistic talent or as a home or happening for students whose engagements differ from the template of instrumental rationality. While the temporal orientation of aspiring artists tends to have a strong element of future-oriented action, the typification of art education as happening and as home has a greater emphasis on the present involving daily routines and the creative sides of actions. The engagements in art education most rooted in the past, as a means for justifying the present folk high school participation, comes from groups of students who partake in the folk high school more as a recuperation. In this final category, we denote art education at the folk high school as a hospital. The category shares a certain instrumental mindset concerning the arts with projections in accordance with a individual plan. Still, this time art education emerges as a back-ward looking  self-treatment strategy with possible therapeutic effects related to mental and physical well-being, to regain control and transform oneself into a better self. For example, the visual art student Charlotte shared the following on why she chose to attend art education: Charlotte: This is something I have been thinking about from time to time for quite a long period. I have a degree as an art teacher and have worked for many years at upper secondary school as an art teacher. I am on long-term sick leave because of burnout and fatigue. I tried to get back to my job but felt that something was missing, and I simply wanted to take a chance to find a new route in life, break with my occupational identity, work with my creativity and see where it led me. Interviewer: What was missing? […] Charlotte: […] I was lacking inspiration and engagement, on my part, I think. There was something that was lost. (Charlotte, woman, visual art student)

For Charlotte, the merit and qualities of attending art education are seemingly not about labour market integration. She already occupies a job

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as an art teacher at an upper-secondary school level. However, her mode of engagement in art education comes from the context of the long period of sick leave and a overwealming sense of fatigue that she experienced after working as a teacher. Charlotte attends the folk high school course as an open-ended exploration of a craft well-known to her. She also seems to try and regain a sense of purpose and meaning, which got lost after the difficult period of being ill. Charlotte’s engagement and form-giving operation are firmly rooted in the past experiences of losing touch with her sense of self and her occupational identity as a teacher. Based on the effort of breaking with the habits of caring for others and putting other interests before her own, she has now taken the opportunity to care for herself and her interest first. There is an explorative dimension to her story, as she wants to find her sense of self by taking a break from her previous life and developing a new relationship with herself. Yet, the mode of engagement is here primerily about the intimate and corporal recovery that art education may possibly help her realise. While many students come to the folk high school with an existential question of figuring out “who they are”, the same question can dwell in other non-traditional students who have lost a sense of something  they once had. Petra is in a similar situation as Charlotte. She experienced a period of sick leave and got the backing of welfare agencies sponsoring her reactivation towards becoming an active labour market participant again. However, during her folk high school studies, her orientation and ambitions seem to have shifted from merely entering “the usual nine to five job” into something over which she can have a greater influence. Petra: I got to this course through the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, because I have been on long-term sick leave. I got an opportunity to take [a course] at this folk high school. I tried ceramics, which I had never done before. I then took this course and got stuck and could not leave [laugh]. […] I have a goal now, that is not the usual nine to five job. […] I want to do something I have dreamed about for a long time but that I have not been able to achieve. […] To do something for my own sake and not based on what others expect from me. (Petra, woman, visual art student)

The Swedish Social Insurance Agency specifically targets individuals on long-term sick leave as part of the welfare state. The provision of folk high school courses within these schemes offered a chance for Petra to reflect

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and re-orient her life choices and become a “new person”. Later on, in the interview, she reveals that she wants to become an educator herself, using art as a therapy for people who have also fallen ill. Her story is similar to those of persons who attend folk high school studies after trying other things out. It is qualified as paradigmatic shifts from these “other demands on her” to her doing stuff for “my own sake”. Art education as a hospital makes room for a form-giving operation that takes wellness, health, and recovery as the overarching modalities using artistic creations to accomplish these ends. Recuperation may seem to be achieved by familiarity and exploration that achieves new ways of living. The search for a “better self” might also, in the end, lead to a meaningful and gainful occupation with a connection to a given biography and work trajectory. Still, its primary focus is more immediate, recuperative, and corporal. It is not uncommon for students to encounter mental illness and bad health at the folk high school. These issues may become more salient due to the boarding school nature of the courses, where one may hang out with people after school and discover more about their life. The folk high school is even compared to a hospital by one of the students. Lea: There is a very fine line between folk high schools and a hospital [laughs]. Everyone seems to have a trauma that they need to work to resolve. A trauma and an emotional wound. Or they want to engage in self-­realisation to get on track without many pressing demands. To be able to take a breath. (Lea, woman, creative writing)

The folk high school is not officially about being a hospital, but students and teachers can care for other students. Lea describes students she has met and how they have lost traction and capacity  but regained it through the craft and school environment. The orientation is thus a loop back to the emotional wound that needs mending to find oneself again.

4.3  Conclusions In this chapter, we have looked at what kinds of accounts of engagements students provide as they embark on post-compulsory artistic training in visual arts, music, and creative writing. Without assuming the priority of a totalising force and without assigning these students a preconceived purpose, we have sought to unravel how artistic engagement fulfils multiple

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roles in these students’ lives and how their talk is crafted in relation to normative frameworks and expectations of what is valuable and worthwhile. In stark contrast to the prevailing public discourse that advocates demands of labour market integration as primacy for legitimate educational choices, these participants perform operations of valuation that are both multiplex and dynamic. To avoid a reductionistic understanding of what the value of art education can be, we have tried to lay bare these varieties. Building particularly on what Thévenot (2014) calls  modes of engagements has allowed us to zoom in on the forms through which persons qualify their involvement in post-compulsory art education. We typified four forms of engagements prevalent in the Swedish folk high schools: art education as a hothouse, happening, home, and hospital. These modes of engagement are “ideal-typical” in that they are crystallisations of pertinent differences among the art students: what they believe is at stake, the relationships they form amongst one another, the objectives they seek to accomplish, their modes of modality, and their time orientation. Both intrinsic and extrinsic demands of art education surface when listening carefully to the accounts “on the ground”. The pressures exerted by the external demands for labour market integration are present in the participants’ stories. They can be interpreted as part of a political imperative with considerable moral leverage. Following the human capital theory, students interviewed this chapter ought to be self-regulating and gradually adjusting themselves to becoming able-bodied and in servitude to the ever-changing demands of the labour market. However, as we saw from the interviews, the engagements in folk high school training can also  be devised as an escape from the immediate demands of labour market integration. A break with a work-related career or a educational trajectory is introduced thereby avoiding making a firm commitment about the future or simply taking “a gap year”. Even these possibilities of taking a sabbatical year to “dabble with the arts” could nevertheless draw on justifications from the dominant paradigm of labour market preparation. Cultural competencies and self-directed learning from practising music, arts, and creative writing can be more useful than for those pursuing an artistic career, as parts of markets for goods and labour are transforming towards “enrichment economies” (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020). According to Boltanski and Esquerre  (2020, p.  313ff), the new modes of valuation in contemporary capitalism are deeply intertwined with the enrichment of both objects and places in which cultural creativity and artistic competencies are indispensable for the creation of “exceptional things”.

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The strong emphasis on recuperation in some stories may also be seen as an escape from labour market demands. By providing “slack” and breathing spaces in  ongoing career trajectories, art education provides room to de-accelerate and focus on corporal and mental well-being. Art as recuperation might likewise be indirectly purposeful for regaining health and re-entering the labour market, even though the school is assigned value precisely because it departs from the conventional market logic and ramped-up performance demands. Paradoxically, regardless of students’ intentions to escape the imperative of labour market integration, the artistic engagements of exploration and recuperation can lead to labour market integration (Fürst & Nylander, 2020). The artistic programme at the folk high schools may help the individual regain health, existential purpose, and well-being or act as a support for open-ended explorations into a craft and new self-identity. Nevertheless, the imperative of employability is destined to return as soon as the person runs out of subsidised student loans and state-sponsored grants. Returning to health often means becoming employable again; thus, taking a gap year may be more of a strategic pause in making “real” educational commitments. Still, it is only with great difficulty and a somewhat disconnected way of reasoning that the value of art education can be entirely subsumed under the guise of direct or indirect labour market integration. The problem described in the introduction of this book is not that labour market integration is entirely out-of-touch with the value of art education, but that art education cannot and should not be reduced to its potential contribution to labour market integration. Rather than viewing the folk high school as a either–or, it should be construed as a both–and. Engagement in the folk high school is multiple, and so is its worth. The value of art education offers a vehicle to pursue an artistic career, with the resources necessary for artistic growth and development, such as time, peers and subject area expertise feedback, funding schemes, and housing. Art education is essential to innovation within creative fields. It is also important for its auxiliary functions (e.g. music teachers, curators, writing coaches) and for forming the knowledge and taste needed to become a consumer in cultural life (Becker, 1982; Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020;  Strauss, 1970). Among the ones pursuing an artistic career, the “love of art” is a sincere and genuine “sacrifice” in which instrumental values of smooth labour market transitions largely  are known but  thoroughly ignored. While many students might harbour dreams of eventually achieving success as producers of music, visual art, or literature, they often

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end up learning as much about the art of listening, seeing, and reading as they do about creating artistic work in itself.3 Regardless, the art education at folk high schools forms an integral part of cultural life in Sweden, simultaniously enabling cultural creation and consumption. The value of art education for the health and well-being of students can also be regarded as having a value in its own right, without considering its implications for labour market integration. Just as cultural life may be energised by the existence of the folk high school as a local arts venue, so too can the health care system indirectly draw benefits from the presence of art programmes for proactive and informal recuperation processes. As individuals come together to paint, write, or make music, they also reflect upon themselves and the formative experiences that they have been a part of, which can be a mode of subjectification and strategy to take care of and heal oneself. This “function” of the folk high school in the health care infrastructure is often overlooked in the public debate. Nevertheless, “care for one another” to foster well-being among students is found at the folk high school as a political intervention to social problems of discontent and exclusion (Merritt, 2020). Students may ponder about or be fully committed to a career in the arts, which in our typology mainly resides in an individual plan. Far from being an evident and dedicated career commitment, many of these students take to their schooling as a means to “try things out”. They are not alone in their indecisiveness. Participants seem to experience the contingency associated with being in a state of transformation often associated with attending the folk high school and are involved in thinking, trying, and exploring various engagements that may have repercussions on their future lives. These different engagements characterise elements for their identity-work throughout the course which reflect back on how students and the teachers may perceive them in class. Students thus have multiple engagements in art education that bring different moral and political values to the foreground. Therefore, in the next chapter of this book, we look at the complexities of justifying selection to folk high school programmes in the arts. More specifically, the chapter covers how teachers justify selection to their programmes and how they form their evaluative judgements. This analysis allows us to explore further what kinds of values that are embraced among 3  The idea that some artistic dreams are “pipe dreams” and dreams that come into “reality” is, for example, explored by Fürst (2020). For more on the socialisation of aesthetic judgement in jazz, see Nylander (2014), and in literature, see Fürst (2018).

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the teaching staff and how informal hierarchies between the various schools and artistic programmes materialise in the selection of students.

References Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. University of California Press. Bille, T., & Jensen, S. (2018). Artistic Education Matters: Survival in the Arts Occupations. Journal of Cultural Economics, 42(1), 23–43. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10824-­016-­9278-­5 Boltanski, L. (1987). The Making of a Class: Cadres in French Society. Cambridge University Press. Boltanski, L., & Esquerre, A. (2020). Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Polity Press. Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1983). Finding One’s Way in Social Space: A Study Based on Games. Social Science Information, 22(4–5), 631–680. https://doi. org/10.1177/053901883022004003 Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368 43199002003010 Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton University Press. Börjesson, M. (2012). Konstnärliga utbildningar och produktion av exklusivitet. In M. Gustavsson, M. Börjesson, & M. Edling (Eds.), Konstens omvända ekonomi: Tillgångar inom utbildningar och fält, 1938–2008 (pp. 39–66). Daidalos. Childress, C., & Gerber, A. (2015). The MFA in Creative Writing: The Uses of a “Useless” Credential. Professions and Professionalism, 5(2). https://journals. hioa.no/index.php/pp/article/view/868 Faulkner, R. R. (1983). Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry. Transaction Books. Faulkner, R. R., & Becker, H. S. (2009). Do You Know... ? The Jazz Repertoire in Action. The University of Chicago Press. Flisbäck, M. (2006). Att lära sig konstens regler: en sociologisk studie av osäkra framtidsinvesteringar. Göteborgs universitet. Frenette, A., & Dowd, T. J. (2020). Careers in the arts: Who stays and who leaves? SNAAP special report. Spring 2020. Strategic national arts alumni project. Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED605409 Fürst, H. (2018). Making the Discovery: The Creativity of Selecting Fiction Manuscripts from the Slush Pile. Symbolic Interaction 41(4) 513–532. ­https:// doi.org/10.1002/symb.360 Fürst, H. (2019). Debutant! Vägar till skönlitterär debut och ett särskilt uppmärksammat mottagande. Uppsala universitet.

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Fürst, H. (2020). Varför drömmer man om att bli författare? Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap, 50(4–5), 10–20. https://doi.org/10.54797/tfl.v50i4-5.1369 Fürst, H., Levelius, S., & Nylander, E. (2018). Kulturell bildning i folkhögskolans regi : Deltagare och lärare på estetiska profilkurser. Folkbildningsrådet. Fürst, H., & Nylander, E. (2020). The Worth of Art Education: Students’ Justifications of a Contestable Educational Choice. Acta Sociologica, 63(4), 422–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699320934170 Gerber, A. (2017). The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers. Stanford University Press. Kris, E., & Kurz, O. (1981). Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. Yale University Press. Leemann, R. J. (2018). Free Movement of People and Capital and the Standard of Transnational Academic Mobility: Principles of Governance in the European Research Area. European Educational Research Journal, 17(6), 857–876. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904118773946 Melldahl, A. (2012). Utbildningsvägen till Kungl. Konsthögskolan: Förberedande utbildningar bland elever antagna 1938–1984. In M. Gustavsson, M. Börjesson, & M. Edling (Eds.), Konstens omvända ekonomi: tillgångar inom utbildningar och fält 1938–2008 (pp. 143–161). Daidalos. Menger, P.-M. (1999). Artistic Labor Markets and Careers. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 541–574. https://doi.org/10.2307/223516 Merritt, C. R. (2020). Reviving Social Democratic Solidarity in Precarious Times: Community, Care, and the Politics of Well-Being in Swedish Popular Adult Education. University of California. Nylander, E. (2014). Skolning i jazz: Värde, selektion och studiekarriär vid folkhögskolornas musiklinjer. Linköpings universitet. Nylander, E., Dalberg, T. (2015). Jazzklass: Folkhögskolan som intermediär utbildningsinstitution. Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, 20(1–2), 100–126. Salais, R., Thévenot, L. (Eds.). (1986). Le Travail: marchés, règles, conventions. INSEE : Economica. Strauss, A. (1970). The Art School and Its Students: A Study and an Interpretation. In M. C. Albrecht, J. H. Barnett & M. Griff (Eds.), The Sociology of Art and Literature (pp. 621–34). Praeger. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge University Press. Thévenot, L. (1984). Rules and Implements: Investment in Forms. Social Science Information, 23(1), 1–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901884023001001 Thévenot, L. (2009). Postscript to the Special Issue: Governing Life by Standards: A View from Engagements. Social Studies of Science, 39(5), 793–813. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0306312709338767 Thévenot, L. (2014). Voicing Concern and Difference: From Public Spaces to Common-Places. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 7–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.905749

CHAPTER 5

What Counts? Selection Tests as Gatekeeping

5.1   Introduction: Selection Tests as Gatekeeping The idea of “gatekeeping” builds upon a metaphor of closing and opening channels for the flow of information to either pass through or be stopped. The concept was initially used to understand the steps for how food reaches the family dinner table (Lewin, 1951) and was incrementally developed by Hirsch (1972) to include processes of filtering ideas and products from production to consumption in the cultural and creative industries. Gatekeeping has been widely used to understand the points of selection and rejection of material in various states of completion in the creative and cultural industries, such as fashion, entertainment, visual arts, music, and publishing (Foster et al., 2011; Friedman, 2014; Fürst, 2017, 2018; Hamann & Beljean, 2019; Mears, 2011; Nylander, 2014a; Velthuis, 2005). The adjacent concept of cultural intermediary has also been used to similar ends and involves professionals framing the legitimate use of cultural goods (Bessy & Chauvin, 2013; Heinich, 2012; Maguire & Matthews, 2012). To make a legitimate choice, the gatekeeper (or intermediary) needs to rely on conventional formats that reduce the uncertainty of initially not knowing what will be received, what to look for in what is received, and the consequences of selections and rejections. The worth of performances is established by qualification. Qualification happens by making a performance part of a broader category and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7_5

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evaluating whether it is a good or bad performance within the category (Franssen & Kuipers, 2020). Put differently, conventions of equivalence help to establish the inherent worth of objects or activities under evaluation. Like all social processes where qualification and justification happen, there are political and pragmatic consequences of operationalising a given selection instrument and gatekeeping procedure (Boltanski, 2011; Chiapello & Gilbert, 2019, p. 226). Therefore, in art programmes, the selection process tends to be a delicate exercise as the gatekeepers need to decide “what counts” and, by extension, who is an “appropriate student”. When confronted with the selection process, the teachers need to produce legitimate justifications for why the students are worthy of enrolment and how they came to this conclusion. To detect the conventions of worth adopted during the gatekeeping of the folk high school, we draw on the concept of selection tests (épreuves) (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). In these selection tests, the inherent uncertainty of selection becomes reduced through material arrangements that affirm and validate a given definition of reality and make students worthy of enrolment based on mutual agreement or negotiation among the teachers. Paraphrasing Boltanski (2011, p.  75), one could say that these selection tests set certain boundaries of what is possible and help stabilise and fixate reality by confirming “what is the case” and “what matters”. By focusing on the institutionalised selection of artistic programmes, it is possible to discern the assertion of what art education is good for by outlining the variation of worth operationalised in the gatekeeping process. We will differentiate between selection tests found among the teachers in prestigious art education and those working within ordinary art education. Admittingly, this is a simplified and crude distinction of the organisational identities of arts programmes at the folk high school. A folk high school’s status or relative cultural standing is neither binary nor dichotomous (cf. Aspers, 2005; Podolny, 2008). Yet, the two types of folk high school programmes characterise art education differently. The prestigious art programmes are education with a symbolic closeness to an established artistic field. The programmes typically build their justifications of selection on inspired orders of worth, downplaying or converting other potential logics to the aesthetic realm and the creative project. Through the inspired order of worth, art for art’s sake, and practical mastery of artistic conventions, the possibility for artistic innovation in the future becomes essential. The teachers are confronted with other forms of justification and

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evaluation principles where the individualised conceptualisation of “inspiration” is deemed more problematic. Ordinary art education is more closely related to leisure-based art activities or vocational fields beyond “the artistic world” narrowly defined. Teachers in ordinary art education tend to centre their selection on communitarian, domestic, and efficacious orders of worth. The practical challenges of taking responsibility for a diverse and heterogeneous community of students are often compared to the inherent “elitism” and social exclusivity of prestigious art education. The inspired order of worth also enters the mix as these teachers differentiate the students’ eligibility. But the appropriate students of ordinary art education should, above all, complete the programme and form a functional unity by being enthusiastic and motivated. In sharp contrast to the high regard for labour market integration and entrepreneurship in public policy, these moral and political framework of market order of worth are largely absent from the justification and selection of ordinary and prestigious art education. In Table 5.1, we have provided a comprehensive model of five of the dominating conventions of art education of the folk high school that differ from one another based on the dynamics of qualification and justification. In contrast to the private values derived from the students’ engagements, the justifications of the teachers’ need to lay claim to public values related to “the common good” in a more pronounced way in order to pass as legitimate (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Looking at selection tests in art education from the vantage point of pragmatic sociology requires us to be attentive to the generalised evaluation principles enforced in particularly sensitive and critical moments of artistic pursuits (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Stark, 2009). This attentiveness includes studying the formative role played by selection devices that help coordinate action and render some candidates included and others excluded. The questions of who partakes (Chap. 3) and what forms of engagement are accounted for (Chap. 4) are thus dependent on how selection happens and what counts as good or appropriate students. As we shall see, reaching agreements around selection often involves complicated negotiations on principles connected to ethics or aesthetics and representation or presentation. Test Formats in the Selection Processes of Art Education Teachers of aesthetic and culturally oriented education tend to use selection tools to help reduce the complexity of selecting incoming students for their programmes. These selection tools can be seen as an investment in

Know-how

Ritualistic

Efficacious

Domestic

Note: Modified model after Boltanski and Thévenot (2006)

Immorality

Inefficiency

Un-employment

Monetary

Market

Conformism Exclusivity

Artistic

Inspired

Considered problematic

Communitarian Societal

Form of information

Order of worth

Trust

Collegiality

Exchange

Mutuality

Dedication

Principal relationship

Evaluation criteria

Tradition

Competence

Personal growth

Utility

Creativeness and originality Sameness Collective group interests Entrepreneurship Bargaining power

Calling

Quality

Table 5.1  Five public orders of worth in art education at the Swedish folk high school

Civically Engaged Art Education Art Education for Labour Market Integration Functional Art Education Homely Art Education

Artistic Art Education

Type of art education

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form as it allows for qualitative assessments and comparisons based on what is valued (Thévenot, 1984). For example, many educational programmes make prospective students write personal letters, a literary genre that often is seen as giving room for private motifs, subjective experiences, and viewpoints. By letting the students craft their biography and outlining their thoughts about what they intend to learn, the teachers seek to identify dispositions, traits, and characteristics among the students that they believe will benefit the individual and the collective group. Another form of testing tool that the folk high school teachers in the arts often use to regulate these admission processes is the submission of work samples. In some cases, these work samples are directed to a single technique, object, or theme on the teacher’s demand. At other times, prospective students can choose samples based on their existing portfolio of work. The advantage of letting the students choose work samples from their existing portfolios could be that the teachers can create an understanding of the variety of artistic styles and blending people with different specialities and inclinations. In contrast, a more standardised work-sample procedure based on the deployment of a single technique, object, or theme allows for closer and more fine-grained comparability of the abilities and skills across a pool of candidates. Individually oriented art forms like creative writing and visual arts tend to use portfolios, work samples, letters, and interviews as the main vehicle for selection. Collective art forms like theatre or music often mobilise another test format commonly found in art education: auditions. Auditions are an assessment tool the music teachers in our sample use as a gatekeeping procedure to help identify the candidates’ abilities and how attuned they are to follow genre-specific artistic “standards” or conventions (Nylander, 2014a). The prospective students within the performing arts are thus commonly evaluated “in-action” and based on their ability to follow some procedural logic that is art-specific and partly improvised, rather than being assessed in absentia or based on individual discursive narration.

5.2  Ordinary Art Education Most courses at Swedish folk high schools are what we categorise as “ordinary art education”. Ordinary art education typically aims to let students learn a craft or continue practising it after acquiring some basic knowledge. Some students might try out if one’s dedication and interest in the

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art form are strong enough to pursue an artistic career. Teachers often make a virtue out of the social, voluntary, healthy, and joyful aspects of folk high school training within the arts. Recruitment tends to be more socially heterogeneous than within the more prestigious art programmes. The motifs among the fellow students are varied, with students mostly wanting to engage in art education as a “home”, “happening”, or “hospital” (Chap. 4). Among the most devoted students, who are there to test out their artistic pursuits as a potential hothouse, the ordinary art provider is a stepping-stone for more prestigious schools (Nylander, 2014b). Although the ordinary art programmes are oriented to the “folk” (English: “the people”) in a broad sense of this word, they often receive more applications than there is positions available. The situation of over-applicability forces teachers to choose what they value and arrange ways to determine how this selection is made. The Primacy of Enthusiasm, Excitement, and Efficiency When evaluating prospects for an ordinary programme, the art teachers primarily seek to understand if the student is grounded in their interest in learning a given artistic expression to secure attached, sustained, and prolonged artistic engagements throughout the entire course. Therefore, evaluating the drive and enthusiasm for the course and the artistic subject becomes vital in shaping their selection process. The teachers also have to create functional groups and seek to promote learning in a homely and conducive atmosphere that prompts every student to develop. The art teachers believe that they can observe manifestations of an “enthusiastic student” in the forms of selection they deploy, such as the wordings in application letters, the way someone plays an instrument, or the understanding of composition in a submitted painting or piece of writing. This enthusiasm among students can be related to students’ private values (Chap. 4) but tend to be extended towards more generalised conceptualisations of the “common good” in the grammar adopted by the gatekeepers (Table 5.1). The following teacher has many years of experience working in a creative writing course. This specific programme offering is quite popular and has had former students who have become established fiction authors. The course is not considered among the most prestigious ones among the folk high schools, and the way the writing teacher talks about the desired “traits” among her selected students reflects this.

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Interviewer: How do you go about with the selection when you get so many texts? Majken: Yes, it’s exciting. I am going to try to make a priority list for you. The person must want to invest a whole year of their life in this course. They must be genuine writers who cannot help but having a desire to spend a whole year just sitting down and writing text every week, reading all the books we read, and reading others’ texts. That I can read into the letter, that I can see in the text they submit. And I think it’s the first priority, that is, this motivation. Priority two, I look at the group composition. There are different people, from university students to healthcare assistants and preschool staff. All the different types of jobs you can imagine. Both highly educated and non-educated. […] Interviewer: What about literary composition? Majken: Yes, you look at that too. Interviewer: How important is it? Majken: It also weighs in heavily. However, those sort of things is what you should learn as this is an introductory course. It might be number three. (Majken, woman, creative writing teacher)

For Majken, enthusiasm and motivation to participate in the programme are paramount. When carefully reading submitted texts and personal letters, she tries to estimate whether the student is “a genuine writer” who “cannot help but having a desire to spend a whole year just sitting down and writing text”. Without students who show such a deep-seated desire to engage in the art form, it is hard to arrange it in the envisioned way. Key to her educational planning is the ability and acquired competencies to enjoy spending all these months together making and reading texts with people from all walks of life. She also considers having a “mix” of students to achieve a desirable communitarian group dynamic. Hence, what matters for Majken in the work samples is not the mastery of the artistic genre, the mannerism, etiquette, originality, or finesse manifested, as is more often the case in prestigious art education. Rather, she is looking for manifestations of a deep-seated desire to develop their literary craft and be part of the folk high school community. The writing programme is portrayed as civically engaged as an essential value revolves around having perspectives in the classroom from “all walks of life”, virtues the teachers want to balance against selecting productive and self-managing students with the right competence to complete the course. While authenticity and genuineness are emphasised, it is primarily a vehicle to propel them onwards, in

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conjunction with peers different from themselves and within the community spirit they will create together. While it may appear surprising that the manifested quality in the craft of writing is in third place in the selection of Majken’s writing course, she is not alone in thinking in this way. One of the visual art teachers responsible for an ordinary programme acknowledged the uncertainty and chance element in selecting her new students. Even if her narrative is characterised by humbleness as to the great difficulty of assessing the portfolios and letters sent in by her by potential students, she puts a lot of effort into evaluating these submissions to make justifiable choices. Margareta: It is very, very difficult to judge or evaluate the prospective students based on samples from their work. That’s why we go pretty much on the personal letter. Motivation. If you know what it’s all about, if you want to do this a lot, yeah. You really have to be motivated to attend this course. And I think that is the most important thing. […] Interviewer: When assessing prospective students, do you ever say, “I do not want to see this” or “When I see this, I feel ‘no’”? Margareta: Yes, you can think, “hm, well, this person feels like he’s just thrown something together, just to have something to present”. You can feel that sometimes, there is very little power and energy and thoughts put into it. And then maybe you do not put them at the top of the list. Then others have made fantastic presentations. You get impressed by that as a teacher, too. That’s how it is … But I think, among other things, you try to look for some kind of a feeling. I think it is the knowledge that comes from experience that is very difficult to describe. It is some kind of practical knowledge that … a feeling. It’s a little gut feeling and a little intuition and a little chance, I would say. (Margareta, woman, visual art teacher)

According to Margareta, visual art teacher, the most foundational quality she seeks to identify at the selection stage is hard to verbalise. Due to the difficulty in evaluating the aesthetic contributions submitted through work samples, Margareta prefers reading the personal letters which convey “what you want to do” and if they “know what it’s all about”. To continue the course and be sufficiently prepared to make art over an extended period, the students need to bring a deep-seated motivation that is perceived to last. When talking about what she does not want to see in the artworks and personal letters, it is clear that she can swiftly identify when someone has not put sufficient thought and heart into their submissions. Half-­heartedness is

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a clear warning sign for her, as it might render the students unable to persevere in the sometimes tedious process to learn and mature within the group and the artistic craft. Margareta also acknowledges that some students produce works and presentations that make a great impression on her from an artistic point of view. However, this kind of “gut-­feeling”, “intuition”, and “chance” in the selection process do not seem to rest heavily on the aesthetic and inspirational quality of having submitted a “fantastic presentation”.1 Within the music profiles, the prospective students are typically subjected to a selection test based on their ability to play “on stage” together with already enrolled students. In these types of selection tests, the candidate are evaluated based on their ability to follow along and play a particular genre or repertoire according to the genre-specific music conventions (cf. Bennett, 1980; Faulkner & Becker, 2009; Grazian, 2004; McCormick, 2009; Nylander, 2014a). Adam is one music teacher from our pool of “ordinary” music programmes who gives some flavour to these kinds of in vivo assessment procedures. Adam argues that working in a group and having the discipline to practice on your own are pivotal qualities that are supposed to be exhibited in these performances: Interviewer: But at  these auditions, do you look at how they function within the group? Adam: Yes, it’s paramount because we need to see that they are on the right level for this education to learn from the course, that they can work together. Exactly. But also that they have some prior knowledge, so that they can start playing in a group at once, that they are not complete beginners.  As a rule of thumb, most students here of have attended an aesthetics programme in the upper secondary school or something like that. This is not always the case but most of them can play, somewhat. And then, in addition to this, it is to a large extent about motivation to study music full-­time. Because that requires a lot of discipline, and much practice on your own. (Adam, man, music teacher) 1  The gut feeling experience from selecting participants is well-known in selection processes in the arts (Fürst, 2018; Nylander, 2014a; Strandvad, 2014) and is what evaluators rely on when making and motivating their decision in gatekeeping processes. In the end, the knowledge may come from their professionalisation into a position as a gatekeeper and the position of the folk high school in the educational field. The systematic use of gut feeling is based on being sensitised and professionalised into acting on particular experiences that arise when “discovering” a submission that may lead to accepting the submitted work (Fürst, 2018) or forming “sound judgments” in the case of jazz (Nylander, 2014a).

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Adam’s evaluation of competence illustrates that art-specific gatekeeping procedures can ultimately aim to create efficacious and functional ensembles. Playing music in an ensemble is a collective practice. Finding students at the “right level” with some basic abilities to master their respective instruments is a prerequisite for the whole group. Adam highlights that the course is an intermediary course, primarily oriented to students who already attended a music programme at upper-secondary school (Swedish: “gymnasium”) and now want to take their music practises towards the next level. Auditioning is a selection procedure that allows him to swiftly hear which level of complexity and what kind of collaborative skills each prospective student possesses before enrolment. While the course is not for “complete beginners”, his narrative is not indicating that mastery of specialised genre conventions is very emphasised (cf Nylander, 2014a). Instead, Adam seeks to understand if the student has acquired enough practical knowledge to be fully engrossed in board-based ensemble training and if they have the discipline and dedication required to advance in their learning trajectories throughout the year. Mitigating “Fragile Students” A common dilemma in the selection formulated by the school teachers of ordinary art education is students in a fragile state. For example, what to do with students suffering from psychological depression or mental issues. Is that a type of student that shall be prioritised or excluded from the imaginary community of appropriate folk high school students? When asked about “what are the no-gos”, Magnus, who works in a creative writing course, talks about what kind of prospective students to avoid in this way: Interviewer: What is it you do not want to see? When do you feel like “no, not this”? Magnus: Weak use of the Swedish language. Suffering from severe dyslexia, which we do not have the competence to handle properly. It’s not that common, but you can see it sometimes. You also check for when there is a lot of personal and psychological darkness in the texts. You get signals about mental problems. Then, again, we feel that we do not have the competence for handling that, either. Interviewer: No. That writing comes close to a form of therapy…

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Magnus: Yes. If there are suicidal motives and such in the text sample they submit, you get badly affected. You do not have time to engage in it too much. You cannot call them and interrogate them. Instead, you have to make use of intuition and your own teaching experience from previous years. (Magnus, man, creative writing teacher)

In this quotation, Magnus claims to be particularly cautious not to accept students who potentially suffer from some mental illnesses, weak language skills, or severe writing difficulties due to dyslexia. Due to the lack of professional support and the collective ambitions of learning creative writing, traits that indicate that the prospective students suffer from mental illnesses or dyslexia are excluded from his course. Taking these students on is regarded as taking up too much resources, jeopardise the collective learning practices, and create difficulties for him as a teacher. Within the evaluation procedure of the ordinary programmes lies a tension between rivalling orders of worth, exhibited in how these learning communities are formed and formatted. The folk high school might be expected to take care of students’ interests and needs regardless of their embodied states or physical form. It can also be seen as students that should be prioritised as they have a greater need to change their current course of action. The teacher may however choose to temper such civically engaged logic of inclusivity by referring to “the collective interest” of an efficient and functional community. In the case above, Magnus circumvents the tricky situation of justifying a “crude” or ableist selection by claiming a lack of competency to create the right kind of education for seemingly “fragile” students. The problem avoided seems in part attached to the ambition to develop an art education where the enthusiasm and the love of art are at the focus. Magnus believes that including students with mental illness or dyslexia can compromise his vision by being hard to align with his class’s general interest and direction. In his selection process, he expresses a compound of efficient, communitarian, and artistic forms of value and distances himself from more recuperative, compensatory, or philanthropic values. However, another creative writing teacher Tora works in a course on biographical writing that typically attracts a fair share of people in dire need to talk about their fragility and vulnerability. Persons who have experienced mental illness or psychological trauma are not necessarily avoided in her course:

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Interviewer: How did you come up with this course? Tora: One thing before was that the course was more about wanting to find people who otherwise did not get their voices heard. To some extent, this is still the case. But with my new colleague, we have reasoned a lot about building the best possible group and that it’s possibly not… It’s pretty good to have a mix of people. So not only [recruit] these very, very fragile individuals who, both linguistically and, yes, psychologically are somewhat torn or broken, who are searching … The best group are those where some people can lift and support [these fragile persons] […] It’s not easy for us. We almost think it requires a little more of us because we have to meet both these very basic needs but also those who have big ambitions with their writing. (Tora, woman, creative writing teacher)

Although Tora’s creative writing course does not specifically target fragile individuals, there seems to have been an explicit ambition of setting up this programme for persons who typically struggle to “get their voices heard”. By being focused on biographical writing, people with recreational and self-therapeutic ambitions with their writing are attracted to the course offering. Contrary to Magnus, the therapeutic element is, in this case, partly embraced by Tora and made to form an integral part of her programme.2 Gradually, the teachers have opted for a pragmatic compromise to help mitigate the problems arising from incorporating many of the students deemed to be in a rather vulnerable state. Students with signs of linguistic and psychological “fragility” are increasingly mixed with recruitment profiles of “stronger” students with “big ambitions”. Maximining the internal variation in the student body is practically motivated by supporting the most fragile individuals. However, such variation has created other challenges and dilemmas for the teachers. The composition of students needs to be addressed based on their very divergent knowledge base and a multitude of engagement. While enthusiasm is required for this course, the teachers raise the variety of psychological and physical abilities as part of the virtues that make the course publicly justifiable. Compared to Magnus, Tora stresses social justice and solidarity more, that is, a type of communitarian virtue that might incorporate a 2  This intricate topic relates to art education’s role as a hospital or as a form of self-therapy (see Chap. 4).

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heterogeneous recruitment structure even if it risks affecting social cohesion. Hence, variations within the communitarian order of worth can be challenging to commensurate even though they often form integral parts of ordinary art education. Since different orders of worth are justifiable in relation to “the common good”, their confrontation during the gatekeeping and selection processes often leads to uncertain and contestable outcomes (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Stark, 2009).

5.3  Prestigious Art Education High-status courses within the arts do not have problems with lack of excitement and enthusiasm. The prestigiousness of an arts programme is built on the fact that the programme is the object of enough collective enthusiasm to make it stand out from the rest of the providers in the same aesthetic universe. The abundance of applications to the prestigious art education builds a large “talent pool” from which the enactment of selection tests is operationalised. The small number of selected students paired with a history of high esteem sets these programmes apart, creating a narrative of its exclusivity. The teachers working within prestigious programmes within the arts often uphold artistic identities independently of their work as teachers. Their names are usually known to the most well-informed applicants well before embarking on their training and matter for them in how they navigate and make their school choices. Prestigious programmes at Swedish folk high schools are also keen to maintaining strong links to the professionalised artistic field. This work of maintaining a link to a professionalised sphere could involve taking in established writers, artists, or musicians to hold workshops and clinics in school, or touring and exhibiting the work of students at scenes that matter among the right type of connoisseurs or cultural intermediaries (Bessy & Chauvin, 2013; Maguire & Matthews, 2012). Among the alumni, many go on to pursue artistic careers and thus operate as “flagships” for recruiting more prospects to the educational programmes in the future.3 All of the above is important 3   A distinguished and prestigious course tends to attract lots of talented students, some of whom might go on to become renowned artists, writers, and musicians which, in return, can attract new cohorts of well-informed and apt prospects (Fürst, 2019).

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to establish the prestigious art programmes as hothouses of things to come, gain entry to the right networks, and brand them symbolically as valuable and worthwhile. Having more applicants than available study places makes room for evaluative judgements based on more refined aesthetic criteria. The high-­ status courses enforce evaluation procedures where the work’s aesthetic qualities and the personality and voice of each individual are foregrounded. Rather than justifying selection based on mimetic aesthetics and conventional rule-following, individual contributions and personal expressions are given weight. The students’ applications in the form of auditions, literary texts, and work samples are conceived of as “singularities” where the valorisation of quality is always uncertain and built on a multidimensional assessment of properties (Fürst, 2019; Karpik, 2010; Nylander, 2014a). In their evaluation, teachers tend to focus on more “field-specific” criteria for the legitimation of art (Bourdieu, 1993). That does not mean that their evaluation can be accomplished without proxies, conventions, and models that reduce the complexity of their decision making. The teachers make their informed decisions and sound judgments through field-specific tests and judgement devices (Karpik, 2010). Even in the most prestigious art programmes offered among the Swedish folk high schools, these stylistic and genre-specific qualification criteria are never the only axiomatic principle deployed. The gatekeepers to prestigious art schools also need to address some of the problems raised among the teachers of ordinary art education, such as social cohesion and the group’s composition as a whole. Teachers at prestigious art education are never entirely subsumed under a single value regime or pure aesthetic evaluation criteria. Nevertheless, the teachers of prestigious programmes move their emphasis from a civic and communitarian form of value towards a grammar of justification coloured by the conventions of the inspired order of worth. The prestigious art programmes safeguard their school’s brand to enable and facilitate the “right” type of cultural exchange. This safeguarding shows how their relationship to the highly restricted field of cultural production matters more here than it does for ordinary programmes (Table 5.1). The Primacy of Creativeness and Originality Therese is a teacher at one of the most prestigious creative writing courses. When discussing the recruitment of new students, Therese highlights the importance of the text-as-such, which the teachers take as the starting point for in-depth collegial deliberation. They expect someone who

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addresses an interesting “literary problem” and shows potential for innovation and artistic originality while preparing to read others and partake in collectively organised learning activities. Interviewer: How do you go about recruiting new students? Therese: Yes, well, we read. They apply with a personal letter and with text, and then we read all the texts, and then we select, and then we discuss the texts. They are accepted because of their text. Texts that we think … So, it is not necessarily that we admit those who are … how to say, write the best. It is more important that it feels like there on to an exciting question. That is, where one thinks that they have an interesting literary problem and that we think can be helped by coming here. With the help of the personal letter, you need to get the impression, since it is a very collective education, that you must be interested in reading. Otherwise, it will not work. It can not only be “now I will sit and write my own thing”, but it must be because  of a  greater interest than that, if you understand what I mean. So the group composition comes last. So primarily, it is the texts we accept, and then you can discuss it a bit. (Therese, woman, creative writing teacher)4

A crucial part of maintaining a high-status programme within art education is the ability to select participants based on a more fine-grained analysis of the quality of the submitted work, a given portfolio or performance. The selection to prestigious art programmes is typically conducted and monitored with great care. The student shall exhibit knowledge of the artistic genre conventions and her place and orientation within it. Quality is, for Therese, the same as the ability to develop a “literary problem”, which is manifested through the energy of the text itself. Although prospective students also write personal letters, the literary text is the primary material for selection. According to Therese, this submitted text sample does not need to contain all the stylistic qualities of an established writer. Yet, there needs to be a sense of some bigger artistic quest to be explored throughout the writing course. Rather than referring to the beauty of a text or its technical brilliance, it is the originality and innovation of the literary inquiry that takes centre stage for her justificatory talk. Being an eligible prospective 4  The aspects of affirmative action cut across all folk high schools. It will be discussed more at length below.

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student is partly to be in an exploration of a deep-seated literary problem. Still, the writing course is not focused on the individual authorship per se but rather on the conversation of literary texts in the making. As it is as much a creative writing course as it is a course in learning how to read and being read, the students’ ability to interpret and to valorising literary texts are also abilities they scout for when screening candidates.5 The creative writing course’s admission process and overarching design are similar to the visual art course where Nora works. Nora is a teacher at a programme that offers a renowned education for making graphic novels. The school has emerged as the go-to place for anyone who strives to make a living out of this emerging literary subgenre and has a clear first-mover advantage in this artistic segment (Aman & Wallner, 2022; Krantz, 2018). The school is located in an urban environment and offers two years of training; the first is where the students develop a deeper understanding of the artistic expressions of comics and graphic novels. Students mainly work on projects during the second year, specialising within a particular subsegment of comics and graphic novels. The focus for Nora when assessing prospective students is the quality, originality, and potential of the submitted work. She ponders that her programme is “an oddity” within the folk high school community, as it focuses so much on the quality of these work samples: Interviewer: What does the admission process look like? Nora: For the introductory year, which is the larger class, then there are work samples and a personal letter. You have ten pages to submit. What do you want from your series or artistic attempts and such? Our selection process does not feel particularly in line with the ethos of a folk high school. We look at both artistic expression and potential in the work samples, and then we try to have a class composed of demographically diverse groups so that age and gender and ethnicity and origin in urban or rural areas and a few factors are taken into consideration. And its the same with this second year, the project year, which is … then you apply with a project description of what you want to do in terms of creative projects in a year at school under supervision. It is a work sample we assess. And similarly, we try to compose a diverse group. 5  For an analysis of literary debuts and attendance to various writing schools, see Fürst (2019), and for the relative importance of writing school participation for a continued career after the literary debut, see Fürst (2022).

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Interviewer: Besides trying to mix, or attempting to mix, students of different backgrounds, what is it you want to see? What do you look for in work samples and letters? Nora: Yes. In letters, we look for, partly for these background factors that I mentioned before, but also whether you seem to be a person who kind of likes to work in a group and not just invest everything in your artistic self and your creative project. If there is someone who may have been involved in organising comic book festivals or part of a comic book collective or something like that, well, then we think that is a positive thing. Also, we consider if the person would fit in at a folk high school or something like that. Other folk high schools have interviews, and I think we look for the same kind of things in these letters. As for the work samples, it’s harder to put your finger on what is important because words like quality, potential, and originality sound so evaluatory and are a bit arbitrary. But we are four teachers in the collegial team, and we make this selection together, and it’s some kind of quality, potential, a threshold of originality, or something like that, that you look at. Even though it is very personal and arbitrary, that is what it’s all about. And we also try to form a diverse class that we think would, well, maybe not like five fantasy cartoonists and another five autobiographical artists, but rather a variation in the expressions, and so on. So that the class has the best opportunity to learn something from one another and so on. (Nora, woman, visual art teacher)

For Nora, the work sample is of the utmost importance. It is about discovering and sensing the work’s qualities as standing out from the rest of the submitted work samples. It’s a complicated and multifaceted thing to assess these artistic samples as they can exhibit maturity and originality. The students should preferably exhibit some longer track record within the specific field of comics, where book festivals and art collectives are mentioned as two concrete examples. In acknowledging experiences from organising comic festivals and events, Nora unifies values from being civically engaged for the sake of the art form and the artistic valuation principles acquired by being in that universe for a long period. Regarding the various subgenres, it is important for the gatekeepers that various graphic novels and comics are represented, which also relates to finding a variation in demography and social disposition among the students.

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Nora resembles Therese in that she is concerned about the social composition of the class. In this case, the dilemma is expressed through doubts about whether their selection procedures align with the communitarian ethos of a folk high school. Despite such worries, the general evaluation principles given priority in the selection process are grounded in the “collegial team”. While diversity is important, and the teachers want to break the dominance of students with similar traits by age, gender, class, ethnicity, and geographic origin, they would never admit someone solely because they happen to represent an underrepresented group. While quality, potential, and originality are acknowledged as “a bit arbitrary”, these aspects still form the heart of the evaluation procedure. However, the comic arts programme does not want their students to have the ambition to “go solo” straight from the get-go, so they also tend to look for prospects that they can cooperate with the other students, as that facilitates the learning processes for all. Hence, the qualification framework at play seems somewhat similar to the creative writing course: the artistic work sample is paramount, and consideration of group composition and social cohesion comes later. At the same time, enthusiasm and drive to complete the art programme are largely taken for granted. The music course Sonja is responsible for has been very popular, carving out its niche among courses within Nordic folk music and sing-and-­ songwriting. However, this course has recently faded out of popularity and does not attract as many applicants as before. Nevertheless, the course has a high status within its particular subgenre, as many alumni have pursued a career in the freelance-based singer–songwriter genre. In the interview with the programme manager, Sonja talked at length about why she had decided not to arrange the admission in the form of auditions: Interviewer: Do you have an audition, or do they submit work samples? Sonja: I have been stubborn. I will continue for a while, at least not having an audition, no. They can come and visit us, and many do come to see how we teach and so on. I want letters, pretty in-depth letters about who they are, and I want an audio recording. And we get that via the internet… before it was a cassette tape, it’s not the case any longer [laughs]. […] First of all, I think it would be awful to sit on a jury in the form of an audition. Secondly, I know that some would do so badly because they are nervous. Travelling all this way and being under pressure. We recruit from all Nordic countries. So an Icelander would be admitted, but not because he

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is from Iceland. I think we are a few who sit with it every year, and I think we have learned to listen. And we listen in different ways, someone listens to lyrics, and someone else listens to the instruments, and I listen well to the tonality of the voice and stuff like that. Mm. So we do not have an audition, no. (Sonja, woman, music teacher)

Despite not having an audition, the teachers in this singer and song-­ writing programme claim to prioritise the aesthetic qualities in the submitted sound samples. The stance that the programme has taken against setting up conventional music auditions is legitimised by the teacher claiming to get a better chance to capture the real artistic abilities of the prospective student. The students may feel more at ease when performing and recording music in their home environment or music studios. The competent judges evaluating each sound sample have “big ears” and specialise in slightly different aspects of the recorded performances. One is “listening” for text writing, another one specialises in the craft of playing the guitar, and Sonja herself is putting her main focus on the voice. Together the different teachers can discern genre-specific aspects of the sing-and-­ songwriter genre into a compounded classification and ranking. They have “learned to listen” carefully to these performances and seek to build their recruitment on the most talented candidates from all over the Nordics. Aesthetic Quality and Inclusiveness? Even among the prestigious art programmes at the top of the educational status hierarchies within music, creative writing, and the visual arts, gatekeepers are often torn and troubled when faced with the question of selection. The formatting of these selection tests makes their work slightly easier. It grounds their judgements of quality and value in material arrangements that create comparability (cf. Chiapello & Gilbert, 2019, p. 226; Karpik, 2010; Leemann & Imdorf, 2019; Thévenot, 1984). Yet, their task of selecting “appropriate” students seems to be haunted by complicated negotiations on principles connected to ethics/aesthetics and representation/presentation. The most frequent confrontations of contested orders of worth in gatekeeping are between egalitarian-communitarian ideals and the deployment of more strict aesthetic evaluation criteria. The Swedish art programmes of high cultural esteem from our sample are still supposed to align with the public policy for Swedish folk high

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schools. These policies are explicitly aimed at (i) “strengthen and develop democracy”, (ii) “make it possible for people to influence their own lives and create commitment to participate in social development”, (iii) “eliminate educational disparities and raise the level of enlightenment and education in society”, (iv) “bridge educational gaps and raise the level of education and cultural awareness in society”, and (v) “broaden interest in culture and increase participation in cultural life” (Folkbildningsrådet, 2014, p. 12). The spokespersons of these schools are expected to conform to the universalistic and egalitarian ideals about the purpose of popular education and cultural policy in Sweden (see e.g. Johannisson, 2018; Mangset & Hylland, 2017; Verdier, 2018). At the same time, if the selection of students were to be based exclusively on a compensatory logic or a civic order of worth, they would rather quickly eradicate the prestigiousness of their art programmes and do their work in aligning the students’ engagements more difficult. Hence, closer to the ground, we can see how the teachers try to grapple with the selection by drawing on rather incompatible value registers, particularly related to ethics and aesthetics (cf. Heinich, 1993). As we have seen, these issues were perceived and solved differently in prestigious art education compared to processes within ordinary art education. For prestigious art education, diversity and representation are often raised as quality issues for the artistic renewal of the aesthetical expressions within the field and a strategy for establishing a fertile group dynamic to refine the artistic practice. Referring to creativity and originality, the renewal of which voices, expressions, and sounds that get a chance to reach public recognition, cannot be executed void of the reflections of who these students are. Due to the proximity between the top echelons of the educational programmes and the professionalised artistic production, the responsibility of creative renewal rests more heavily on the shoulders of these gatekeepers than what is typically the case in ordinary art education. The teachers also have higher expectations of the entry level of each of their students and share an expectation that selections should be based on intra-aesthetic qualities to be fair and just. The teachers of the prestigious art schools did not pose the perennial problem of diversity as an individual question of rights, nor did they meditate much about the potential risk for systematic discrimination in their selection procedure. Rather, the gatekeepers to these prestigious schools tended to translate these ethical issues into a question of revitalising the aesthetic domain by indicating which voices and personal expressions are

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deemed likely to stand out within a given genre and create a fertile ground for deliberations and creative group dynamics. Majken, a creative writing teacher, sums this attitude up by saying: Majken: If I can find, among all these applicants, a variation of social groups, some of foreign origin etc., then I want these due to the composition it creates […] The best text discussions are generated when people have different backgrounds, different genders and different ages. (Majken, woman, creative writing teacher)

Even if these gatekeepers rarely think about their social selection in compensatory terms, they seek to create compromises between the inspired and the communitarian orders of worth. The tension between aesthetics and ethics is not conceived as an antinomy (Karpik, 2010). Rather, when granted attention, diversity is largely seen as a vehicle for creating better and more dynamic learning environments in the servitude of progressing and refining the students’ artistic expressions and, ultimately, the art form itself. The justifications and arguments put forth by the gatekeepers to prestigious programmes can thus still be mobilised to justify broader and more diverse recruitment to prestigious art education but through a process of “refraction” of the normative framework (cf. Bourdieu, 1993; Peters & Roose, 2020; Viala, 1989). For the selection process to appear fully legitimate in the eyes and ears of the gatekeepers to prestigious schools, they should preferably focus on the intra-aesthetical dimension of how artistic expressions need to be refined, but basing those evaluations on the experiences of those students whose voices have hitherto been marginalised can make them more likely to renew the canon or convention they are active in. In the deployment of selection instruments and enforcement of evaluation criteria, the gatekeepers maintain a strong focus on identifying students with salient abilities and attributes that can set them apart from their peers based on artistic conventions. The reference points deployed by the gatekeepers of elite programmes mainly draw on conventions derived from the artistic world of inspiration, where dedication, passion, and devotion ought to be paired with individual abilities to master and innovate within any given artistic universe. Communitarian forms of valuation thus seem to exercise only indirect influence over the selection process of these prestigious programmes. Still, these gatekeepers are constantly trying to

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balance their narratives and selection processes to avoid being regarded as elitists or exclusionary.

5.4  Conclusions This chapter has focused on the teachers’ operationalisation and justifications of selection tests guarding access to art programmes in Swedish folk high schools. One way to describe the gatekeeping process is that teachers rely on selection tests to reduce complexity and form legitimate decisions by classifying prospective participants to hold a certain quality and justifying their decisions by relating them to an established public “order of worth” (Table 5.1). The fact that these selection and evaluation processes rely on practical knowledge that is hard to codify into a fixed and standardised template does not mean that the judgement of these gatekeepers is more arbitrary, chance-based, or weakly grounded than any other professional judgement (Hamann & Beljean, 2019). Uncertainty in these selection tests is, in part, the product of most art programmes having more applicants than they have available study places. This structural oversupply of prospective students is also a prerequisite to enforcing any type of criteria of evaluation at all, as the qualification and justification processes need to be based on choices of preference. The teachers we interviewed relied on disparate forms of evaluations such as auditions, work samples, portfolios, and personal letters to facilitate their selections. To be perceived as legitimate and orderly, they deployed instruments to make candidates comparable to one another and presented argumentations around the most critical qualities in their function as gatekeepers. The gatekeepers often faced difficult choices as the selection tests ultimately needed to be coordinated and commensurated into a more unified structure and justified in relation to the dominant understandings of “the common good” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006; Espeland & Stevens, 1998). In the case of ordinary art education, the teachers tend to formulate heterodox evaluatory claims. It is typical for the teachers of ordinary art programmes to use a functionalistic and composite set of qualification criteria. To evaluate the candidates’ ability for sustained aesthetic engagements, their enthusiasm and inner drive is often assessed in conjunction with forming efficacious and productive work units. The art teachers of ordinary art education programmes aspire to form heterogeneous student

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groups and derive much of their legitimacy from a communitarian value register. The folk high school is supposed to constitute a social meeting place between persons with different life experiences and social dispositions, whose artistic engagements are supposed to express a plurality of voices void of hierarchical relations. Folk high schools are typically organised by organisations in civil society and seek to adhere to egalitarian goals formulated by civil society as well as the Swedish Welfare-state. Hence, these artistic programmes might have a more collective, amatorial, and civic spirit than what is commonplace in art education in other countries (Mangset & Hylland, 2017). Students also detect this institutional ethos of egalitarianism, solidarity, and sameness. In fact, they expect their post-compulsory artistic training to be conducted in a homely and cosy institutional environment (see Chaps. 2 and 4). The great emphasis the teachers of ordinary art education put on enthusiasm, excitement, and confidence can also be related to the self-directed learning enacted in many of these schools (Chap. 2). To create functional groups, the  teachers need  students who can take full responsibility for their learning trajectories, creating patterns of exclusion for those deemed too complicated, fragile or torned. School entry requirements can always be thrown into question, and are even likely to become so, as these selection processes have material consequences for both the selected and the rejected students. For prestigious art education, inclusivity and heterogeneity in social selection tend to convert to the aesthetic refinement within the artistic craft or the “unique” and creative expression embodied by a person that “stands out” among other artists-in-the-making. The fundamental role that inspirational orders of worth have within the world of art (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Bourdieu, 1993) is more clearly discernible in the selection tests adopted by elite schools. These tests aim to show how each individual relates to the genre-specific conventions which is much easier to do with a large pool of candidates. The prestigious programme’s interest in standing out is aligned and highly dependent on the students’ abilities to perform well within the realm of restrictive artistic production. Navigating and prioritising a selection based on these aesthetic evaluation criteria thus allows the programmes to maintain their positions as reputable and of symbolic value within the artistic field. Yet, these selection test is always at risk of being challenged based on rivalling orders of worth, especially when the tests are critiqued based on the effects of having enforced narrow art-specific evaluation criteria

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favouring some segment of the “folk” (demos) in the past. As this inspirational mode of evaluation is individualistic at its core but tends to favour homogeneous social groups, hence it is a form of valuation that needs to be balanced against the demands of forming socially inclusive and heterogeneous student groups on a collective basis. Conceived as a selection test or grand moment, the gatekeeping procedures to prestigious art schools are both haunted by and thrive upon uncertainty. Not knowing in advance who will be selected and what is evaluated is, in fact, something that may aid in producing more applicants than available positions. If the selection game were seen as predetermined or rigged, there would be no reason for so many candidates to feel “called upon” (Mangset, 2004; Menger, 2014). At the same time, the arrangements for selection tests in the arts need to be perceived as consistent and fair for the schools to be trusted as institutional actors (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006). Suppose the justification procedures appear arbitrary, for example, by drawing on many incompatible principles and evaluation techniques to derive what is valuable. In that case, the legitimacy of the selection might be thrown into doubt and calls for greater transparency may be raised. In the end, the teachers need to be organising their selection procedures in ways that make these contestable choices pass as legitimate and orderly, even if they themselves often acknowledge that their preferences are, to some extent, subjective or deeply personal. Now that we have familiarised ourselves with students’ engagements and the processes of qualification and justification in selection tests from the vantage point of its gatekeepers, it is time to turn to what happens as the students have been enrolled. How are all these varied engagements aligned after the initial selection process? How are the trials and tribulations of artistic practice arranged on an everyday basis once the students are enrolled at the school? What kind of assignments and exercises are the folk high school students subjected to, and how do these institutional tests align and coordinate action in situ?

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Fürst, H. (2022). The Curse of the Difficult Second Book: Continuation and Discontinuation in Early Literary Careers. Poetics, 92, 92101642. ­https://doi. org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101642 Grazian, D. (2004). The Production of Popular Music as a Confidence Game: The Case of the Chicago Blues. Qualitative Sociology, 27(2), 137–158. https://doi. org/10.1023/B:QUAS.0000020690.48033.00 Hamann, J., & Beljean, S. (2019). Career Gatekeeping in Cultural Fields. American Journal of Cultural Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41290-­019-­00078-­7 Heinich, N. (1993). Framing the Bullfight: Aesthetics Versus Ethics. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 33(1), 52–58. https://doi.org/10.1093/ bjaesthetics/33.1.52 Heinich, N. (2012). Mapping Intermediaries in Contemporary Art According to Pragmatic Sociology. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(6), 695–702. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549412450634 Hirsch, P. (1972). Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems. American Journal of Sociology, 77(4), 639–659. Johannisson, J. (2018). Kulturpolitisk styrning och kulturpolitiska reformer i Sverige. http://kulturanalys.se/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2018/04/Kulturpolitisk-­ styrning_webb.pdf Karpik, L. (2010). Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities. Princeton University Press. Krantz, G. (2018). Fanzines and Swedish Comics Memory. In M.  Ahmed & B. Crucifix (Eds.), Comics Memory (pp. 267–276). Palgrave Macmillan. Leemann, R.  J., & Imdorf, C. (2019). Das Potenzial der Soziologie der Konventionen für die Bildungsforschung. In C.  Imdorf, R.  J. Leemann, & P. Gonon (Eds.), Bildung und Konventionen (pp. 3–45). Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­658-­23301-­3_1 Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers. Harper & Brothers. Maguire, J. S., & Matthews, J. (2012). Are We All Cultural Intermediaries Now? An Introduction to Cultural Intermediaries in Context. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(5), 551–562. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1367549412445762 Mangset, P. (2004). ‘Mange er kalt, men få er utvalgt’: kunstnerroller i endring. Telemarksforsking. Mangset, P., & Hylland, O. M. (2017). Kulturpolitikk: organisering, legitimering og praksis. Universitetsforlaget. McCormick, L. (2009). Higher, Faster, Louder: Representations of the International Music Competition. Cultural Sociology, 3(1), 5–30. https://doi. org/10.1177/1749975508100669

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Mears, A. (2011). Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model. University of California Press. Menger, P.-M. (2014). The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty. Harvard University Press. Nylander, E. (2014a). Mastering the Jazz Standard: Sayings and Doings of Artistic Valuation. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2(1), 66–96. https://doi. org/10.1057/ajcs.2013.13 Nylander, E. (2014b). Skolning i jazz: Värde, selektion och studiekarriär vid folkhögskolornas musiklinjer. Linköpings universitet. Peters, J., & Roose, H. (2020). From Starving Artist to Entrepreneur. Justificatory Pluralism in Visual Artists’ Grant Proposals. The British Journal of Sociology, 71(5), 952–969. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-­4446.12787 Podolny, J. M. (2008). Status Signals: A Sociological Study of Market Competition. Princeton University Press. Stark, D. (2009). The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life. Princeton University Press. Strandvad, S. M. (2014). Contingencies of Value: Devices and Conventions at a Design School Admission Test. Valuation Studies, 2(2), 119–151. https://doi. org/10.3384/vs.2001-­5992.1422119 Thévenot, L. (1984). Rules and Implements: Investment in forms. Social Science Information, 23(1), 1–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901884023001001 Velthuis, O. (2005). Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton University Press. Verdier, É. (2018). Europe: Comparing Lifelong Learning Systems. In M. Milana, S. Webb, J. Holford, R. Waller, & P. Jarvis (Eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning (pp.  461–483). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­55783-­4_24 Viala, A. (1989). Prismatic Effects. In P. Desan, P. P. Ferguson, & W. Griswold (Eds.), Literature and Social Practice (pp.  256–266). The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 6

What Happens in Class? Testing Students’ Engagements

6.1   Introduction: An Underdog Barks Back It is rare that students have the chance to debate the public worth of art education. But in 2012, a student of the most prestigious creative writing school in Sweden, Lidija Praizović, published an autofiction story of her time at the folk high school in a newly started literary magazine. The selective and closed nature of this particular creative writing school and the successful track record of its alumni had by this time established a widespread interest in all things related to this specific literary establishment. How are they able to constantly provide the literary field with new writers? How is their teaching shaping the conventions of Swedish fiction writing and poetry? What happens at that school? Praizović’s publication addresses these issues in a highly iconoclastic way by telling the author’s story. She writes about her humble and rather impoverished background growing up with a mother from Serbia who had worked as a cleaner, dinner-lady, and child-minder before entering early retirement due to chronic muscular pain. Her background is juxtaposed with subsequent encounters with fellow students at the creative writing school and the school’s culture and everyday conversations. The other students are predominantly described as having upper-middle-class backgrounds, with parents who work in culture or as academics and originate from Sweden or the rest of the Nordics (see Chap. 3). To a large degree,

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the students are presented as unaware of their privileged social origins, facilitating their ease of settling into this literary environment. Conflicts and tensions between Praizović and her other fellow students loom large in the narrative. In part, this situation is attributed to the naturalness embodied and enacted by her fellow students in this “world of letters”, which is contrasted to Praizović’s underdog position as having to struggle for passing as a legitimate subject. That cool distant way other people have and which I’m so bloody jealous of and because of this despise from the bottom of my heart, those who can afford not to make an effort, who can afford to put their heart & brains on standby, who can afford to look cool. FUCKING HELL, I can’t believe how much [name of fellow student] is making me cringe right now…. (Praizović, 2012, p. 31)

By fully disclosing the names of her fellow students in the text, their social dispositions, sexual interests, and private interactions, Praizović made the relationships and life-forms encountered at the creative writing school into her literary project. While autofiction writing was a literary genre en vogue during this time, Praizović’s literary project created a controversy. As her fellow students also read these texts during their creative writing class, they became more and more upset and wanted her to stop writing about them in this non-fictionalised form. Following the final publication of Praizović’s text, a public debate arose that focused on the recruitment to the most prestigious creative writing schools in the artistic realm. The debate related literary cultivation to classical sociological issues of privilege and social reproduction, a culture strongly circumvented by class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. Akin to the “unveiling” of privilege that can be performed by a critical sociologist (Boltanski, 2011), Praizović attempted to throw into question what she perceived to be the basic principles for governing access to the writing school and, by extension, established literary life in Sweden. The author’s autofiction story published in an avant-garde literary magazine can be understood as an effort to disrupt the co-option of a certain group of people predestined to be taken up and cherished within the literary field while at the same time claiming her place within it. Praizović’s text turns the unease she experienced blending into the most prestigious writing schools into a creative asset. The underdog barks and seeks to turn her disadvantages into an advantage by writing the text and publicly naming and critiquing life at the writing school. Praizović is evoking the line of conflict reminiscent of the gatekeeping troubles we

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explored in Chap. 5. The established “elitist” reproduction of “high culture” is juxtaposed to egalitarian ideals of widening access, regardless of ethnicity or social origin. To successfully navigate in this space by blending in and “afford not to make an effort”, Praizović was supposed to be someone she was not. While it is hard to generalise from a single narrative, especially when the accounts are from a highly prestigious literary establishment like the one Praizović attended, the story shows tacit norms not generally associated with Swedish folk high schools or Nordic popular education (Gustavsson, 2019; Korsgaard, 2019; Verdier, 2018). While there are evident tensions between artistic legitimacy and inclusivity among the folk high schools, the controversy triggered by Praizović’s writing also had another moral and ethical dimension. Her autofiction story seemed to transgress the trust and sense of community among fellow students. Praizović’s text highlights the appropriate ways of being engaged in art education, for example, the norms of participation being “put to the test” in everyday classroom settings. Hence, her text provides a fruitful starting point to the questions to be explored further in this chapter: How do art education students get recognition for their cultural and educational engagements? What type of values are meant to be enacted in practice? What kind of institutionalised tests prompt students to understand art in a given way, and why are some students reacting to it with bewilderment, perplexity, or contestation? To further explore the importance of tests and tribulations that may lead to confirmation or contestation within everyday folk high school settings, we will draw on a few ethnographic scenes from a visual art course and a creative writing course. Contrary to the prestigious creative writing school Praizović attended, we base these ethnographies on programmes that are less elitist and more mundane and ordinary.1 However, the selected ethnographic accounts feature practical situations where students are 1  The practical tests we study are derived from two different art courses at the folk high school: one full-semester visual arts course as well as a short four-day writing course. The data from the visual art course build on the non-participant observation data gathered by Filippa Millenberg in the process of writing her thesis “Att mötas på folkhögskola: En studie om folkhögskollärares pedagogiska hållning” (2023). The short writing course was attended by one of the authors of this text (Henrik Fürst) as a participant-observer. The two ethnographies complement each other. Fürst provides a detailed account of experiences of being tested as a student, where the temporally bounded nature of the course provides a miniature portrait of entering, participating, and leaving a class. Millenberg’s study provides snapshots throughout ordinary art education where the teacher’s testing of students is in focus.

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supposed to acquire particular ways of engaging and acting in class through material arrangements that bind them together and test their abilities to follow artistic and social conventions. While Praizović’s story exemplifies resistance by the critical ambition of “opening one’s eyes” to the unequal access to elite institutions in the arts, we explore what being “put to the test” in ordinary art education might mean.

6.2   Being Put to the Test The framework of pragmatic sociology can help describe how the participation of students is “put to the test” to prescribe legitimate forms of engagement. Hence, this chapter explores numerous situations of what is considered appropriate and worthwhile. In the framework put forth by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006, pp. 147–148), a test can be viewed as a type of grand moment, that is, situations in which the potential value registers are manifested. Even with a radical openness towards different cultural pursuits, as outlined in the previous chapters, the teachers of art programmes continuously test and mould students based on what they can do and how they do it. Even more mundane decisions of teachers’ work require them to be reflective around moral and aesthetic evaluations: the time they devote to each of their students; the valorisation they formulate to a draft, sketch, or jamming session; the deliberations around these students’ “progress” or lack thereof and so on. According to Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 31), tests always have a normative and political dimension and are fundamental for establishing legitimacy: The test is always a test of strength. That is to say, it is an event during which beings, in pitting themselves against one another […], reveal what they are capable of and, more profoundly, what they are made of. But when the situation is subject to justificatory constraints, and when the protagonist judges that these constraints are being genuinely respected, the test of strength will be regarded as legitimate.

One way to get a hold of these justificatory and normative dimensions during artistic training is to look for situations where misalignment and alignment occur in practice. These moments typically involve

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presenting or performing some artistic test in front of significant others, where each case consists in being subjected to the judgement and evaluation of competent peers and “informed” critics.2 Very few of these testing moments led to the kind of public controversy Praizović experienced when making her renowned writing school’s unofficial norms and the fellow students’ names, social dispositions, and sexual orientations become the object of a literary publication. Instead, as Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p.  31) point out, institutionalised tests tend to be conceived of as fully legitimate and sound. Students might object to the outcome of the test, and might feel some unease in conforming to its normative underpinnings, but rarely question the very existence of institutionalised tests or even the forms in which these tests are designed and deployed. Since art education consists of many moments when the fragility of learning an artistic craft is put to the test, it provides ample empirical evidence of certain delimitations between what “is” and what “ought” to be (Boltanski, 2011). Boltanski (2011, pp.  103–104) further distinguishes between different types of tests and their role in instituting or calling into question “the state of reality”. The foundational task of institutions, such as art schools, is to deploy what Boltanski calls truth tests. Truth tests are meant to affirm and validate the social order through confirmation acts. In the case of art programmes, these operations of confirming reality tend to be less hierarchical and formalistic than what is typically the case in other educational settings. Any test and outcome can be thrown into doubt, questioned, and critiqued, like in the Praizović story presented above. On these occasions, Boltanski talks about reality tests and existential tests, which are often mobilised to direct two kinds of critique, reformist, or radical, towards the prevailing social order based on the multitude of experiences people have in the world.

2  The idea that habitual ways of doing things get interrupted in social life through a series of “tests” can be related to classical forms of American pragmatism. Among founders of American pragmatism, like John Dewey, these processes of learning artistic skills and competencies have often been described in terms of their embodied and iterative processes of creation (Dewey, 2005; Shusterman, 2000). The more contemporary conceptualisations that make use of such a pragmatic framework include Boltanski and Thévenot (1999), Hutter and Stark (2015), Muniesa and Linhardt (2011).

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In our following presentation, the fragility of being subjected to educational assignments and exercises will be understood as institutional tests to align and coordinate action. To understand how the folk high school teachers seek to align and coordinate the students’ activities in time and space, we need to look more carefully at their educational planning and acts of recognition operationalised in practice. The design and deployments of these testing moments are typically centred on the work of teachers.

6.3   Learning to Let Go: Exploring Artistic Practices at a Visual Art Course A relevant ethnographic account of tests in art education comes from work by Filippa Millenberg. Millenberg studies an “ordinary visual arts course” offered by a folk high school in the south of Sweden. In what is to follow, we draw on Millenberg’s ethnographic material to depict how a group of novel art students is made to do, discuss, and understand potential contributions to “land art” and “abstract painting”. The context in which these ethnographic sequences play out is a school with a modest application ratio and a rather heterogeneous intake of students in terms of social backgrounds and artistic ambitions. The ethnographic emphasis is centred on the role of the teacher, whose work lies in focus for Millenberg’s (2023) thesis. Doing Land Art In one of the first exercises of the course, the students get a group assignment to do land art. The students are directed to walk out of the folk high school into the surrounding environment to do this exercise. As the school has a facility situated in the countryside, close to nature with a lake surrounded by a forest, the teachers have made use of the possibilities of outdoor education by designing a land art exercise. Land art often involves doing art in places far from populated areas and using materials from the earth, such as soil, rocks, vegetation, and water, which resonates well with its scenic placement. Land art, which is sometimes also referred to as earth art, is described to the students with reference to the work of Andy Goldsworthy, who is

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one of the teacher’s favourite artists. Working with ideas and concepts relating to what art is and how one shapes nature to create art is supposed to allow the students to (re)address fundamental questions thoroughly discussed and debated in the history of art and art criticism. The teacher starts by contrasting land art to the conventional art in studios and exhibition halls which tends to be more static, and the material object is less bound to change. As a source of inspiration for their upcoming exercise, she exhibits a selection of pictures of Goldsworthy’s work on a PowerPoint slide. When this PowerPoint presentation seems to be finished, she says: – Then you understand exactly what to do? (chuckles and sweeps with her eyes across the classroom). Time is limited, and you should not make such grand works of art as depicted in those pictures. It need not be so complicated with land art (she then shows a picture of a 4-year-old boy who has created an “artwork”). This art is changeable and evolving, so you must document your artwork. We will walk around the venue next week and see what is left, but we will also look at the photos you have taken of each work and during your process… – Then, we will divide you into groups. Do you want teachers to help with this? How many are we? (counts) 34. How many groups will there be then? All participants are given a number for a different group to become randomly mixed. The teachers now stand and count people into groups: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4… – Has everyone received a number? (no one protests and the teachers affirm this is the case by nodding). Yes, then it’s time to find the right group… The headteachers then indicate where each group is meant to meet in the classroom. She takes on one group at a time and points out the meeting place by standing on it and saying: “group one should be here” until all groups are formed.

Compared to the clearity of instructions for forming groups, the collective task of creating land art seemed vague and rather mammoth for the newly formed groups. The grandiose work from the celebrated land artist Goldsworthy seems to be echoing in their bodies and minds, and none of them seems very familiar with the genre of land art from before. Evidently conscious of this reception and to lower their expectations and play down the magnitude and seriousness of the test, the teacher had included an image of a young child making something akin to land art.

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The mode of engaging in exploration, discovery, and curiosity that comes more naturally for a four-year-old child is meant to encourage playfulness. The assignment is purposefully designed ambiguously as a test for the students to consider art in new ways, bringing students into an alignment by evoking their curiosity and exploration. As they are all new to land art and are all equal in relation to nature, the basic idea is that the students could do almost “anything” in the surrounding terrains and then try to justify it as art. Through the exercise, the students are to transform themselves away from a closed, rigid, and rule-based understanding of art-­ making, to enter an open and explorative mode where their curiosity can flourish. The most crucial element in this form of testing is that the students are supposed to engage in exploration and collective learning of their own will. Rhetorical questions like “do you want teachers to help?” or “then you understand exactly what to do?” are meant to signal to the students that they are expected to take over the responsibility for the exercise from the teachers as these groups are formed. In one of the groups that took on the invitation to the land-based exercise aimlessly, the teacher eventually felt the need to intervene. After a while, this teacher gives more and more explicit suggestions of how the students can go about, before she finally stops herself in her tracks and exclaims: “No, I will not get involved in what you do, now I am silent…”. She then moves into the background again and says to the researcher doing fieldwork that she has such a hard time being silent once she gets going. After this brief and ambiguous injection, the group is again left to their own devices. The teachers return to aiding the groups with various instruments and materials that they consider useful to model and transform the surrounding land in artistic ways. Hence, the assignment is, above all, designed to test students’ ability to try and find their creative capabilities. The teachers battle with striking a balance between getting too deep into doing the actual exercise and getting them going. After a while, the teacher recognises her tendency to get too actively involved in the project and backs off, leaving a new void of silence. When speaking to another teacher about the exercise, she says that the assignment fosters experimental, curious, and exploratory attitudes among these students. She says that the initial mindset tends to be hindered by performance anxieties and the potential risk of doing something “wrong” in relation to the usual standardised tests. When something fails, they should rather be thinking, “Oh, what a thrill, what happened to this

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thing?”, as this process of trial-and-error is all about being open to discovering something. What lies at the heart of this artistic exercise is to form the heterogeneous student body into an explorative mode of engagement in line with the “bohemian artist” (Fine, 2018; Lloyd, 2002; Seigel, 1986; Wohl, 2021). The unspoken criteria of the evaluation of the art teacher are rooted in a romantic understanding of unleashing the inherent inspiration of these students on a project basis. However, the cult of elevated sensations and enactment of enchanted creative visions typically associated with this bohemian legacy still seems to be in a slumbering state. An important facet of this type of test is making students turn away from the conventional and narrow understanding of “what art is” and let go of their habitual performance-based orientation and preconceived notions of being a good and appropriate student. The folk high school teachers had carefully moderated a plan to throw the students into uncertainty and help them question the temples of art as something fixed, institutionally embedded, and long-lasting. However, the students proved rather hesitant to take over the responsibility of the creative exercise and embark on their land art experimentations. The exercise attempted to shape the student collective away from an orientation towards performance and comparison into a collective mode of governing where joint exploration and communal bonding happened more organically. This underlying shift of testing and evaluating the students based on personal engagements and procedural know-how rather than judging the value of the outcomes is core to many teachers at the folk high schools. Ultimately, it aims to transform students into an appropriate attachment to the course through a daring curiosity confronting the uncertainties of artistic creation and among fellow students. Presenting and Narrating Art As the rain keeps pouring down, the students collect their umbrellas and rainwear and pursue their land art projects for several hours, easing into the assignment in their groups of four. The difficulty of entering a mode of discovery and exploration might be due to the expectations to share their experiments in land art with the other students. After the creation comes a presentation and justification. The following Monday morning, the teachers received pictures representing land art from all the student groups. Everyone is gathered in the

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big hall, and where blackout curtains cover every window to keep the late summer sun out. The teacher now presents photos of each group’s works one at a time and invites each group to narrate what kind of artwork they came up with and ask them questions on how the process evolved. Each presentation is referred to with the Swedish term “redovisning”, a colloquial term used for project-based school presentations. The same word is also used to signify accounting, for example, regarding economic entities. Hence, “redovisning” is a type of test where you are expected to account for something you have done while being held “accountable” for it. As the teacher shows the first picture, she asks, “What did you think in the group? How did you do it?” The students mumble among themselves, and no one approaches the full class with a detailed answer. The teacher then approaches the groups again: “How come you did it this way?” Finally, a student says in a soft-spoken manner that it was one of the other teachers who came up with the first idea for their project. The teacher that poses the questions to the presenters laughs a bit. She repeats what the student just said so that all can hear about this (unfortunate) genealogy of their artwork. However, she looks at the land art as if it contained a deeper meaning to be deciphered. As the students do not respond to the challenge of elaborating much on the piece, she tries to interpret the artwork herself. The teacher draws on its similarity to an animal and its placement in a nearby roundabout. Parallels are made to “roundabout dogs” (Swedish: rondellhund), a form of street installation and folk art appearing throughout Sweden during the autumn of 2006. In response to a question about cooperation, a student said they had no problem cooperating. After some additional questions, where the students again confirm their adherence to their teacher’s initial idea, the group is asked to sit down. The other students now produce a warm round of applause. While being spontaneously endorsed by the fellow students, it is apparent that the group carried out a presentation that did not fully fulfil the ideals of land art assignment in the manner the teachers had hoped. Instead of engaging in joint exploration and elaborating the meaning of their creation, the students fulfilled another teacher’s vision. This paternalistic influence is not fully in line with the romantic legacy of the artistic figure, as the process of making art appear in the land should ideally have been born in the group. In a way, the students have been too perceptive and docile in the test, which makes them appear as curating their teachers’

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creative vision rather than exhibiting themselves as independent artists-in-­ the-making (Wohl, 2021). Furthermore, as the group faces the teachers’ questions, they have difficulty elaborating on their work in verbal discourses that would potentially have added interest and meaning to their work. Perhaps due to the lack of devotion to the direction the work of art eventually took, they could not respond to the conceptual challenges of narrating their collaborations and land-based creation. While their work stands out against the backdrop of a dull roundabout, they did not take the chance to stand out as a group adding mystery or meaning to the artistic object they had produced. The material object could not be placed in an artistic convention or be interpreted in relation to standards that would qualify it as a work of art (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020; Heinrich, 1997; Kris & Kurz, 1981). Even if this arts programme encourages an open-ended process of discovery and exploration, it still contains clear norms of how to engage with and narrate the creative process where values related to artistic creativity, originality, and autonomy are key. The second and third groups were not as passive as the first group, as they had several persons that had strong ideas about what to do, which formed the land art creations that they made. However, even such inner drive and determination can appear slightly problematic. In the final group being “put to the test” in this land art exercise, another transgression to the normative underpinnings of art education is discernible by not conforming to the social and collaborative principles of ordinary art education at the folk high school. “How did you do your work?” asks the headteacher. One of the students answers that she probably became “a dicatator” and began to control how they would do it. “Was it nice to have someone in charge? Or is it difficult to work in a group?” the headteacher asks. “There are many strong wills”, says the same girl who said that she probably became a dictator, “I usually do not decide, but now I did it, and I may have done it too much…” “When working with art, you often have to be quite determined”, says the headteacher. “Maybe we should have been in smaller groups because then there would not have been as many strong wills”, says one of the other group members.

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The teachers seem to recognise the limitations and possibilities of having many different wills to negotiate instead of one person mainly in charge. These collegial deliberations seem to conclude that it is good to have different perspectives and ideas voiced, and if someone decides “for the group”, that person needs to consider “the will” of others. The artistic group under scrutiny agrees and points out that they had a short time frame to act within. Hence, this group had moved forward in a committed way that seemed to comply with the ideals of a self-propelling inner creative drive but had not fully engaged in the geist of collective exploration. The time constraint made the students transgress the communitarian ideals of inclusivity and democratic participation. They found themselves in a situation where they could not fully involve all four participants. Part of the purpose of this assignment was to let the participants work in groups to get to know each other through the art-making process, turning the folk high school into “a home”. Acting on egalitarian principles is central to the relationships between students and teachers and students. In the example above, the student acknowledges being a bit of “a dictator”, contradicting the strong egalitarian ethos of working in a group assignment at a folk high school. Taking up the role of the spokesperson for the other potentially marginalised voices, she recognises that such a critique might be valid for their work process. She displays reflexivity and accountability in her role as the leader, where she seems aware of having transgressed the ethos of collaboration and exploration of a shared artistic vision. She tries to balance the tensions central to much art education at the folk high school between ethics and aesthetics: the worth of communitarianism and inspiration, and collective and individual virtues. The Abstract Painting Exercise In the next assignment, the students are put to the test by an abstract painting exercise. The paintings are to be displayed somewhere in the school’s public facilities. The students are restricted to working with four colours: blue, white, red, and brown, and since the paintings are abstract, they need to indicate what is up and down on the back of each painting. For the students to get going, they first need to go and buy the equipment they need. The teacher discusses what kind of material and equipment they might need for what they are about to do. Once returning from buying the equipment, the students started to draw and concentrated dutifully. A teacher says:

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– What you should not do now, but which is very easy to do, is comparing yourself with others and think that you do not know anything and that everyone else can do more and put yourself down. Feel free to walk around, look at each other, and learn from each other. You are at a folk high school. But do not compare yourself with each other! I want you to develop and find your imagery. I want you [student’s name] to find your imagery, your way of expressing yourself and what you develop. And then you have to try and test.

The teacher continues to foster both an explorative and familiar attachment to the course and its fellow students, “nothing is considered right or wrong”. As the teacher is aware that the art students easily develop a culture of informal rankings and relate their ongoing work to the perceived “quality”, the teacher seems to halt these inclinations by relativising their efforts. However, the cult of authenticity and being grounded in one’s inner true self, developing an artistic identity or a creative vision, is still a command verbalised to the students from the outside by one of their significant others. The individuality and open-ended exploration of finding one’s stylistic craft and gradually finding an expression grounded in one’s creative “cause”, is somewhat paradoxically enforced upon them as a collective doctrine. The students should have a shared and collective ambition to be unique. The overriding principle of worthiness seems to be to let oneself become fully emerged in individual exploration independent of the judgements of both fellow students and the teachers: I will not comment if you do not ask me for help, I will go around and ask if there is something you are thinking about, and if not, I will move on.

The teacher also says that it is important to have patience and dare to “go outside your comfort zone”. Students should try and experiment with the colours and then ask the teachers for feedback. The constant emphasis on this subjective mode of engaging through exploration becomes so paramount for the teacher that any kind of modelled path towards developing this artistic maturity and identity is difficult to discern from the onset of the abstract painting exercise. Their proto-artistic sense of self requires constant reminders from outside about how they are to go about doing their own creative enterprise. The principal alignment with the ethos of experimentation and equality  makes it hard to put anything at all “on a pedestal”.

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Emphasising the basic means through which the students can work to find their own “voice” as more autonomous artistic subjects seem to involve the postponement of their immediate need for recognition and affirmation towards a process orientation where the result is a mere by-­ product of the creative process. However, throughout their creative processes, the teacher still offers certain insights, providing positive and visual feedback on the students’ ongoing work. These feedback mechanisms of validating and affirming each student’s work typically take more subtle forms such as facial work, gazes, or lifting aspects of the ongoing artwork that looks particularly promising. The well-intended proclamations of unleashing artistic creativities are still an artistic credo passed down to the students from the authoritative position of the teachers as “competent judges”. Showcasing the Abstract Paintings The teacher continues with the idea of not ranking students’ paintings or telling them what is “good” or “bad” in an absolute sense. When walking around and looking at the paintings, she says things like “nice” and makes comments and remarks describing the pictures as much as valorising them. A few examples include: “These dots are good for the painting”, “Here you see the depth…”, “Here it becomes interesting, with these colour combinations...”, “In this corner, you see soft transitions”, or “Here you see the horizontal lines that meet the vertical lines”. Rather than evaluating the state of artwork with references to finished artwork, she tends to pick out a specific element in each of these paintings that seems worth highlighting, capturing “her eye”. She attempts to re-affirm their attachments to the creative process and the explorative and non-evaluative stance where all artworks have potential. Apart from sharing her gaze through observing such aesthetic elements that help build a reflexive painting practice, the teacher asks spontaneous questions about the creative process to the creator of each work. These queries are often open-ended and general, such as “did you figure this out from the beginning or was it something that emerged”. The attitude fostered in the course is to make the participants more confident in their expressions by cultivating them to see what the more experienced teacher sees. By lending them her gaze and making them think through their creative process, they can become more conscious of their artistic practice, extend on what seems promising, and build it into the next creative

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undertaking. Following the valuation of artistic engagement leads to different soft institutionalised “trails”, which are meant to direct the students towards a deeper understanding of the art world by experimenting with it in practice. Rather than fostering a scholastic or academic relationship to artistic practice, practical and existential dimensions are brought to the fore by looking at the operations of the folk high school teacher. In comparison, other research on the visual arts in colleges and post-­ secondary education, much emphasis has been placed on how conceptual art has transformed art in the direction of  academisation. For example, Fine (2018) shows in a study of MFA programmes in the United States that art programmes have shifted from creating art as an end to fostering an ability to talk and theorise art. These overarching trends towards more conceptual, critical, and discursive artistic training might relate to the social exclusivity of partaking in art education. The emphasis on inherited and acquired cultural capital can be more pronounced or necessitated after the conceptual turn than when art was centred on practical mastery and technical refinements (Gustavsson et al., 2012). However, the site explored here provided no illusions of alleviating the students to the highest echelons of visual art. Maybe due to the more basic level of this preparatory programme, the valuation operations were more based on a sympathetic sentiment of confirmation when doing art than their (in)ability to narrate around it. The teachers trained the folk high school students with a greater emphasis on aspects of playfulness and discovery rather than aspects having to do with discursive mastery and symbolically refined presentation. Even if there, throughout this ethnographic depiction, is a strong emphasis on process rather than the finished product, the framework of tests helps visualise these tacit underpinning of normative assessments and deliberations no educational endeavours fully withstand. This anything-goes approach to art education still has a hierarchical element. The mystification of the creative process can create a lack of clear guidance on what kind of axiomatic principles and value framework the students are being assessed against (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). At times, a sense of misalignment, a disapproving graze, a burst of nervous laughter, or disengagement gave witness to the teacher’s intended ambitions in testing artistic skills and know-how. At other times, the teachers act in accordance with democratic virtues of being open, community-oriented and just promoting engagements, experimentations, and deliberations.

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6.4   Vulnerability and Intimacy at a Creative Writing Course Before writing this book, one of the authors (Henrik Fürst) participated in a creative writing course at a folk high school. The course was short and, most likely, not as formative of an experience as the long and continuous exposure in the normal folk high school programmes. It was an informative event in that it captured some of the normative dimensions of being put to the test in a folk high school environment first-hand. My participant observation will therefore be used as our second ethnographic account of how practical tests are deployed and experienced from the perspective of the student, this time within creative writing.3 These experiences exemplify how a group of strangers meet in a secluded place. Through a series of rituals and tests, we are made to reveal our vulnerabilities and align our critical capacity by collectively responding to each other’s work with a caring and critical attitude. Drawing on Thévenot’s (2014) model of engagements, building up a mode of familiarity and trust in the other students was an intense challenge in this course as it only lasted four days. As we shall see, the formation of intimacy and risk-taking in sharing texts with the others in the writing group was particularly delicate. Many of us writers felt personally invested in our texts and the reception they provoked in the group. The end result of partaking in the course created opportunities to explore a craft, play with writing identities, and consider individual plans for potentially writing more seriously in the future. The course also fosters a fundamental trust in the creative process where vulnerabilities and intimacy are indispensable and integral parts. Meeting in Small Groups The morning after we arrived at the folk high school, we were divided into smaller groups to discuss the texts we had written the previous evening. The teacher instructs us to “be objective, ask questions about the text, and not be critical. Instead, talk about the first impression you get”. One of the participants summarised the request with the words, “you give two stars and one wish”. The person who has written the text should not 3  Rather than summarising a large amount of ethnographic work into a short text, or choosing illustrative examples, Fürst’s four-day ethnography had the benefit of being short enough to fully engage with most of the collected material.

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speak; only listen to the comments from the rest of the group, which is a pedagogical idea at the heart of many creative writing classes (Edberg, 2015). Everyone in the group is expected to say at least something about the text under scrutiny. We are also made to assume that the text is not about the person writing it and bracket out any expectations of biographical authenticity. Crucially, even though the text might be about that person, the comments should not be directed at that person but rather towards the text itself as if it had its own separate life. During this small group discussion, we treated one text at a time. The author read the text aloud, and we discussed the text following the teacher’s initial instructions. Giving feedback and  receiving literary critique becomes a form of test. The principal tension stems from the self-images we have perpetuated about ourselves as “authors” and what kind of critique the text discussion may entail. It is simultaneously testing us out as readers, given that the group was largely responsible for providing feedback to each of the text samples created at the site. However, the responses we received from the first round of soft artistic testing were a form of non-critical literary criticism, much in line with the visual arts teacher’s approach to assessment in the painting exercise, where everything is good in some respects. After a while, the teacher enters the room, and she listens to some presentations and discussions. Suddenly the teacher breaks her silence and says, “wonderful rhythm, tempo, and dialogue, really good!”. The teacher seems surprised by her own sudden outburst of excitement. She is trying to retract some of the unintended performative effects of her intervention by saying, “I am not a truth-teller. Every text may be good in some ways”. The teacher’s enthusiastic gut feeling response to how one of the texts was being read, and the immediate retraction of the value statement, seems to be derived from the ambiguous nature of the course. The core idea of being equal and everyone being potentially ‘equally good’ seems to be at odds with her aesthetic value assessments that, at times, shine through. Even though some of our texts seem to stand out as exceptionally good, the basic form of alignment here is the equality of all, a value register built on universality and pluralism. During our small group meeting, it is revealed that several of the participants have larger and longer writing projects on-going. One person has written 150 pages of text, and another says she is writing a novel. For them, the course is, on the one hand, a relaxation and break from their daily lives, but also a way to bring themselves one step closer to an imaginary future publication by getting time and energy to write fiction again.

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As the short course offers time away from their daily chores and dedicated attention to writing, it becomes a space for them to focus on what they want to devote themselves to in terms of writing. The exercise also demonstrates the existence of commitment to writing longer fiction text, an initial reality test of what it takes to pass as a “real” fiction writer (Boltanski, 2011; Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999). To know how far-fetched or reasonable these imaginations are, these authors have to subjugate to the creative process and the feedback from fellow writers. The test we enact relies on the intimacy that has been created in the group, which is probably why the ethics of reading is treated with great care here. Once back in class, we turned to a reading assignment, as we had all read a particular fiction book before we enrolled in the course. The teacher introduces the book, but the participants are silent and do not discuss it to the extent the teacher intended. The silence continues throughout the dinner. “We are all thinking about what to write”, a participant suggests. My interpretation of the silence draws on what is going on within me. I reflect on having revealed myself through writing and having had private thoughts and feelings exposed to the trial of giving and receiving literary feedback. As we do not know each other yet, this initial exposure comes with a great deal of vulnerability and leads to a state of exhaustion. Afterwards, we walked together and talked about our interests and hobbies, like singing, dancing, and running. The next morning, people seem more relaxed, talk more freely, and joke. This process of gradually easing up indicates us becoming more aligned with the form of engagement that we are supposed to exhibit. These short literary encounters rely on us letting go of our fears and artistic performance anxieties and trusting the sensory judgements of our newly formed group. Getting Together in the Evening When we meet in the classroom after a coffee break, it is announced that this evening event is to have “a literary get-together” which includes eating cheese and drinking wine. We have changed buildings to an even older house, where we all sit in a dark and damp cellar with lit candles. We are now asked to pay a small sum of money in exchange for crackers, different types of cheese, wine, and pears. People generally seem very relaxed at this point. We eat, drink, and talk about what we might do together after the course. This event is also a time for improvisation and experiments; some

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people are reading texts or making spoken-word performances, while others play music that they composed and recorded. I have brought a book by a poet, and another person has done the same. I read a poem, and it becomes evident to some of the participants that I write like this particular poet. It makes sense to them now; this revelation makes them very happy. In my modest effort to try out fictional writing, I seem to be performing a particular type of poetry. I am, at this time, offered a way of interpreting my engagement in writing: as one who dabbles with a serious writer through imitation and alterations. The outlining of explanations of my style of writing is itself a delicate act of valorisation as it is necessarily done through comparison. Regardless of the unofficial and relaxed atmosphere of our candle-lit cellar, it positions my writing in relation to canonised work which easily results in feelings of ambiguity and mimicry. At this evening event, it becomes apparent that we all play with established ideas of literary life, where the entire environment is virtually drowning in symbols that enforce the imagery of “a world of letters”. We find ourselves drinking wine, eating cheese, and reading and talking about literature in a building with considerable historical pedigree. We cannot fully enact serious writing identities in this situation. Instead, we explore, play and make some ironic remarks about how cliché we experience the situation. However, our evening get-together also allows us to extend the mode of engagement beyond the immediate need of building a sense of ease or familiarity. The distance we feel toward “real poetry” allows us to be more playful and ironic concerning these cultural tropes and artistic identities than if it was a more permanent and prolonged artistic pursuit. The trust we built for one another now makes it possible for more explorative and experimental engagement in arts to be enacted. Intimacy and Taboos: The Final Test The final day of the writing course would prove particularly demanding for many participants. For the final day, we had been given the assignment to write a text about “a taboo”. The thematic choice of taboos opens up a range of questions that are not normally disclosed. Were we now in a state of trust that enabled us all to share our ideas about more delicate and controversial topics? How was this test going to play out? Are there any taboos in this taboo-writing exercise?

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Just as we were about to hand out our texts to everyone else in the class, one of the participants immediately regretted sharing the text with everyone and asked us to hand it back. We handed it back and never read it. Although we were encouraged to explore our own experiences and reveal things about taboos in our lives, we could also refrain from doing so. Another participant said she wanted us to return the text once we had read it. However, many other participants seemed keener to share their writing on taboos, as if they finally got the chance to present the kind of texts they wanted to write. The texts we read were mostly about life and death situations and different forms of violations of societal norms. We had become a remarkably close-knitted group in only a couple of days. This writing group had been formed as a space for temporarily testing out our engagements. Due to the short time frame of this writing course, it might have been more intense and compressed than what is commonplace in the full-time folk high school programmes. However, the brevity of the course allowed us to follow the process through which a small group of people built up trust in each other’s critical capacities (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Thévenot, 2014). As the group was meant to share vulnerable material often rooted in our biographies, the teacher seemed to trust the process through which we, as fellow humans, could take care of the challenges that practising poetry and fiction writing triggered and manifested in us. Although the final test of taboos dealt with difficult topics and was sometimes formulated in a rather cathartic manner, we were able to treat them and discuss them as literary texts. While this assignment of extreme disclosure was somewhat safeguarded by not assuming a “biographical” groundedness for the stories told, the “confessional” element of these exercises was an essential part of the dramatic build up. As a writing group, we had become close enough to one another in a concise time frame to entrust one another with “hidden facets” of each other’s lives. Our stories were re-interrogating reality claims that had been suppressed or removed from memory. We also developed our vulnerable artistic selves through a mutual process of receiving, reading, and commenting on each other’s texts.

6.5  Conclusions In this chapter, we have investigated how being put to the test in class shapes students in a way that may make art education worthwhile in practice. The focus of tests derived from pragmatic sociology helps visualise that different things are “at stake” in art education. Even among seemingly egalitarian and progressive educational providers like the Swedish

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folk high schools, everyday classroom practice contains numerous challenges and tribulations where students are tested for “what they are made of” and “are capable of” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005, p. 31; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Even with the radical openness towards different forms of cultural pursuits that the folk high schools preach, the students are subjected to forms of tests that model them in relation to pre-­established formats, imposing norms and modes of formulating critique. The iterative processes of writing and being read or painting, perceiving, and receiving feedback on creative exercises are also akin to embodied knowledge as understood within the classical pragmatic tradition in philosophy (Baert, 2005; Dewey, 2005; Shusterman, 2000). As the ethnographic scenes illustrate, practical experimentation and constant feedback loops are central to the knowledge process enacted and evaluated in art education. The novice artists-in-the-making are often made to “awaken” their sense of wonder and puzzlement towards artistic practice. Before becoming driven by an “inner excitement” to continue exploring a specific idea or style in an enchanted “creative vision” (Wohl, 2021) or “singularity” (Heinrich, 1997), art students are made to “learn to let go” of their preconceived notions of artistic practice. The school becomes a space where one should trust one another and dare to externalise one’s art-making for others to see. As the students often hold firm ideas of how arts is supposed to look, they are gradually supposed to build trust in the group and an open-ended creative process. Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976) showed how ideals of eccentricity among (male) artists were pivotal for enacting appropriate forms of engagement in fine arts at art school, which still is of relevance in American art schools (Fine, 2018). According to them, the most critical aspect among art students lies in the imaginative abilities of the artist to be questioning and finding new problems to solve (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976). From this vantage point, it is not surprising that the way art students are put-to-the-test at the folk high school revolves around originality and creativity, related to an explorative mode of their engagement. This explorative mode is under consideration in the justifications of participation within more serious establishments, and avenues as their names and stylistic expressions tend to be elevated through an inspired order of worth. However, in learning these artistic crafts, particularly when persons embark on new learning activities in the regulated learning environment, eccentricity is not the most pervasive virtue or quality enacted and tested. Due to the creative processes’ vulnerability, uncertainty, and precarity, much of the work of the artistically oriented folk high schools revolves

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around building a sense of familiarity and commonness among diverse social groups that need to trust one another to produce and critique works of art. Hence, the overriding importance of exploration, experimentality, and creativity in art schools is supported by much more mundane and commonplace activities that build trust and ease among those who engage in the creative process. These frames build on communal bonding and make students feel at home and have a sense of familiarity with one another. Yet, the implicit norms of easing into the art school also create tensions amongst the students who are very perceptive to the sublime delimitations of value assigned by significant others. Arts institutions, such as folk high schools, fulfil a crucial role in affirming and stabilising certain perceptions of reality and aligning heterogeneous and varied pursuits (Boltanski, 2011). Somewhat paradoxically, the call for finding one’s “unique voice” and true artistic self is a command that reaches the students from the exterior place of authoritative teachers. These teachers remain in the position of “competent judges” regardless of how relativistic and universal these artistic abilities might be. Much of these activities take the form of truth tests, which ultimately affirmed the preconceived and validated social order. However, the premise of art education is also to provide room for artistic critique of the social order and open up new avenues for what is considered “real” or worth noting. Thereby, art education also scrutinises the dominant representations of reality as incomplete and contingent on struggles around the very definition of reality.

References Baert, P. (2005). Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism. Polity. Boltanski, L. (2011). On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Polity. Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso. Boltanski, L., & Esquerre, A. (2020). Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Polity Press. Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/136843199002003010 Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On Justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton University Press. Dewey, J. (2005). Art as Experience. Berkeley Publishing Group. Edberg, H. (2015). Kreativt skrivande för kritiskt tänkande: en textanalytisk fallstudie av studenters arbete med kritisk metareflektion. Örebro universitet.

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Fine, G. A. (2018). Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education. The University of Chicago Press. Getzels, J. W., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1976). The Creative Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem Finding in Art. Wiley. Gustavsson, B. (2019). Bildningens dynamik: framväxt, dimensioner, mening. Bokförlaget Korpen. Gustavsson, M., Börjesson, M., & Edling, M. (2012). Konstens omvända ekonomi: tillgångar inom utbildningar och fält 1938–2008. Daidalos. Heinrich, N. (1997). The Glory of Van Gogh: An Anthropology of Admiration. Princeton University Press. Hutter, M., & Stark, D. (2015). Moments of Valuation: Exploring Sites of Dissonance. Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, O. (2019). A foray into folk high school ideology. Folkehojskolernes Forening i Danmark: internettet. Kris, E., & Kurz, O. (1981). Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. Yale University Press. Lloyd, R. (2002). Neo–Bohemia: Art and Neighborhood Redevelopment in Chicago. Journal of Urban Affairs, 24(5), 517–532. https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1467-­9906.00141 Millenberg, M. (2023). Att mötas på folkhögskola En studie om folkhögskollärares pedagogiska hållning. Linköpings universitet. Muniesa, F., & Linhardt, D. (2011). Trials of Explicitness in the Implementation of Public Management Reform. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 22(6), 550–566. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2011.06.003 Praizović, L. (2012). Isis Mother - Professor of Gender Studies, Writer and Artist, My Mother  - Ex-cleaner, Dinner-Lady and Child-Minder, Currently on Disability Allowance with a Diagnosis of Chronic Muscular Pain. CONST Literary (P)review, 1, 28–55. Seigel, J.  E. (1986). Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930. Viking. Shusterman, R. (2000). Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Rowman & Littlefield. Thévenot, L. (2014). Voicing Concern and Difference: From Public Spaces to Common-Places. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 7–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.905749 Verdier, É. (2018). Europe: Comparing Lifelong Learning Systems. In M. Milana, S. Webb, J. Holford, R. Waller, & P. Jarvis (Eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning (pp.  461–483). Palgrave Macmillan. Wohl, H. (2021). Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged. The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 7

How Are Teaching and Creating Art Combined? Worth and Vocational Dilemmas Among Teachers

7.1   Introduction: Vocational Identities and Boundaries Previous chapters revolve around students’ engagement in art education, the teachers’ role in testing, valuing, and assessing students’ competencies, personal growth, and artistic work-in-progress. This chapter shows the value of art education for the teachers themselves and how the Swedish folk high schools constitute an infrastructure for semi-professional artists with dual or hybrid vocational identities. It has been argued that the role of art teachers tends to get overlooked in contemporary research about art education (Gerber & Childress, 2017). However, many researchers focusing on the precarity of creative labour and the insecure artistic labour market conditions of artistic work have highlighted how artists tend to combine various types of employment to “make ends meet” or enable a continuation of their artistic pursuits (Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020, pp.  313–328; Chong, 2021; Fürst, 2022; Lahire, 2010; Menger, 1999, 2014; Perrenoud & Bataille, 2017). Teaching art, music, or writing while pursuing an artistic career can thus be seen as a viable strategy to overcome the perennial problem of landing employment or achieving success in these insecure artistic labour and commodity markets. Teaching can also be conceived as a vocational identity in its own right, and there are many ways in which art-making and art education are vocationally combined. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7_7

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From the perspective of pragmatic sociology, it is important to highlight how people move through different spaces throughout their careers and in their daily lives (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006). As art teachers often occupy multiple positions in the labour market, they can work with different things throughout the year, semester or day. However, moving between different spaces in a nonlinear way typically creates tensions between divergent orders of worth. The tensions generate a need to establish symbolic boundaries or compromises concerning the justification of various work tasks. For example, when a folk high school teacher pursues an artistic career on their own, that person opens up to the possibility of being questioned about the dedication to teaching faculty and students. Suppose the same teacher instead remains fully loyal to being an institutional spokesperson of a school and relinquishes all artistic engagements. In that case, the students might eventually question the teacher’s understanding of contemporary artistic expressions, of being “up-to-date”, or grounded in the art form they are supposed to learn. We will explore the various formulations of vocational identities found among folk high school teachers within the artistic realm broadly conceived. We focus on how the teachers combine or cross vocational boundaries and spaces (cf. Beljean et al., 2015; Berner, 2010; Chong, 2021; Liu, 2020; Perrenoud & Bataille, 2017). First, we seek to understand the overarching patterns of teachers’ involvement in the labour market, drawing on survey data from teachers employed at various art courses in Swedish folk high schools. After sketching the general prevalence of working artistically in this teacher collective, we use interview data to understand better how these teachers conceive their vocational identities and the intersections of teaching and making art. We build the chapter around two diverging strategies that the teachers adopt in dealing with the relationship between art creation and art education: compartmentalisation and synthesisation. Compartmentalisation means either separating teaching and making art or only being involved in teaching, whereas synthesisation means combining teaching and the making of art.

7.2  A Survey of Folk High School Teachers Within the Arts To create an overview of the work conditions among teachers collective, we conducted a web-based survey targeting all teachers who worked at Swedish folk high schools’ artistically oriented programmes in 2017 (see

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Appendix 1). The survey was answered by 397 out of the 702 arts teachers employed in art courses. The survey comprised teachers from a broad range of art courses, and some were involved in multiple aesthetic areas. Among the 397 teachers, the subject covered in the survey responses was the following: music (n = 140), visual arts (n = 118), scenic arts (n = 70), plastic arts and craft (n = 62), creative writing (n = 36), and other aesthetic subjects (n = 54). Aside from their work conditions, careers, and attitudes regarding the link between art-making and teaching, the survey also provided data on their social background and demographic characteristics. Out of the folk high school teachers who filled out the survey, 44% were men, and 56% were women. Most were raised in Sweden (94%) and came from small- and middle-sized towns (50%) or even more rural environments (25%). There appeared to be an overarching bias towards hiring in-born native Swedes. Most of the respondents had been employed for a long time in their respective schools. The utterly “nativistic” profile of the teacher collective could therefore, at least in part, be a generational effect of older in-born teachers who had stayed in their vocation. Most teachers had tertiary education, either within the specific art form or various teaching degrees combined with aesthetic specialisations. Nine out of ten teachers had attended specialised training in the arts, either at a folk high school or from an art school or conservatory within higher education. While most teachers had some form of tertiary training, one out of four had no teaching training or formalised training in education whatsoever. The employment structure shows that most folk high school teachers combined being art teachers with their artistic pursuits. Out of the respondents, some 70% claimed to be “professionally” active in the artistic field, whereas 10% saw their artistic engagements more as a “hobby”. More specifically, 92% of the music teachers, 77% of visual arts teachers, and 69% of creative writing teachers claimed to be vocationally active within their respective fields. Another small group saw their vocational identity as an integral part of the popular movements and religious congregations associated with their folk high school. In this small group of teachers, religious or political denominations had precedence over both artistic and teaching pursuits regarding vocational identification. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was widespread for art education teachers to work part-time at the folk high school. Almost half of the respondents worked 75% or less at the folk high school. More than half of the teachers believed their artistic activities accounted for up to 25% of their total working hours. Another fairly large group (30%) estimated that their

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artistic activities accounted for 25–50% of their total working hours. While freelancing, touring, and creating art took up a substantial part of the art teachers’ time, their income was mainly secured through their employment as teachers. Approximately half of the teacher population stated that they ran their own company on the side. Two out of three who see themselves as teachers and artists estimate that 80% or more of their income comes from their employment at the folk high school. Among all art education teachers, employment at the folk high school was an important precondition for their art-making. However, the various aesthetical fields differed from one another in this respect (see Tables 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3). These results indicate that the space of art education and that of artistic creation are tightly connected and intertwined. On the one hand, the teachers often navigate dual loyalties aspiring to maintain and advance their positions within the world of artistic creation and production and, on the other hand, sustaining and developing arts programmes in their role as teachers. While previous research supports the findings of Table  7.1 in Table 7.1  Folk high school teachers’ responses to employment as an economic precondition for art-making Your employment at the folk high school is an economic precondition for your own art-making Not Not at all To a lesser To a high To a very Total applicable degree degree high degree Visual arts

14% 16 Scenic arts 29% 20 Music 9% 12 Creative writing 19% 7 Plastic arts and craft 26% 16 Other 31% 17 Total 17% 67

10% 12 29% 20 17% 24 11% 4 18% 11 20% 11 17% 69

15% 18 13% 9 21% 29 25% 9 16% 10 19% 10 17% 69

28% 33 16% 11 29% 41 22% 8 19% 12 15% 8 25% 102

33% 39 14% 10 24% 34 22% 8 21% 13 15% 8 22% 90

100% 118 (n) 100% 70 (n) 100% 140 (n) 100% 36 (n) 100% 62 (n) 100% 54 (n) 100% 397 (n)

Note: Statistics are based on 397 teachers working in six areas of art education (presented in percentages)

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Table 7.2  Folk high school teachers’ responses to art-making as a precondition for employment Your experiences from your own art-making are a precondition for your employment at the folk high school

Visual arts Scenic arts Music Creative writing Plastic arts and craft Other Total

Not applicable

Not at To a lesser all degree

To a high degree

To a very high degree

Total

3% 4 0% 0 0% 0 8% 3 8% 5 9% 5 3% 14

5% 6 6% 4 2% 3 17% 6 8% 5 9% 5 5% 22

27% 32 44% 31 41% 58 19% 7 32% 20 26% 14 33% 132

52% 61 36% 25 42% 59 44% 16 34% 21 37% 20 42% 172

100% 118 (n) 100% 70 (n) 100% 140 (n) 100% 36 (n) 100% 62 (n) 100% 54 (n) 100% 397 (n)

13% 15 14% 10 14% 20 11% 4 18% 11 19% 10 14% 57

Note: Statistics are based on 397 teachers working in six areas of art education (presented in percentages)

that financial affordances of maintaining an artistic career through other means are relatively common (Gerber, 2017), what seems less discussed in the literature is the necessity of having practical experience from having worked, or maintaining work, as an artist when teaching post-compulsory art education. Among our survey respondents, more than 80% saw their experience from undertaking various artistic pursuits as a necessary precondition for their current employment at the folk high school. This pattern becomes even more evident in Table 7.2, where most teachers, either to a “high degree” or to “a very high degree”, perceive their art-making experiences as a precondition for their employment. We also asked if the teachers considered their experiences from teaching as a precondition for their art-making. However, only a few teachers considered their teaching an influential precondition of their art-making in other ways than providing financial support and employment security. Most teachers considered the influence of the teaching to be influential to

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Table 7.3  Folk high school teachers’ responses to teaching experiences as a precondition for art-making Your experiences as a teacher in the folk high school are a precondition for your own art-making

Visual arts Scenic arts Music Creative writing Plastic arts and craft Other Total

Not applicable

Not at all

To a lesser degree

To a high degree

To a very high degree

Total

13% 15 27% 19 11% 16 19% 7 19% 12 26% 14 17% 67

31% 37 36% 25 31% 43 36% 13 35% 22 30% 16 32% 129

39% 46 24% 17 42% 59 28% 10 29% 18 30% 16 35% 142

13% 15 11% 8 14% 19 14% 5 8% 5 7% 4 11% 46

4% 5 1% 1 2% 3 3% 1 8% 5 7% 4 3% 13

100% 118 (n) 100% 70 (n) 100% 140 (n) 100% 36 (n) 100% 62 (n) 100% 54 (n) 100% 397 (n)

Note: Statistics are based on 397 teachers working in six areas of art education (presented in percentages)

a lesser degree or not at all, with no major differences among the various artistic areas (see Table 7.3). The high degree of teachers who maintain some type of independent art-making indicates that the relationship between art-making and teaching art at the post-compulsory level is a theme worth exploring in more detail. For example, Perrenoud and Bataille (2017) have found that “ordinary musicians” in France and Switzerland follow a largely bi-polarized pattern in making a career. Either local artistic engagements are combined with teaching and “service work”, or the artist sets off on a singular artistic career trajectory with a more cosmopolitan and international orientation. The Swedish folk high school teachers seem akin to the localised “ordinary musicians” explored by Perrenoud and Bataille (2017), particularly in the Swiss case, where the musicians relied on teaching and service work to a greater extent than in France.

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In what follows, we are mobilising interview data from 21 teachers working in visual arts, music, and creative writing to typify the interplay between art creation and art education and their vocational strategies. What kind of worth is attributed to art education from the perspective of teachers with various involvements in art-making and teaching? What kind of tensions and conflicts arise from simultaneously engaging and juggling these different vocational pursuits? We continue to build on the theoretical framework of pragmatic sociology (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006; Thévenot, 2014), showing how art-making and art education are sometimes bound up with opposing claims for vocational  identities and that the teachers need to find ways to navigate between them.

7.3  Compartmentalisation One way teachers deal with the relationship between teaching and art-­ making is through compartmentalisation. The benefit of compartmentalisation is that art-making and art education are kept separate. The dilemma of multiple identities and practices in work is solved by compartmentalisation, where one bracket other roles and identities to act within a single identity (Chong, 2021). The conflictual “logic” dominating each space is less likely to confuse when work is compartmentalised. The teaching practices are shielded from the influences and outcomes of the teacher’s artistic pursuits and vice versa. The teachers’ artistic practices exert a minor influence on the teaching practice. Teachers can seek to maintain a dualistic vocational identity without exposing the students to the dissonance and anxiety they might feel concerning their artistic endeavours by exposing their work or creative process. Within this dualistic vocational identity, the teachers also perceive a limited influence of their teaching on their art-making.1 When the relationship between art education and art-making is discussed among these teachers, they tend to become guardians of the space for activities of teaching and the space for art creation activities, with their inherent values and interests. To cope with the situation of traversing from one space of activity to another, the teacher can choose to spend periods with one or the other activity without letting them collapse, merge, or 1  The teachers may also not be involved in artistic pursuits outside of art education and have an exclusive vocational identity as a teacher. For these teachers, the question of influences between art-making and teaching is not applicable.

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overlap. While art-making and art education might remain linked to each other from the teacher’s point of view, the folk high school students experience their teaching as if this link were not there or unaware if it is activated. We learned from the survey that the teachers most often considered that working in the folk high school had little influence on their art-­ making practices. When teachers acknowledged the influence of teaching on their art-making, it was often attributed to “a small degree” of impact. Conversely, many teachers acknowledge their own art-making being an important precondition for their teaching to either a “high- or very high degree”. The space between art-making and art education is thus asymmetrical in that it is to a limited degree conceived of as bidirectional or with “mutual beneficiaries”. For example, Mona describes how the logic of her art-making is entirely different from her teaching, which makes up most of her workload. Making art is seen as a self-centred activity, while teaching for her is a student-­centred activity, which makes her inclined to divide her attention and section out her various work tasks. Interviewer: Do you work artistically, yourself? Mona: Very little. My experience is that it is very difficult to combine artistry with teaching. Making art requires a certain kind of selfishness, and you cannot be selfish when you are a teacher. My experience, and again, this is my personal experience: I need to be an outgoing person in a completely different way than when I sit at home in my room. However, I’m going on artistic holidays. When I have a week free, then I’m an artist [laughs]. Then I work at night, doing what I want to do. And in that, my students have inspired me to, of course. The participants here are the ones I try my ideas on, and then I take them with me on my long holidays, and then I paint. Interviewer: So, it still gives a mutual benefit or? Mona: I cannot do it any other way; I would not survive. No. … Also I see it a bit like that I am an artist as a teacher, that I create art with my participants. So, for me, being a teacher is a creative profession. Period. […] Interviewer: But also, that it gives you something as an artist as well? Mona: Oh yes, all year round. Oh yes. Otherwise, it would not have worked with this. Interviewer: Is it also the other way around? That what you do then on these holidays gives something to your teaching?

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Mona: Oh yes, yes, absolutely, all the time. But I have to choose because I have also seen how difficult it is for my colleagues who have artistic careers to manage. I do not have it that way. I do not have to manage exhibitions or make sure I exist or am seen or anything like that. I do not have that requirement and pressure on me because it is not my main vocation. I am a teacher. Since I love making art for my own sake, it’s something else. But it enriches my life, not just my vocational life, but my whole life. Yes, you probably have to decide, I think you have to decide. Otherwise, it will be difficult. (Mona, woman, visual art teacher)

Mona has found it necessary to separate the two vocational commitments from each other in time and space to keep up with her passion for art creation and teaching. She generally tries to compartmentalise art-making and teaching when engaged in teaching. Still, the influence of teaching and her art-making becomes evident when she has long periods away from teaching. For as long as she is teaching her students, she focuses on teaching and not her art-making and stresses how teaching is a “creative profession” in its own right. Rather than emphasising her artistic endeavours, she sees herself as a facilitator of students’ different engagements. Her vocational meaningfulness and love of art centre on guiding her students in their life and art-making. Therese connects to the idea of isolation as a requirement for producing artistic work  (see also  Fürst, 2022). Therese also sees the world of fiction writing as something to be held separate from the educational space where she devotes herself entirely to teaching. However, compared to Mona, she expresses a much more pronounced artistic identity. Interviewer: When I spoke to your students, they said that they would have difficulty seeing themselves being fully operative as writers. How do you feel about it? Could you devote yourself entirely to writing? Therese: I do not know. Sometimes I have done it for shorter periods, been on leave or had scholarships, etc. But I am very interested in people, that is, to be among people. Or I’m probably also thinking of writing as something informed by the world. To just be in my writing … Yes, of course, sometimes I think it’s good and exciting, and important. But you also have the risk of going completely crazy.

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Interviewer: Why do you go crazy? Therese: Well, it has something to do with if you are engaged in a writing process, you constantly seek out that place of a complete questioning of language, the questioning of everything. It is a very exhausting place. Also, because, of course, I get bored of myself. I think the enjoyment here [at the school] is to meet lots of other people or hear lots of different stories. (Therese, woman, creative writing teacher)

Through teaching, Therese meets people and gets social energy, making time in isolation writing possible. Yet, she guards the worlds of teaching and writing against one another. Therese sees her fictional writing requiring a demanding and tormenting critical relationship to language, herself, and other people. She wants her writing to be “informed by the world” and prefers travelling between teaching and writing while not mixing up the two. In her narrative, the juxtapositions between “the social” nature of being immersed in teaching activities is contrasted with the isolation and psychic tribulations she associates with writing on her own. Similarly to Mona, she moves between teaching and art-making, stressing an overarching opposition between these activities. Here the teaching becomes an engagement in familiarity, ease, and recuperation in order not to “go crazy” pursuing her writing. The individualistic pursuits in her art-­making create tension in the more civically ordered art education, which cannot justifiably be  transfered or combined straight into her teaching. The results from the survey showed that teaching could also be a financial affordance for artists to create their works of art. Few of these teachers would be able to live directly on the revenue streams generated from their products and short-term projects within the arts. However, they position themselves in cultural production and entrepreneurship in very different ways. For Emil, teaching is an enabling factor for maintaining integrity and honour in the kind of work he wants to produce. Emil: I am what we can call an ‘active’ artist. But periodically, I have limited number of  exhibition activities. It has been a few years since I have had a few exhibitions. But I do [art] all the time, I do. And this is well, we can say, a prerequisite for... In a financial sense … life would be quite meagre if you were to try to live on artistic activities alone. So that it is

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both positive … On the one hand, I can use what I can, while, at the same time, it gives stability in life that I have an income. Interviewer:  Yes, it can also enrich your way of teaching and your routines? Emil: Yes. I do not have to produce bad things for people to buy, but rather I can stand up for what I do and not give a damn about whether it sells. It is reassuring to know I am not dependent on others. Interviewer: So, you mean in a way that this makes art more autonomous, that you do not have to sell bad art? Emil: Yes, I do not need it… I can stubbornly do my own thing that I think is based on my way of seeing quality. I do not have to worry about someone else. But on the other hand, if I had been financially completely dependent on art, there is a great risk I would have started listening to what could be sold. […] I think of when you watch TV when you see actors, fiction writers, and others that suddenly run around in these entertainment shows on TV. Then I feel, “are they so vulnerable that they have to crawl down to that level?” That’s how it all could end up. […] Interviewer: Then you would rather work at the folk high school? Emil: Yes, I do. And then I can stand up for what I do, that’s it! (Emil, man, visual art teacher)

Emil is invested in his art-making projects, although there are ebbs and flows in his exhibition activity. Emil seems to perceive teaching as an auxiliary function of securing a platform and resources to be a serious artist and making enough money to earn a living. To legitimate his position of making art of particular esteem and quality, he alludes to the inherent pressures of producing art for mass consumption and the risk of becoming a “sell-out”. The folk high school employment here becomes a prerequisite to avoid creating art for a mass market and an institutional resource for making art for art’s sake (Abbing, 2002; Bourdieu, 1996). Hence, Emil positions himself in the art world by denouncing short-sighted commerce and by laying claim to self-worth through the autonomy warranted to him by his folk high school employment. From his perspective, he can justify his artistic work and his teaching based on the inspired order of worth. His job in art education is to help create time to foster creativity and originality within the sphere of creation and lessen the economic pressures of selling art.

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Another reason for keeping the spaces of art-making and art education separate, according to the teachers, is the potentially perverse effects of the teachers’ art-making on the students’ creative activities. The students are in a stage of exploring and finding their style and artistic identities. Giving them a view of the teacher’s artistic practice might create a template that becomes an obstacle to the overarching goal of cultivating a plurality of independent artists-in-the-making and their orientation of engaging in exploration. Interviewer: Thinking about the relationship between your art practice and what you do here at the folk high school, do you feel you pick things up like telling what you have done [abroad] and what you have done [here in Sweden], and so on? Marie: Not so much. I try to stay away from it, and there are a few different ways of doing it. The students are very curious, “what do you do, what do you do? We want to know what you do!” Some schools post the teachers’ paintings and pictures online, and so on. I’m a bit like, I do not want to focus, I do not want to give a final answer to questions they may have. It is very easy to make an influence. I feel, no, I’m not that interested in doing that. If I show my things, maybe I will do it at the end of the course but not at the beginning, then it is very different to show your work. It depends a bit on what you do, of course. But I’m a little careful because I do not want to… Interviewer: Do you think your pictures and your way of doing things would influence how they do it? Marie: Yes. It will be like the “final answer”. It becomes a bit like, “well, so this is what you have to do”. It’s probably my ideal that everyone should go about their own  way. Everyone sculptures the same thing, but everyone makes their sculpture, and you should not have a role model to follow. It should be in this way, or it should be in that way. I should not make judgements according to my ideas and what I think. [Another teacher] who works here works with both sculpture and painting and works a lot in her art with performances. She usually shows her work, but then it’s more of a … I feel it’s not so much like a finished artwork. It’s another art form. Yes, no, it is tricky. (Marie, woman, visual art teacher)

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According to Marie, making art and art education overlap poses the risk of corrupting the valuation process and judgments among the students in making and assessing their work, abilities, and confidence in art. The students are on a quest of figuring out how to make art and make it in their own style (see Chap. 6). If they are presented with a specific way of doing art from an authoritative figure like their teacher, it may become too strong of a guiding principle of “the right way” of making art. This problem seems to be the main reason for Marie to guard the space of art education from her art-making, a relationship she acknowledges to be particularly “tricky”. Here the justification of art education again relates to the grammar of inspiration and what pedagogical practice is most conducive to stimulating and spurring creativity and originality among the students. As teaching is supposed to support the students’ wide-ranging and diverse interests, their individuality, creativity, and originality, enforcing any type of standard or role model have to be done with care. As art education is about fostering an explorative mode of engagement of finding an original voice, it should be void of the authoritative figure of the teacher as a master. For Hugo, artistic creation has always been rather fleeting. After graduating from The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, he moved to a small Swedish town to become a folk high school teacher, a position he kept for well over 20 years. Today, when he has settled down and stopped spending time touring, his vocational identification rests heavily on his teaching tasks. The music career has become a hobby and something he carries out in his spare time based on sporadic requests from the local community. Interviewer: Why have you been working here all these years? Hugo: Well, it is amazing to meet people at an age where they are on their way somewhere. They are in the process of defining “Who am I?” They all come here with a huge question that can be formulated in different ways, but when I hear them, they all say something along the lines of: “Am I good enough?” I get the pleasure of telling them: “Yes, you are good enough!” There are so many levels to answer  this huge  question. And  based on one dimension, where they are good enough, you can go ahead and make them “good enough” on more dimensions. With that starting point. […] Interviewer: Do you consider yourself an active musician, or is it something that has become something of the past at this point?

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Hugo: No, I do play but to a very, very small degree. I do not have time. So, I’m not out, but we’re trying to keep learning, playing, and giving some concerts. Interviewer: Together, in the teaching team as well? Hugo: Yes, yes. So, there are various contexts. I play at weddings and funerals, and baptisms. When you live in a small community like this, you end up in these kinds of places. (Hugo, man, music teacher)

Hugo is very articulate about his role as a folk high school teacher and what it contains. He prioritised his work as an educator alongside being a father. Confirming young persons and establishing confidence in who they are is portrayed as an existential calling for him. Similarly to Mona, Hugo explicitly addresses the role of being a teacher to facilitate engagements in arts that entails realising a more mature and stabilised identity and direction in life (see Chap. 2). Like many previous teachers, Hugo justifies the importance of art education concerning artistic inspiration. Still, he also emphasises the many different dimensions through which these confirmation acts occur: affirming and validating individuals in one dimension become the starting point of making them feel worthy overall. Moreover, making music is still something that enriches Hugo’s life, but the kind of gigs he performs seems to be something else and something truly different from what takes place when he teaches. While the music he performs is largely functionally motivated by the kind of rituals and ceremonies in the local community, his teaching does not depend on these rare artistic appearances, nor do these spheres add much to one another. Hugo highlights a dimension of art education that tends to be overlooked, namely the importance of art education for the local community, for example, providing a place for employment and providing cultural experiences within the local community, particularly in sparsely populated areas.

7.4  Synthesisation Another way of dealing with the biped structure of teaching and art creation is to allow them to bleed through or synthesise art creation and teaching actively. The teachers’ involvement in art-making and teaching allows each activity to overlap in a more fluid and symbiotic way. Rather than safeguarding and compartmentalising these activities, teachers enact brokering practices where the mediation of creative content moves between

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teaching practices and their own making of art. In other words, the teachers either incorporate and blend values from their professional roles to deal with dilemmas and potential role conflicts or use the other role as an anchor to deal with a specific problem (Chong, 2021). In the survey, a majority of teachers considered experiences of their art-­ making as “a necessary precondition” for their teaching employment to “a high degree” or “very high degree”. Given the prevalence of teachers who highlight the importance of having practical experience from actively pursuing an artistic career, it is hardly surprising to encounter many examples where the two activities of teaching and art-making are presented in a more synthetic and interdependent way. Nevertheless, how the interplay of these activities manifests themselves varies considerably between the teachers’ narratives. Margareta describes the influence the students’ work and creative assignments have on her way of making visual art and how her way of making art is actively used in her teaching. Her story can be seen as exemplifying the idea of using the creative flow of these spaces to merge or synthesise with one another. Interviewer: How do you look at how your artistic activity and teaching work relate to each other? Margareta: Actually, I think ​​ they enrich each other. When you are in [class], you have to work with what you think is interesting, even if it is not your images. You get to talk a lot, discuss a lot, about the creative and the artistic realm. And that, in turn, can feel like, “oh, this is what I want to do too”, and then I go home and work on it. Or last year, we had a week where we worked with collage as a theme, [name of coteacher] and I worked on it together. And then, even before that happened, I thought, “no, perhaps I’ll work my way into this a bit”… So I sat at home at the kitchen table, and it was overflowing with stuff I had been cutting up. And so, I worked on it, and it ended with three different art pieces that became part of [an exhibition] at the [regional] art gallery this summer. So I think that they enrich each other. Interviewer: Yes. Do you also use your work in teaching? Margareta: Yes, I usually show my work. To inspire, maybe, or to show how I approach certain things. So, I show it also because I work first in analogue, then take photos, and then maybe I print, and then I work analogue and a little bit digitally

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and … So, I seek … What I am most interested in is, of course, the creative process. And that process I try to show, preferably my process then. How that one works. Maybe it suits someone, and someone else thinks, “My God, I would never be able to work that way!” as well. But yes. I think ​​ that I know some other teachers … We have very different views on this. Some teachers do not want to show what they do. And I can understand that, I can respect that. But I want to be open so they understand what kind of person I am and what I work with. And also, my opinions and values, because that’s what comes out in these pictures as well. Interviewer: Exactly. Margareta:  Thoughts, ideas, opinions. Social criticism, perhaps, or whatever it may be. So, then I want to be open with that. (Margareta, woman, visual art teacher)

In creating overlaps between her visual artworks and the creative content of the art programme and its curriculum, Margareta feels that she is more transparent and genuine as a teacher. Rather than keeping her artistic engagement hidden from the students, she seeks to demystify the creative process by giving them a sense of how she works with photos. As a teaching method, the idea seems to anchor art education as much as possible in her vocational experiences, for the students to find their way of working and understand her way of teaching and giving feedback better. Rather than portraying her inspiration and creativity as a domain separate from teaching, she seeks to establish a flow between these spaces of activities. Ideas and inclinations spring from each one into the other. In doing so, the private explorative engagement becomes useful as fodder for creativity among the students. Her teaching work assignments and ideas become material support or a catalyst she uses in her artistic practice. The legitimacy of the activities relates to the inspired order of worth, making creativity and originality the overriding ambition and value within each space. The teacher expresses an idea of revealing oneself through art (see Chap. 6), creating conditions for intimacy and trust within the class. Besides working as a teacher, Nora makes graphic novels and cartoons. For her, teaching often involves drawing on her own artistic experiences and practises while becoming challenged and ignited to reflect on artistic practices. Nora talks about the relationship between teaching and art-­ making as creative, social, time-effective, didactically helpful, and a means for financial support.

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Interviewer: Do you see that they give each other something, your different parts [of teaching and making graphic novels]? Nora: Mm, very much. When I get here to write my lessons down, and so on, I derive almost all the knowledge from my practice. And then when I went back to the drawing board again after being here, I noticed that I have theorised a lot and read a lot of other people’s work, that is to say, my students’ cartoons, and talked a lot about them. Through that, I get a lot of new perspectives and so on. So, I think it’s an exchange that is very harmonious as well. It is super social to be a teacher, and it’s very lonely to sit and work. So, I find it very dynamic in many ways. It is mainly the labour market conditions that throw a spanner in the work rather than these creative operations. Interviewer: Alright, yes. And do you need to hunt for jobs, or is it that it also takes time if you were to be fully active as a cartoonist? I understood it as if it would be difficult time-wise. Nora: For me, it has never been so much about a job hunt, but more that it is hard to perform to meet deadlines. It is quite low compensation for the type of work we do, so you have to stagger quite a lot of deadlines. And then you feel, or I feel like, I want to perform very well and so on. With employment, you can go home when it’s five o’clock, but there you are … you must finish this. You sit until late at night, and you know how it is. Interviewer: Do you use your cartoons, or something similar, in your teaching? Nora: Yes, I do in part. I have made a comic book and a satire comic book. These are two genres that we teach here. So, I use a lot of that and how I went about it and so on, that kind of practical knowledge. (Nora, woman, visual arts teacher)

Nora describes the social aspect of teaching in stark contrast to the loneliness she experiences from sitting and working with her material. In contrast to the similar juxtaposition between sociability and loneliness made by Therese, Nora highlights how her experiences from the practical know-­how of artistic creation harmoniously and seamlessly travel into her classroom. Furthermore, by involving her work in the teaching, she needs to think it through and reflect on it more thoroughly, which creates a fertile ground for refining her work. Nora also expresses a similar attitude towards teaching as some other emerging artists, who view teaching as a

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practical and relevant way of dealing with the low monetary compensation from drawing cartoons. Rather than staggering deadlines and struggling to meet multiple deadlines, teaching has allowed her to merge and synthesise vocational tasks she finds balanced and meaningful. Using her teaching material and what she learns from teaching for her creative endeavours, she becomes a broker of activities that intimately overlap. In this case, the relationship between art-making and teaching is portrayed as a symbiotic harmonious affair in that it generates flows, ideas, knowhow, and creativity of mutual benefit. These justifications centre on inspiration and how to bring about creativity and original artwork in her and the students’ work. The creative situation of the fiction writer Magnus is similar to the situation of Nora. Magnus sees teaching as a point of reflection and being able to explain and illustrate the creative process by using his material. The overlap is not only about methods of teaching and creativity but also about creating time for writing. Interviewer: How do you view the role of both being an active writer and a teacher? How do they relate to each other, those roles? Magnus: Yes, in principle, I think one is the prerequisite for the other. Interviewer: Yes, in both directions? Magnus: Yes, I mean you cannot teach writing unless you are a writer yourself, I think. So, it … sure, there are certainly, so to speak, teachers of the Swedish language who can do well and so on. But it is a point to have experience of the profession, of the guild, of the industry, of surviving as a writer, when you talk about writing. And clearly, it is not that it is necessary for me as a writer to teach writing [laughter], but the big advantage with this, apart from livelihood, is that you get a recurring opportunity to reflect on “what the hell it is you are doing” [laughter]. Interviewer: Yes. Magnus: And how to do it. And how not to do it. So, in that way, teaching writing is not a one-way process. Rather you work with yourself as well [laughs], in some way all the time… Interviewer:  Yes. Do you get help to do it through your teaching then too? Magnus: Yes, I get new perspectives to live through. In part, I force myself to develop perspectives on writing to transfer them

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and inspire others to write. At the same time, I get a perspective on writing in general, but also on my writing through the students’ views and writing. So that way, I get a lot of input. Interviewer: Exactly. Magnus: Yes, both creatively and as a human being. Interviewer: Mm. Do you use your material in your teaching as well? Magnus:  Yes [laughs]. Later today, the inspiration for the poetry assignment was three poems by ‘yours truly’ [laughs]. You almost have to excuse yourself. I have said that one of the reasons why I sometimes use my material, not always, of course, is that I know what is behind these poems. So that I can illuminate them in another way than if I were to include a Tranströmer2 poem or from other authors. So, I can defend that I use my poems in that way. I find it easy to find examples because I know my writing career inside and out. Interviewer: You get access to a creative process by doing so? Magnus: Yes, yes. I can tell you about the background of the poems and how I worked on them. What kind of considerations I made and why I made the decisions I made, and so on. (Magnus, man, creative writing teacher)

Magnus returns to the experience of the potential human growth from teaching. To teach can be an existential endeavour, encompassing elements from the world of letters and what it means to be human. Some teachers refrain from using their material, but Magnus seeks to anchor the literary analysis in an understanding of the underlying process, which means that he often draws from his work. To know about the process of writing based on your own experiences and the “authenticity” of being a published writer is considered a prerequisite for teaching about writing in a meaningful way. Nevertheless, Magnus also says he almost has to excuse himself and explain to the students why he uses his poems, which shows that the two spaces are not entirely subsumed or integrated in an unproblematic manner. The role of being a broker is not self-evident and needs to be claimed and explained for it to pass as a legitimate teaching practice. The troubles he faces may arise from the problem of being seen as selfish and self-promoting when using his material. This situation appear problematic from the point of view of egalitarian and civic worth. 2  Tomas Tranströmer was a Swedish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.

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Sonja is a singer-and-songwriter and sees her artistic activities as instrumental for her teaching practice. In her narrative, she stresses how her teaching philosophy builds on her artistic abilities. The student’s learning is greatly facilitated by her continued involvement and engagement in advanced forms of music-making. In line with the charismatic image of teaching “what you are”, she stresses teaching as a means to create heightened musical experiences. Sonja: I still have concerts and sing, which is making me credible to my students. They know I still know what it’s about. I’m not a person who happened to become a teacher 30 years ago. Nothing bad about being a teacher. I’m a part of the folk high school idea of ​​teaching who you are. It is not the case that a good teacher can say, “tell me what to teach, and I will prepare it”. We who work like this, we are our preparation, you could say. For us to have it within us, what we teach. […] Interviewer: You are a practitioner too. That is that you sing yourself. But could you imagine a life where you only did one thing? Just being a teacher or just being a singer, yourself? Or what do they give each other? Sonja: So, I always say that I am a much better teacher when I have been out singing myself. And I am a much better singer when I have taught. Because it’s all cross-fertilising, it’s incredible. So, I do not know. When I come up on stage to perform, I feel “this is where I belong” somehow. I like to express myself through songs. Over the years, the kicks I get on stage, I get them just as much if I go to a concert with a student that I have… or just a student here at school, and they succeed with something we have struggled to do. I get just as touched by them … because I know how they feel on stage. If I would not have stood there myself or known what it is like to succeed, to succeed in communicating with your audience and feel that “there it is” […] I do not feel that there are precious ideas I want to keep to myself. It is not that I think, “I have come up with this trick, this no one shall know about, only I should know”. Every time I come up with something new, my first thing is to try to share it. And it is this joy I feel when the student sits with an open mouth and is like “aha” [laughs]. It is a wonderful experience as a teacher when it just clicks. It is fantastic! Yes. (Sonja, woman, music teacher)

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To be a teacher and artist is a joyful cross-fertilizing combination for Sonja. To be the kind of music teacher she wants, she builds upon her own practical experiences from “standing on stage” and touring. This experience creates legitimacy of being grounded in what she teaches and allows her to more easily hear and identify the students’ struggles and the challenges they face in “getting a hold” of their audience. Sonja also talks about a process in which the type of kicks and trills she got from taking the stage now increasingly occur when she is witnessing her students overcoming problems. For Sonja, being a teacher and artist is about identifying and reaching through to students. To communicate and make that person undergo a transformative process, she draws heavily from her artistic engagements. As she sees her vocational identity as seamlessly overriding art-making and art education, she also exemplifies the idea of synthetic and symbiotic relationships between the two. You teach who you are. The teacher searches for the kind of enchantment she can find in making music and seeks ways to share it with her students. Teaching music is seen as searching for creativity and that may solidify a community spirit both on stage and off-stage.

7.5  Conclusions This chapter has illustrated how a group of teachers working within Swedish folk high schools’ art education handles tensions arising from being involved in both teaching and art-making. Teachers move through different environments and situations in their daily lives, requiring them to adjust behaviours and expectations while handling multiple identities (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999; Liu, 2020). A principal tension in vocational identities is between their part of a competent collective of teachers where they are to foreground the multitude of students’ engagements and their role as singular individuals making art in their own  name. Predominantly, justification for their vocational commitments happened both in the communitarian order of worth, where the community of students’ engagements were seen as independent of their individual occupational pursuits, and in the inspirational order of worth, where charisma and personal groundedness were considered key. Throughout the chapter, we identified two types of vocational strategies for how teachers either keep art-making and teaching separate or combine them. In the first overarching strategy, they held these spaces separate from one another through compartmentalisation. In the second

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type of vocational strategy they adopted and justified these dual commitments in processes of synthesisation, letting the space of creation and teaching overlap and bleed through with one another. Safeguarding these activities in separate and compartmentalised domains shields teaching from the influences and outcomes of artistic pursuits and vice versa. Teachers who separate the activities tend to see different logic and requirements emanating from these activities. In teaching, the students are the centre of attention, and some teachers exclusively identify themselves as teachers. When teaching art disconnected from active art-making, they can become questioned for not being plugged into transformations in the professionalised art field and know-how. One can also be an active artist but let these activities affect teaching more indirectly or implicitly. Some  consider any type of self-proclaimed groundedness as a  vulgarity or “bragging”, whereas other find it problematic as it set certain aesthetic norms in motion. In deploying these vocational strategies, the teachers operate through boundary work as guardians defending the separate interest of teaching and making art or as space travellers who live a “double life” without letting the spaces intermingle through boundary work (Liu, 2020). For guardians, the activities are held separate to avoid inevitable conflicts from crossing boundaries and combining various work tasks. For those mainly engaged in art-making, the separation is used to foster creativity and originality in their art-making. They have a compound identity of being artists and teachers. Students’ creativity is also seen to be benefited from the overarching separation, as it fosters more egalitarian and pluralistic engagements not to put themselves and their work on a sanctimonious pedestal. As art education in folk high schools are carried out in environments where students are in the process of making sense of who they are as persons as well as artists, mobilising or showcasing finished artwork or performances can prevent the students from exploring their artistic pursuits. Teachers fear that by using themselves and their work as the starting point, the students’ engagements are prevented from building up their creative identities and finding their “voice”, “style”, or “calling”. Teachers may also refrain from the boundary work and compartmentalisation and instead act to build and bridge a more unified or vocational identity combining elements of their teaching and artistic creation. In the second type of vocational strategy adopted to navigate and justify these dual commitments, the teachers engage in processes of synthesisation, letting the space of creation and teaching overlap, bridge, and bleed through

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with one another. The inspired order of worth is central to the justifications of folk high school teachers’ art-making and art teaching. While some teachers seek to separate the creativity in art education among students from their artistic careers, others tend to see them as symbiotic and of mutual benefits. You are what you teach, you teach what you are. The hybridity of these workflows may float in both directions. One flow is to inspire students to solve their artistic problems with the help of concrete examples of how the teacher tackled them. In the other type of work flow, teachers may be faced with new sources of creative inspiration based on the exercises, feedback, and reflection taking place in class. The pedagogical practice is different from those that separate the spaces. The belief of these teachers is firmly rooted in the idea that artistic development and creativity benefit from linking and cross-fertilising the spaces.3 Teachers who see the overlaps of spaces as natural or symbiotic are engaged in boundary work that Liu (2020) calls brokers, that is mitigating between the spaces of creation and teaching. Their argumentation is often based on the assumption of being seen as credible, legitimate, and trustworthy teachers. This group have to ground their teaching in the practical experiences of their art-making for it to make sense. The practical knowledge and symbolic assets from being part of “the guild” or having “a name” in the professionalised sphere is simultaneously  a claim for authenticity and works to instil creativity based on the changing contours of what happens in the world of art-making.

References Abbing, H. (2002). Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam University Press. Beljean, S., Chong, P., & Lamont, M. (2015). A Post-Bourdieusian Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation for the Field of Cultural Production. In L. Hanquinet & M. Savage (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture (pp. 38–48). Routledge.

3  The teachers’ stances, seeing the spaces as oppositional or symbiotic, are similar to Zelizer’s (2010; see also Velthuis, 2005) research on economic market exchange and private life. One stance is that the economic market exchanges should be kept away from the private sphere in a hostile world relation. In the “nothing but” stance, there is only the market or the private sphere. Nevertheless, the distinction made by the teachers encountered in this chapter is not between private life and economic gains, but rather between their teaching and art-making.

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Berner, B. (2010). Crossing Boundaries and Maintaining Differences Between School and Industry: Forms of Boundary-Work in Swedish Vocational Education. Journal of Education and Work, 23(1), 27–42. https://doi. org/10.1080/13639080903461865 Boltanski, L., & Esquerre, A. (2020). Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Polity Press. Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 136843199002003010 Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1996). The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Polity Press. Chong, P. K. (2021). Dilemma Work: Problem-Solving Multiple Work Roles Into One Work Life. Work and Occupations, 48(4), 432–469. https://doi. org/10.1177/07308884211017623 Fürst, H. (2022). Splendid Isolation: Managing Time and Making Culture Among Novelists During the Pandemic. Poetics. Epub ahead of print. ­https://doi. org/10.1016/j.poetic.2022.101733 Gerber, A. (2017). The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers. Stanford University Press. Gerber, A., & Childress, C. (2017). The Economic World Obverse: Freedom Through Markets After Arts Education. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(12), 1532–1554. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764217734275 Lahire, B. (2010). The Double Life of Writers. New Literary History, 41(2), 443–465. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0001 Liu, S. (2020). Between Social Spaces. European Journal of Social Theory, 24(1) 123–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431020905258 Menger, P.-M. (1999). Artistic Labor Markets and Careers. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 541–574. https://doi.org/10.2307/223516 Menger, P.-M. (2014). The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty. Harvard University Press. Perrenoud, M., & Bataille, P. (2017). Artist, Craftsman, Teacher: “Being a Musician” in France and Switzerland. Popular Music and Society, 40(5), 592–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2017.1348666 Thévenot, L. (2014). Voicing Concern and Difference: From Public Spaces to Common-Places. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 7–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.905749 Velthuis, O. (2005). Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton University Press. Zelizer, V. A. (2010). Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy. Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Is Art Education Worthwhile?

What is the value of art education in society, and for a society? One answer to this question was offered to the authors of this book when we arrived to present a commissioned research report on art education at folk high schools to members of the Swedish parliament (Fürst et al., 2018). A government agency (The Swedish National Council of Adult Education) had commissioned us to evaluate the art programmes in relation to national cultural policy objectives and the purposes of the state’s support for adult and popular education. Some of these objectives involved broadening the interest in culture and participation in cultural life and were reflected in the title of our report: Cultural Bildung at the folk high school (Swedish: “Kulturell bildning i folkhögskolans regi”). The full report covered a wide range of topics, including presentations of the participants’ social background, motivations to study at the folk high school, and education-to-­ work transitions. However, to our great surprise, the organisers of the event had decided to streamline the message of our report by giving our talk the title: “No, the folk high school does not lead to unemployment!” The covert title change from Cultural Bildung at the folk high school to No, the folk high school does not lead to unemployment! allowed the organisers of this event to frame the complex and multifaceted issue of value in art education as a simple problem related to labour market outcomes. Seemingly contrary to a popular belief, they wanted us to highlight how art education led to gainful employment, or at the very least, with that

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7_8

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double negative, “not lead to unemployment”. Such a focus is consistent with increased public and political pressures across the EU and OECD to evaluate art education based on a narrow framework of “learning for earning” (Brown et al., 2020). However, based on the chapters presented in this book, it should be clear that this economistic means-end logic is but one approach to conceptualise value among many others. While Western politicians and policymakers have been inclined to subsume art education within a neoliberal worldview where the breadth and richness of human and cultural values are reduced to their function for economic output, cultural sociologists have often built their understanding of art education around the “symbolic” forms of value needed to pursue artistic careers and earn cultural esteem (see e.g. Menger, 2014). For example, studies have found that the economy in the transition from education to work in the arts is “reversed” so that students tend to sacrifice instrumental values, such as money or employment security, in exchange for amassing field-specific symbolic capital needed for the long-term recognition within the field of art (see e.g. Abbing, 2002; Bourdieu, 1993; Gustavsson et al., 2012). Nevertheless, to derive conclusions about a fully “reversed economy” of the arts, scholars tend to focus on social closure and enforcement of normative frameworks that belong to a particular subsegment of art education, namely the most exclusive and selective programmes that are defined by its proximity to pursuing a career in a particular restrictive field. Since “success” in the arts is often evaluated in terms of esteem and exceptionality, an overemphasis has been placed on the symbolic and inspirational values celebrated in the higher echelons of the educational system as opposed to the more mundane orientations of “ordinary artists” (Buscatto, 2019; Perrenoud & Bataille, 2017; Perrenoud & Bois, 2017). The premise of this book has been to take a symmetrical and comprehensive view of the valorisations and justifications enacted among common actors. We believe that the book can add to the diversity of everyday and ordinary cultural engagement images in art schools and post-compulsory art education. Before we turn to the broader implications of our argument, we want to highlight some of the central findings from each chapter of this book. We began this book with a birds-eye-view of the Nordic educational institution of the folk high schools, describing both the institutional properties and tensions central to the voluntary forms of arts participation and the social composition of its full student body. In Chap. 2, we show that

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sociological concepts such as Goffman’s “total institution”, Foucault’s “heterotopia”, Erikson’s “psychosocial moratorium”, and Turner’s “communitas”, have limited viability for comprehending the institutional properties of folk high schools  in the era we live in. These concepts denote either liberation or repressive control and were all developed during the 1950s and 1960s, either as part of the anti-psychiatry movement or to describe countercultures of an era when spaces in society were not as interconnected and fluid as they tend to be today. While these totalising concepts retain some utility, the multiplicity and variation of contemporary life forms have made them slightly rigid and outdated. In the context of institutional spaces of the Swedish folk high schools, some degree of control and seclusion is often paired with experiences of transgression, freedom, and liberation. Due to the interconnectedness of the lives lived there, the varied forms of engagements in their buildings, and the mixing up of different kinds of students, no catch-all concept seems to be fully equipped to cover the inherent institutional complexities and uncertainty of their lives. Based on the insights from this chapter on the institutional properties of the contemporary folk high school, it is crucial to be attentive to the variation of experiences in these art programs and the tensions that emerge from the institutional design and relative autonomy these schools possess. The mid-twentieth century also gave rise to a critical sociological questioning of the representation of art creations as a romantic notion of “giftedness”. One sociological approach to demystify artistic engagement is to unveil their social usage from a position of exteriority. Chap. 3 considers the social characteristics of the full student body engaged in the art programmes offered by the folk high schools when factoring in gender, social origin, and the parents’ highest educational attainment. When mapping out the educational attainment of various participant profiles, we show that while art education might be available “to all” in a formal or juridical sense, different social groups make use of these opportunities in ways that are fundamentally skewed (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979; Brook et  al., 2020; Oakley et  al., 2017). While there is variety among participants, more women than men participate in all art subjects. The students predominantly originate from families with strong positions in the labour market, with parents who attained tertiary education and who were, for the most part, born in Sweden to two Swedish-born parents. The Swedish welfare state provides generous state subsidies so that people are free to continue post-compulsory education in the arts. Nevertheless, students’ decision to study art likely relates to the perceived “acceptability” of

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engaging in these voluntary forms of artistic enculturation. The acceptability varies among subsegments of the population. Moreover, the provision of educational offerings within the arts might also be bound to a restricted repertoire of Western highbrow culture that is far from universally appealing. In Chap. 4, we moved from the broad-based depictions, based on a position of externality, to a more situated and practically oriented perspective where the engagements and justifications among the students themselves were foregrounded. We adopted three concepts from Thévenot’s (2014) model of regimes of engagement: individual plan, familiarity, and exploration, to which we add the concept of recuperation. These concepts are then used to analyse students’ orientations to art education and how it becomes, for them, a meaningful pursuit. The analysis conveys a broad array of cultural engagements: towards making a career, taking a break, exploring and discovering, or reconstituting one’s self. We also develop four overarching metaphors about the folk high school based on its meaning among those who enrol: the folk high school as a hothouse, a home, a happening, and a hospital. While these orientations are used to understand participants’ attachments to the post-compulsory art education that may make them worthwhile from their perspective, different sets of justifications and value regimes tend to congregate in different schools and programmes. An important legacy from American pragmatism is that exploiting critical moments and contestable situations is a powerful way to identify what common actors find worthy and worthwhile. Those situations force them to make their habitual expectations explicit. Chap. 5 zooms in on the critical moments when gatekeepers of the folk high school evaluate prospective students. Which students strike them as “worthy” of admission? And what forms of evaluation and criteria render their selection procedures legitimate? Since these art courses are already positioned against one another, we distinguish between the selection tests in prestigious and ordinary art education based on their status and orientation. Prestigious programmes typically attract an abundance of prospective students. The principles of evaluation are often close to the virtues celebrated in the specialised sphere of art-making, with high demands for practical know-­ how, artistic originality, and novelty. The gatekeepers to ordinary art education, on the other hand, seek to assess would-be students’ dedication, know-how, and willingness to participate in the course. These selection tests, which oscillate between orders of worth derived from the inspired, communitarian, and efficacious value registers, make visible tensions

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inherent to the institution as a whole. The individualised notion of an inspirational performance or text proves particularly difficult to square with values derived from more universalistic and egalitarian values. While teachers tend to focus their evaluations on intra-aesthetic dimensions, they also seek to mitigate expectations of providing a more diverse and equal student group and ensuring that students can complete the course. With the ethnographic reports in Chap. 6, we turn to the classroom setting, where student engagements are further “put to the test”. Based on observations from an ordinary studio course within the fine arts, we explore two assignments through which the students are subjected to learn the basics of land art and abstract painting. Even if the teachers seek to deploy soft testing formats that prompt the students to let go of their performance anxieties and encourage a variety of stylistic expressions, there are clear norms that the students are meant to align to in the course of these exercises. The vulnerability and fragility of student engagement are further explored through participant observation in a short creative writing course. This ethnography takes on a student-centric perspective to capture the importance of the affective and personal bonds among the students to ease into the situation where they are open to experimenting and critiquing one another. These examples show that art education tests students to perform under conditions of uncertainty, where both the alignment to artistic conventions and the questioning of dominant perceptions of reality can be foregrounded. To understand the work of teachers in the folk high schools’ art education, it is important to place them within the wider landscape of cultural provision and specify their vocational commitments. In the final empirical chapter, Chap. 7, we show how these folk high schools form an integral part of the system of cultural creation and provision. The teachers often combine part-time employment in art education with their art-making and freelancing careers. Although all teachers cherish the opportunity to work with students and watch them transform and develop as human beings, they adopt rather different vocational strategies for combining their own art creation and teaching practices. The hybridity of their labour conditions can render them in problematic value conflicts but also be seen as an asset for legitimacy in the eyes of the participants. Some teachers actively seek to synthesise these spaces and describe teaching as a place to test out their artistic ideas, model exercises, and display their work. Teachers who compartmentalise the spaces attempt to prevent values from

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collapsing and might see the value of art education in economic terms as something that provides them employment and a steady income.

8.1   The Value of Art Education Although art education has been narrowed down to a means-end instrument in public policies, on-the-ground actors hold a much more comprehensive array of values in common. Following French pragmatic sociologists interested in renewing the scholarly attention towards common actors’ critical capacity (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999, 2006), we have focused on how these actors understand worth and give it sustained forms in an institutional setting with great internal variety. This setup allows us to broaden our understanding of the variation of everyday communicative practices while, at the same time, grouping them into different sets of the comprehensive grammar of what art education “is good for”. As has become evident in this book, there are several orders of worth that are plausible when defining the value of art education. The Swedish folk high schools are far from monolithic, and depending on the recruitment profile, the position of the school and its proximity to the professional world of arts, we find different compositions of these value registers. Table 8.1 depicts these different regimes of publicly acknowledged forms of valuation. The public justifications draw upon values schemes that help render art education legitimate within a social sphere, where they are associated with “the common good”. Relating these public values to the sociological predecessors, one can see how modern society is differentiated into “value spheres” of actions aiming for ultimate values, as described by Max Weber (1993).1 The social spheres of art and art education constitute a very particular subsection of activities and values in modern society alongside the economy, law, religion, politics, and so on. In this book, and pragmatic sociology more widely conceived, these spheres can be seen as generative for a specific composition of legitimate grammar.2 Conceived as traditional 1  Weber’s emphasis on the important role of “inner-worldly asceticism” in modern life and the inherent problem of institutionalising “charisma” parallels some of the tensions that arise in our study. 2  Society can also be conceived as differentiated into spheres of activity in line with what Mead (1934) calls a universe of discourse, that is to say, an order based on the generalised perspectives for communication and collaboration (see Cefaï, 2016). A theory of functionally differentiated societies is provided by Luhmann (1995).

Ritualistic Monetary

Domestic Marketized

Creativeness, originality Collective group interests Utility

Evaluation criteria Conformism

Considered problematic

Artistic Art Education

Type of art education

Exclusivity, Elitism Civically Engaged Art Education Competence Inefficiency Functional Art Education Personal growth Tradition Immorality Homely Art Education Entrepreneurship Bargaining power Un-employability Art Education for Labour Market Integration

Sameness

Calling

Quality

Note: Modified model after Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) and Boltanski and Thévenot (2006)

Trust Exchange

Collegiality

Know-how

Efficacious

Dedication Mutuality

Artistic

Inspired

Types of relationship

Communitarian Societal

Forms of information

Order of worth

Table 8.1  Five public orders of worth in art education at Swedish folk high school

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value spheres, they both have their legitimate ends and develop links to one another as society transforms. The situational availability of different orders of worth to create rules of coordination and lay claim to our perception of reality relates to the struggles that have taken place between these relatively autonomous social spheres, for example, the institutionalised tests of strength, value conflicts, and clashes that have been played out historically. Why then has our conception of value become so narrowed down that it is viable to headline a talk about the worth of art education with a title such as: “No, the folk high school does not lead to unemployment”? How can we understand art education’s role in relation to the dominant grammar employed in public discourse? One sociological explanation for the weak status of art education would be to look for answers in the social groups who are most keen to make use of them. Historically, it is predominantly the cultural fraction of the middle classes who have invested their time and energy in art education, finding art valuable for its own sake. However, in the past few decades, the fracturing of the middle class has increased, and cultural, educational, and creative groups have found themselves in a much weaker position than the professional and managerial classes within the economic sphere (Bourdieu, 1984; Piketty, 2014; Savage et al., 2013). Meanwhile, New Public Management (NPM) has had a tremendous influence on public policy rendering the value and quality of largely in-­ calculable goods (art, education, science) into numeric outcomes within governing bodies looking for ways to conduct “cost-benefit analysis” of all public investments. While such integration of economistic and financial worldviews and their associated orders of worth leads to coordinated action in spheres beyond the economy, the real modus operandi and market pricing is a rather complicated matter (cf. Beckert & Aspers, 2011; Chiapello & Knoll, 2020; Mazzucato, 2019). For example, behind the guise of quantification by performance indicators related to art education, the relative success of art education is often measured by counting which students with which degrees find jobs and earn money. No wonder scholars argue that we inhabit an “audit society” (Power, 1997) or “performance society” (Stark, 2020), where performances are constantly measured, managed, and accounted for, turning “the self” into an odd unit of equivalence. However, one could also interpret this preoccupation with the economic output of art education as an effect of the overall integration of cultural workers into the functioning of contemporary capitalism

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(Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020). As Western economies outsourced much of their production to less-developed countries, large segments of these labour markets rely on cultural workers to function (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020). The growing numbers of cultural creators, artists, artisans, curators, musicians, authors, designers, and so on that overwhelmed the educational spheres from the mid-twentieth century and onwards has a fundamental role in creating stories, collections, and events that set things and places apart as “exceptional”, whether because they have a “heritage” are “enriched” or “singular” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020).3 Capitalism thus relies on cultural creators to differentiate enriched objects from standard objects and, more profoundly, set things and places apart. One obvious way to describe the effect of these broad societal transformations is to assert that the traditional opposition between culture and commerce has eroded or collapsed altogether (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski & Esquerre, 2020; Siciliano, 2021). Nevertheless, from a crudely economic perspective, it often remains true that art education does little to advance one’s position in the labour market or increase one’s bargaining power in the short term. While it may be true that some proportion of these students become integrated into the labour market and that art and culture can benefit the new economic modus operandi of postindustrial societies, such observations cannot tell the whole story of what is going on within art education. If art schools themselves promote themselves solely in terms of their graduates’ ability to find jobs, they will have surrendered many of the inherent values that both teachers and students hold dear and that make such programmes valuable for culture and society at large. We should not forget that art education is also legitimised by reference to communitarian ideals of participation in the arts. This involves collective group interest, the sheer enjoyment of making things come to life, 3  According to Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, pp. 466–470), the new spirit of capitalism has, since the 1970s, successfully neutralised many of the challenges raised by an artistic critique by incorporating it into a post-Fordist mode of production built around buzzwords from the creative industries: flexibility, entrepreneurship, creativity, project-based innovation. So while a previous generation of artists critiqued capitalism as one-dimensional, standardised, and deprived of artistic authenticity and creativity, today, trained artists are increasingly employed in project teams working creatively with the “valorisation of objects”. What was once considered bohemian, radical, and unmodern is paradoxically fashionable and business-minded.

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and the need that some of these students feel to slow down and, through artistic engagements, contemplate about what to do next in their life.

8.2   Beyond and Beneath the Dominant Paradigm The publicly endorsed values of art education are primarily argumentative vehicles for legitimising (or delegitimising) it within the wider social spheres of the economy, politics, and the arts: they speak to whether art education serves a conception of the “common good”. But students at folk high schools also adopt modes of engagement in situ in accordance with private values with more limited reach and generalizability (Heinich, 2020, p. 86). These values are often narrowly attached to their embodied state and present sense of self and can be much easier for them to conceive than the more distant, long-term, and aggregate effects of their participation. Participation at the level of individual engagements often resembles an identity project: an opportunity to find out about one’s “true self”, dabble with the arts, or recuperate and regain health. To be able to take a year or two to define what one wants to do in life, explore an artistic expression or develop a hobby one feels particularly passionate about is not necessarily at odds with the common good but often occurs on a level below it, as though it is not, or cannot be, as important for society as it is to oneself. As a technology of self and popularised form of identity project, one might, of course, see it as an extension of the dominant ideologies of investing in one’s self or the continuation of “charismatic myths” of quasi-­ religious origin (Kris & Kurz, 1981).4 Since art education provides an institutional and relatively standardised pathway for learning any given art form, it can often generate contradictions in relation to the more individualised and romantic values that aspiring or ordinary artists describe. In the Nordic folk high schools, in particular, such individual identity projects can run up against a strong social emphasis on egalitarianism, sameness, and community, which stems from both the Nordic welfare state and the civic organisations that act as the schools’ custodians (Røyseng et al., 2007; Verdier, 2018). At the same time, the teachers also want to promote uniqueness, authenticity, and

4  The idea of art education as an identity project has been previously explored in a range of sociological work (Moulin, 2009; Røyseng et al., 2007).

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personality in each artistic endeavour without losing their sense of authority as a “competent judge”. However, art schools like the folk high schools are important arenas where socialisation towards artistic identities happens, including how students project themselves into imagined futures. Their modes of engagement are far from reducible to their future career prospects. For example, we encountered many students focused on the “here-and-now”, not just because of the strong emphasis on spontaneity and sensation that is commonplace among aspiring artists, but as a coping mechanism within the kind of society they lived in. Students also told us about their own corporeal, recuperative, health-related motivations for pursuing education in the arts. The hectic temporal dynamics of modern society resemble what Rosa (2013) calls “social acceleration”, stemming from the high demands for performance in many parts of people’s lives. Rather than slowing down to synchronise activities in their lives, people who feel pressed for time are pushed to speed up. But the folk high schools, which are in many ways set apart from society, operate on a different and more manageable rhythm. They offer people the chance to experience life at a different pace, providing opportunities for reflection, change, or even resistance to norms. The folk high school thus holds an existential value below the justifications that often frame the public perception of art education. Students can come to the courses to slow down and focus on their mental and physical well-being. The cultural offerings at the folk high school thus seem to offer some institutional support for individuals to focus on “working on themselves”. A parallel can be drawn to the spa, or in Swedish “kurort”, which historically served as both recuperative breaks from the rest of society and part of a public sphere where elites would meet and exchange thoughts (O’Dell, 2010). As O’Dell (2010) shows, class divisions remained stark within these spas, separating citizens of different classes and creating viable alternatives for the working classes. Like a less conspicuous version of a spa, the folk high school provides a chance to experience life at a different pace, find oneself through craft and culture, and explore individual concerns through creation and engagement with others. There are few other spaces in contemporary society that allow for cultural exchange or the development of common perspectives among creative and culturally curious people, and the folk high school’s ability to provide such a space seems one of its major benefits for both individuals and society at large.

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In some ways, art education at the folk high school provides a solution, or perhaps, a respite from, or container for, social problems created elsewhere (Brook et  al., 2020). The school might temporarily mitigate the competition and performance pressures of the everyday world so that engaged citizens have a chance to devote time to creating a “meaningful life”. This recuperative element of art education is not necessarily confined to the health of these individuals, however; it might, for example, help people feel more prepared for future employment. Yet, if employability alone dictates our approach to art education, we will be submitting to a very limiting moral and political framework. Throughout this book, we have shown the various ways in which art education gains value. While the value of art education may seem to be a marginal phenomenon at first glance, the kind of value attributed to it speaks to the kind of society one wants to have.

References Abbing, H. (2002). Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam University Press. Beckert, J., & Aspers, P. (2011). The Worth of Goods: Valuation and Pricing in the Economy. Oxford University Press. Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (2005). The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso. Boltanski, L., & Esquerre, A. (2020). Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities. Polity Press. Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1999). The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377. https://doi. org/10.1177/136843199002003010 Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (2006). On justification: Economies of Worth. Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1979). The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture. The University of Chicago Press. Brook, O., O’Brien, D., & Taylor, M. (2020). Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality and the Cultural and Creative Industries. Manchester University Press. Brown, P., Lauder, H., & Cheung, S. Y. (2020). The Death of Human Capital: Its Failed Promise and How to Renew It. Oxford University Press.

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Buscatto, M. (2019). Presentation. “Modest” Artists Standing the Test of Time. The Artistic “Vocation”, Yes… But Not That Alone. Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques, 50(2), 9–26. Cefaï, D. (2016). Social World: The Legacy of Mead’s Social Ecology in Chicago Sociology. In H. Joas & D. R. Huebner (Eds.), The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead (pp. 165–184). The University of Chicago Press. Chiapello, E., & Knoll, L. (2020). Social Finance und Impact Investing. Historical Social Research, 45(3), 7-30. https://doi.org/10.12759/HSR.45.2020.3.7-­30 Fürst, H., Levelius, S., & Nylander, E. (2018). Kulturell bildning i folkhögskolans regi: Deltagare och lärare på estetiska profilkurser. Folkbildningsrådet. Gustavsson, M., Börjesson, M., & Edling, M. (2012). Konstens omvända ekonomi: tillgångar inom utbildningar och fält 1938–2008. Daidalos. Heinich, N. (2020). A Pragmatic Redefinition of Value(s): Toward a General Model of Valuation. Theory, Culture & Society, 37(5), 75–94. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276420915993 Kris, E., & Kurz, O. (1981). Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. Yale University Press. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Stanford University Press. Mazzucato, M. (2019). The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Penguin Books. Mead, G.  H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. The University of Chicago Press. Menger, P.-M. (2014). The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty. Harvard University Press. Moulin, R. (2009). L’artiste, l’institution et le marché. Flammarion. O’Dell, T. (2010). Spas: The Cultural Economy of Hospitality, Magic and the Senses. Nordic Academic Press. Oakley, K., Laurison, D., O’Brien, D., & Friedman, S. (2017). Cultural Capital: Arts Graduates, Spatial Inequality, and London’s Impact on Cultural Labor Markets. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(12), 1510–1531. https://doi. org/10.1177/0002764217734274 Perrenoud, M., & Bataille, P. (2017). Artist, Craftsman, Teacher: “Being a Musician” in France and Switzerland. Popular Music and Society, 40(5), 592–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2017.1348666 Perrenoud, M., & Bois, G. (2017). Ordinary Artists: From Paradox to Paradigm? Biens Symboliques/Symbolic Goods. Revue de sciences sociales sur les arts, la culture et les idées, 1. https://doi.org/10.4000/bssg.171 Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford University Press. Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press.

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Røyseng, S., Mangset, P., & Borgen, J.  S. (2007). Young Artists and the Charismatic Myth. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 13(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286630600613366 Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M., Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J., et al. (2013). A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment. Sociology, 47(2), 219–250. https://doi. org/10.1177/0038038513481128 Siciliano, M. L. (2021). Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries. Columbia University Press. Stark, D. (2020). The Performance Complex: Competitions and Valuations in Social Life. Oxford University Press. Thévenot, L. (2014). Voicing Concern and Difference: From Public Spaces to Common-Places. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 7–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2014.905749 Verdier, É. (2018). Europe: Comparing Lifelong Learning Systems. In M. Milana, S. Webb, J. Holford, R. Waller, & P. Jarvis (Eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning (pp.  461–483). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­55783-­4_24 Weber, M. (1993). The Sociology of Religion. Beacon Press.

Appendix: Methodology

One ambition of this book has been to capture the art education at the folk high school from various sociological vantage points. To change perspective, we have relied on different types of data. While much of the book relies on in-person interviews with students and teachers, we also draw on two ethnographies, a survey sent to teachers at the art courses, official statistics from Statistics Sweden, and fictional accounts from graphic novels. Much of the material was originally collected for a governmental report. The report’s ambition was very different to this book. A governmental agency directed the report to evaluate the art education courses at the folk high school in relation to aims formulated in cultural and educational policy. While this task came with certain limitations, we were active in designing our data collection to make it possible to use the material for further research. The benefit of doing a commisioned government report is that information may be more readily available, and the problems of gaining access and receiving high response rates are not as pronounced as when you carry out research in your own name. The qualitative and qualitative data for this report were collected by the two authors of this book and the folk high school teacher Sanna Levelius. While we had written about literature and music at the folk high school, Levelius was a teacher in visual arts. She provided knowledge about the state of teaching visual arts in Sweden during the project. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7

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Interviews The three persons collecting the interview data were placed in three different places in Sweden, which was beneficial as it was possible to collect data from 12 different folk high schools throughout Sweden. We built a sampling frame by constructing a database with all folk high school courses in music, visual arts, and creative writing offered in 2017/2018. We removed those courses that were offered to distance students. We could not visit all 83 courses but instead focused on bringing a variation of courses in terms of status, profiles, and geographical location. In total, 20 interviews (with 21 teachers) and 15 group interviews (with 54 students) were conducted. An additional eight interviews with former students were conducted by telephone. Out of the total number of 62 students interviewed, 19 were music students, 28 visual art students, and 15 creative writing students. Of the 21 teachers, 5 were music teachers, 10 were visual art teachers, and 6 were creative writing teachers. All participants were handed a sheet covering informed consent before the interview. They were informed that the participation was voluntary, results would be used for a report and future scientific publications, they would be anonymous in the presentation of the results, and the data would be stored in a way that only the interviewers would have access to it. The interviews were conducted with students for 40–90 minutes, and teachers were interviewed for 15–60 minutes. The interview questions were semi-standardised. Students were asked about their background and what they had studied before, how they found out about the school and how they applied, their life at school (experiences of being at a folk high school, other students, and the teachers), and their plans for the future. The interviews with former students also involved questions about how they, at the time of the interview, perceived their experiences from the folk high school and its relevance to what they did after attending the school. The teachers were asked about their background, how they got the job at the folk high school, their engagement in cultural creation and its relevance to their teaching, and questions about their teaching methods. They were also asked about their relationship with other teachers and the students. As the governmental report focused on education-to-work transitions, we also inquired how they talked to students about their future after attending the folk high school.

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Statistics, Survey Data, and Ethnography We also wanted to get a birds-eye view of participation in the art education at the folk high school and got customised statistics from Statistics Sweden about the students’ social backgrounds, course participation, and work and education after having attended the folk high school. The population was created through the register for the Swedish folk high school (autumn semesters 2005–2010) that included all students in an art course at the folk high school that are specialised courses (“särskild kurs”) or vocationally oriented training. The reason we went back so far in time had to do with the ambitions of the governmental authority to track the students’ transitions into the labour market. The courses included in the population registry were those classified as music, visual arts, handicraft, scenic arts, creative writing, and other art subjects. The statistics entail 24,206 students, and the taxonomy of the subject areas follows Swedish nomenclature. We surveyed the teachers in the art education at the folk high school to get information about who they were and how they engaged in art education and their art-making. The survey was sent to 702 art education teachers. The teachers’ contact details were identified on the web pages for the folk high schools that offered art courses during that semester. As to not miss teachers who were not on the web pages, all folk high schools were contacted and asked about the contact details of their art education teachers. In total, 397 teachers responded to the survey, which amounts to a 57% response rate. We did not have the resources to do an ethnography to see more of the life inside of the folk high school during the main data collection process. However, for this book, we rely on additional ethnographic data from Filippa Millenberg during a visual arts course and an ethnographic report from Henrik Fürst who participated in a short  creative writing course.

Limitations, Coding, and Anonymity A possible drawback of our material is that it was collected before we began plans to write this book. However, as the ambition from the very start was to cover the reasons why students participate in art education

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and why teachers teach them, we were able to create a rich material that was useful for further analysis. All interviews were coded in ATLAS.ti by Henrik Fürst. The interview transcripts with students contained codes about choosing the course, their view of the folk high school, other students, and the teacher. Codes also pertained to their life at the folk high school and their leisure time and ideas about their future. The coded material for teachers’ transcripts was about their own cultural creation, teaching methods, view of the folk high school, course, fellow teachers, and students. The ethnographic data were also coded, covering the different phases of the course and life at school. After this coding, it was possible to scrutinise the material further. For the book, we made abstractions from the material, such as the classifications of students’ orientation to participate in the folk high school. The theoretical apparatus used became the perspective through which we reread and analysed the classified material. We could further detail the varieties of values in art education as discovered in the material through additional classifications which sometimes took us  beyond the preexisting theoretical concepts. In these iterative processes, we worked with theory and sometimes needed to make alterations, additions and revisions to our analytical models.  To anonymise the material, we use pseudonyms for the names of the teachers and students. The names used in this book have been selected from a random name generator.

Index1

A Aesthetic, 2, 5, 7, 8, 16, 51, 52, 54, 58, 61, 90, 91, 96, 97, 101, 102, 107–111, 120, 128, 130, 133, 143 Artist, 1, 4, 6, 16, 33, 34, 72, 73, 80, 101, 101n3, 105, 123, 137, 141, 144–146, 148, 150, 151, 157, 161, 162, 163n3, 173–175, 173n3 B Boarding school, 25–33, 36–38, 44–46, 78, 79, 82 Boltanski, Luc, 4, 11–13, 11n8, 11n9, 12n10, 12n11, 63, 64, 67, 83, 90–92, 101, 110–112, 118, 120, 121, 121n2, 127, 131, 134,

136–138, 141, 142, 147, 161, 162, 170, 172, 173, 173n3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 11n9, 55, 63, 64, 102, 109, 111, 151, 166, 167, 172 C Career, 1, 6, 13, 15, 45, 54, 58, 61, 70–75, 70n2, 77, 78, 83–85, 94, 101, 106, 141–143, 145, 146, 149, 153, 155, 159, 163, 166, 168, 169, 175 Charisma, 161, 170n1 See also Inspiration Civic, 7, 16, 102, 108, 111, 159, 174 Civil society, 7, 9, 111 Common actor, 11–13, 15, 64, 67, 166, 168, 170

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Fürst, E. Nylander, The Value of Art Education, Sociology of the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14061-7

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INDEX

Common good, 13, 15, 67, 68, 91, 94, 101, 110, 170, 174 See also Public value Communitarian, 7, 16, 91, 95, 99–102, 106, 109, 111, 128, 161, 168, 173 Communitas, 15, 46, 167 Conflict, 14, 118, 147, 155, 162, 169, 172 Conventions, 12n10, 33, 45, 90, 91, 93, 97, 98, 102, 103, 109, 111, 117, 120, 127, 169 Critical moments, 12, 15, 91, 168 Critique, 11n8, 12, 16, 61, 64, 121, 128, 133, 137, 138, 173n3 E Efficacious, 91, 98, 110, 168 Engagement, 3, 5, 11, 13–16, 28, 39, 44, 47, 52, 54, 58, 64, 67–85, 91, 94, 100, 108, 110–112, 117–138, 141–143, 146, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156, 160–162, 166–169, 174, 175, 180 Enrichment, 4, 83 Exclusion, 61, 62, 85, 111 Existential value, 175 Exploration, 13, 15, 43, 45, 54, 67, 71, 72, 75–77, 81, 82, 84, 104, 124–129, 138, 152, 168 F Familiarity, 13, 15, 67, 78, 82, 132, 135, 138, 150, 168 Folk high school, 2–10, 2n1, 2n2, 3n3, 13–16, 25–47, 49, 51, 52, 54–56, 55n5, 58–63, 62n10, 69–85, 90–95, 97n1, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103n4, 104–108,

110–112, 117, 119, 119n1, 122, 125, 127–129, 131, 132, 137, 138, 141–148, 151–154, 160–163, 165–171, 174–176, 179–182 H Happening, 15, 27, 30, 31, 34, 67–86, 94, 168 Heinich, Nathalie, 12, 12n10, 89, 108, 174 Heterotopia, 15, 46, 167 Home, 13, 15, 31, 32, 67–86, 94, 107, 128, 138, 148, 155, 157, 168 Hospital, 15, 44, 45, 67–86, 94, 100n2, 168 Hothouse, 15, 67–86, 94, 102, 168 I Inclusion, 61, 62 Individual plan, 13, 15, 67, 70–77, 85, 132, 168 Inspiration, 40, 76, 77, 80, 91, 109, 123, 125, 128, 153, 156, 158, 159, 163 Institutions, 2, 6, 8, 12, 26, 33, 40, 44–46, 55, 75, 120, 121, 138, 166, 169 Intimacy, 132–136, 156 J Judgement, 85, 102, 107, 110, 121, 129, 134, 152 Justification, 10–16, 12n11, 51, 68, 83, 90, 91, 102, 109, 110, 112, 125, 137, 142, 153, 158, 161, 163, 166, 168, 170, 175

 INDEX 

L Labour market, 2, 4, 16, 44, 62, 71, 81, 83, 84, 141, 142, 157, 165, 167, 173, 181 Labour market integration, 4, 80, 83–85, 91 Land art, 122–127, 169 M Market, 83, 84, 141, 151, 163n3, 172 Menger, Pierre-Michel, 1, 2, 4, 40, 74, 112, 141, 166 Moral frameworks, 47 See also Orders of worth N New Public Management (NPM), 172 O Orders of worth, 11, 91, 92, 101, 107, 109, 111, 142, 168, 170–172 Ordinary art education, 54, 90, 91, 93, 98, 101, 101n3, 102, 108, 110, 111, 119n1, 120, 127, 168 P Parents, 15, 55–60, 56n6, 57n7, 62, 117, 167 Pragmatic sociology, 11, 11n8, 11n9, 14, 49n1, 64, 91, 120, 136, 142, 147, 170 Prestigious art education, 90, 91, 95, 101, 102, 108, 109, 111 Private value, 91, 94, 174 Psychosocial moratorium, 15, 45, 46, 167 Public value, 91, 170

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R Recruitment, 51, 55, 57, 59, 61–63, 94, 100–102, 107, 109, 118, 170 Recuperation, 15, 68, 80, 82, 84, 85, 150, 168 S Selection, 3, 13, 15, 57, 58, 63, 64, 85, 86, 89–99, 97n1, 101–103, 105–112, 123, 168 Selection test, 13, 15, 73, 89–112, 168 Social background, 14, 51, 58, 122, 143, 165, 181 See also Social disposition Social disposition, 49–64, 105, 111, 118, 121 Spa, 175 See also Recuperation Space, 14–16, 26, 27, 36, 37, 45, 46, 55, 68, 73, 75, 77, 84, 119, 122, 134, 136, 137, 142, 144, 147–149, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 161–163, 163n3, 167, 169, 175 T Teachers, 3, 3n3, 5, 10, 11, 13–16, 31, 33, 34, 36, 40–43, 49, 78, 80–82, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93–112, 119n1, 120, 122–134, 136, 138, 141–163, 169, 173, 174, 179–182 Test, 10n7, 11–14, 16, 32, 35, 71, 89–112, 119–126, 129, 131, 132, 134–137, 169, 172 See also Selection test Thévenot, Laurent, 11–15, 11n9, 12n10, 12n11, 67, 68, 80, 83, 90–93, 101, 107, 110–112, 120, 121n2, 131, 132, 136, 137, 142, 147, 161, 162, 168, 170

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INDEX

Time, 5–8, 13, 27, 28, 30–37, 39–42, 44–46, 49, 52, 57, 68, 70, 72, 74–81, 83, 84, 93, 99, 106, 108, 112, 117, 118, 120, 122–124, 126, 128, 131–136, 143, 144, 149–151, 153, 154, 157–160, 170, 172, 174–176, 180–182 Tools, 12, 13, 91, 93 Total institution, 15, 44–46, 167 Trust, 34, 119, 132, 135–138, 156 U Uncertainty, 1, 11, 12, 14, 61, 70, 71, 75, 78, 89, 90, 96, 110, 112, 125, 137, 167, 169 V Valuation, 5, 10, 11, 58, 64, 83, 109, 112, 131, 153, 170

Value, 4, 4n4, 5, 10–12, 14–16, 46, 83–85, 91, 94, 95, 99, 102, 105, 107, 108, 111, 119, 120, 125, 127, 131, 133, 138, 141, 147, 155, 156, 165, 166, 168–176, 182 Value sphere, 170, 172 See also Common good Vocation, 70n2, 71, 143, 149 Vocational identity, 14, 16, 141–143, 147, 147n1, 161, 162 W Worth, 1–16, 36, 42, 56n6, 68, 70, 84, 89–92, 99, 101, 102, 107–109, 111, 117, 128, 130, 137, 138, 141–163, 168, 170–172 See also Value