Learning to navigate in the unknown: attuning to affordances in artist visits in schools

ABSTRACT

Artist visits have become a common means of delivering arts education in schools; however, teacher education insufficiently prepares student teachers to use the benefits of art projects for teaching and learning. In this conceptual paper, I contribute to an understanding of what capacities are necessary for future teachers to engage in artist visits. I shed light on the fundamental capacity to recognise the affordances that arise in the sociomaterial environment produced through artist visits. By elucidating how affordances are perceived, I illustrate how teacher education can design educational encounters that enable student teachers to attune and attend to affordances through embodied experiences with the ‘unknown’. This approach involves a shift from generic knowledge and skills to ways of being, a shift that is valuable not only for teacher – artist collaborations but also for interprofessional collaboration and professional practice in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• teacher-artist collaboration
• ecological psychology
• attunement
• unknown
• sociomaterialism

Introduction

Artist visits in school are a recurring element in the teaching profession; however, there has been little focus on how teacher education prepares student teachers for teacher – artist collaborations (Karlsen and Bjørnstad 2020). Teacher – artist collaborations are a particular kind of interprofessional collaboration because the occupations of teachers and artists, for the most part, do not overlap. Yet, particular responsibilities are placed on teachers to actualise the possibilities for learning and teaching that arise through artist visits despite their lack of competence in the knowledge domain of the artist (Morrissey and Kenny 2021). Some attempts have been made to expose student teachers to arts education and art partnerships (Karlsen and Bjørnstad 2020; Møller-Skau and Lindstøl 2022) however, these studies tell little about the skills, knowledge and capacities needed by teachers to make the art project relevant for the pupils’ learning and development. Such an understanding is important for improving teacher education so that future teachers are better prepared to utilise the potential of artist visits. In this article, I provide a conceptual framework based on attuning to affordances that arise in the sociomaterial environment produced through artist visits. Based on this conceptual framework, I show how teacher education can create a sociomaterial environment for supporting student teachers in attuning to and recognising the affordances of artist visits in school. Such an approach does not primarily focus on the development of skills, but on ways of relating to the new professional situations that emerge through artist visits.

Countries such as Norway, Sweden, Ireland, England, the USA, Canada and Australia have programmes that organise artist visits in primary and secondary schools. The most extensive example is The Cultural Schoolbag in Norway (Den Kulturelle Skolesekken), which guarantees that all pupils encounter professional visual art, music, dance, literature, film and cultural heritage several times throughout the school year. These art encounters often consist of pre-determined workshops, concerts, or performances, typically lasting from under an hour to up to a whole day. I refer to them as art projects provided through short-term artist visits. Research has shown that short-term, once-off artist visits may be particularly problematic as they are often characterised by the ‘unknown’. Teachers report having little influence on the art projects in which they are participating (Hall, Thomson, and Russell 2007; Holdhus et al. 2019), leaving their role in the project unclear (Christophersen 2013; Snook and Buck 2014). Clashes of interests, perspectives, epistemologies and ideologies (Christophersen and Breivik 2013; Morrissey and Kenny 2021; Skregelid 2020) may also occur during short-term artist visits.

Due to the contingency and situatedness of artist visits, the epistemic distance between teachers and artists, and the affective challenges of arts encounters (Møller-Skau and Lindstøl 2022), an accumulation of target-oriented skills and knowledge about art, artists and arts education is insufficient. We need to think more about competences that concern particular attitudes, response-abilities, and ways of being (Dall’Alba 2020; Mulcahy and Healy 2023) in relation to the possibilities that arise through artist visits. The following research questions guided the study: What capacities do student teachers need to utilise the emerging situations that arise when artists become part of the classroom? How can teacher education assemble pedagogical encounters for developing those capacities?

To answer these questions, I drew up a conceptual framework based on the concepts of landscapes of affordances and attunement. Here, the landscape of affordances is the possibilities for action that arise from the sociomaterial environment produced through an art project in the school context. These affordances concern the teachers’ possibilities of enacting their profession in relation to the art project. An example is linking the art project to the national curriculum – a link that is not inherently given by the art project. Attunement is the embodied directedness towards the sociomaterial environment where affordances are available. Attunement is a precondition for recognising affordances. Once a teacher is attuned to a landscape of affordances, perception as an active skill can be enacted to recognise affordances. These concepts are useful for understanding the teachers’ embeddedness in the sociomaterial environment that emerges through artists’ visits in schools, the teachers’ positionality and orientation towards the sociomaterial environment, and the sociomaterial assemblages teacher education can provide for student teachers to learn to navigate in situations that are characterised by ‘the unknown’. In this paper, the term ‘assemblage’ describes ‘bundles of bodies, affects, knowledges, responsibilities, people and places which produce capacities and effects’ (Mulcahy and Healy 2023, 828) that teacher education provides for creating pedagogical encounters between the professional practices of teachers and artists to prepare student teachers for artist visits. The conceptual framework can be utilised as a theoretical foundation in the design of teacher education as a site (Sjølie and Østern 2021) where student teachers learn to engage in artist visits. I illustrate my conceptual approach through empirical examples of how teacher education can assemble a landscape of affordance that supports student teachers in navigating in the unknown while enacting professional practice.

Challenges of short-term artist visits to teachers’ professional practice

In this section, I unpack the challenges that short-term visits pose for teachers’ professional practice. It is important to understand how teacher-artist collaborations differ from other collaborations in which teachers are typically involved and why it is challenging for teachers to engage in teacher-artist collaborations. This allows us to shed light on what capacities are necessary for student teachers to engage in teacher – artist collaboration as a particular kind of interprofessional collaboration and how teacher education can prepare student teachers for such collaborations.

Collaborations are usually established to draw on partners’ knowledge, expertise and resources to solve complex problems. However, during short-term artist visits, the artists’ professional logic, artistic values and artistic competencies often take precedence over the teachers’ professional practice (Holdhus and Espeland 2013). These visits are often not characterised by collaboration across professional boundaries or by shared responsibility, planning and implementation of the art project (Holdhus and Espeland 2013). Rather, artists enter the teachers’ professional environment on the artists’ premises. In addition, general teachers often do not have sufficient art experience and arts education themselves (Møller-Skau and Lindstøl 2022). This creates a volatile sociomaterial environment in which the trajectory of the artists’ visit can appear uncertain, messy and unbounded. Moreover, teachers are required to collaborate with various actors from a wide range of artistic fields, but they often have limited influence on who is coming to provide the art projects (Christophersen 2013). Thus, a wide range of constellations of partners and artistic content arises in non-routine collaborations. Also, teachers and artists do not necessarily have the same intentions concerning short-term artist visits. For teachers, the quality and relevance of the visit are tied to providing an opportunity for education, whereas for artists, the quality and relevance of the visit relate to the art itself and to artistic freedom (Ruud, Borgen, and Engelsrud 2022). Some artists even refuse to make ‘curriculum art’ (Karlsen and Karlsen 2022). Finally, teachers are often short on time, which adds a further layer of complexity to teacher – artist collaborations.

Artist visits are a recurring part of teachers’ professional practice, but very little research has examined the necessary capacities to relate to very distant professions and the constantly changing sociomaterial environment that arises through such visits. In other contexts, common knowledge is considered key to collaboration (Carlile 2004; Edwards 2011, 2012). In interprofessional collaboration in health settings, for example, where the collaborating professionals have the patient as the object of their profession and enact common knowledge and language in relation to the patient. In contrast, teachers and artists generally do not share an occupational field. Artists produce artwork, while teachers contribute to pupils’ learning and development. Art works are not inherently curricular or pedagogical, and general teachers do not educate their pupils to become artists. Given the limited time frame and the epistemic distance between collaboration partners in short-term artist visits, it is difficult to establish a joint task and joint work in which professionals from each discipline contribute with knowledge and methods. Due to the shifting relational basis of the teachers’ professional practice during short-term artist visits, it is impossible to specify what is necessary to know at the outset, and the existing knowledge might be partial and fragile (Hopwood 2017). Therefore, we need a better understanding of how distant professional practices can relate to each other when increased mutual knowledge of collaborators’ knowledge domains alone is not a sufficient solution.

Researchers have argued that when encountering uncertainty, the educational task of teacher education is ontological rather than epistemological (Barnett 2012). In that sense, learning how to engage in short-term teacher – artist collaboration in teacher education is not so much about acquiring generic skills and knowledge but about developing ways of being the professional in question (Dall’Alba 2009). However, limited attention has been paid to how teacher education can foster particular ways of being for student teachers that support them in actualising the potential of short-term artist visits in school.

In sum, challenges related to short-term artist visits include an altered, unfamiliar sociomaterial environment for the teachers’ professional practice as well as epistemic issues regarding the art project. Simultaneously, since the benefits of arts education for pupils’ learning and development are evident (Hall and Thomson 2021; Holochwost, Goldstein, and Wolf 2021; Todhunter-Reid 2019), artist visits create an environment full of affordances. More knowledge is needed on how teacher education can support student teachers in navigating in the unknown and making the resources of the collaboration partner relevant to their professional practice. To this end, in the next section, I analyse the sociomaterial environment that arises through artist visits from the perspective of the landscape and field of affordances.

The landscape and field of affordances in artist visits

My conceptual argument is based on the concept of affordances. This concept is understood here as the possibilities for action that emerge from the relationship between an actor and the action-related properties of a sociomaterial environment (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Risjord 2014). Action-related properties are connected to things and social practices. For example, a chair affords sitting because of the action-relation properties of a chair, such as a flat surface to sit on at a height that allows the knees to bend at a comfortable angle, and the established practice of using chairs for sitting, typically one chair per person.

I apply the concept of affordances because at the intersection of the professional practices of teachers and artists, a new sociomaterial environment with action-related properties for education about, in, with and through art (Lindström 2012) opens up. The concept helps explain how teachers are positioned in relation to the learning opportunities that arise in artist visits and how teachers can make use of them in their professional practice. As outlined above, many of the challenges in teacher-artist collaboration seem to arise because teachers do not see the possibilities for (professional) actions in artist visits. Therefore, a refined language is needed to unpack the complexity of artists’ visits in relation to teachers’ professional practice. This allows us to understand how teachers can engage in artist visits for the benefit of their pupils and what capacities are necessary from the side of teachers to navigate in this new environment. I will first outline the concept of affordances in more detail and then turn to the affordances that arise through artist visits.

A sociomaterial notion of affordances

I apply a sociomaterial perspective on affordances that suggests a co-constitutive relationship between social practices, the material environment, the actor and affordances (van Dijk and Rietveld 2017). According to such a notion, affordances arise from the material and social structures a practice is embedded in, and the affordances in the sociomaterial environment enable or constrain practices. This implies that affordances do not exist per se but are situated in a sociomaterial environment and that they are relational to the abilities and intentions of an actor. I unpack these two characteristics in the following because they offer some insights into how teachers can relate to affordances in artist visits.

Since affordances are situated in a practice, the same thing can have different affordances in different sociomaterial environments. For example, a painting in an auction house affords buying it, whilst the same painting as permanent loan in a national art museum affords documenting art history, particular techniques, or understanding the zeitgeist of a particular time. In a school, that painting affords low-threshold access to art or discussions about its underlying meaning. These affordances are not mutually exclusive and are only some examples of a multiplicity of affordances a thing can have. Note that that the ‘thing’ does not need to be tangible. For example, a dance performance within an international dance festival affords a dialogue with other contemporary dance performances, whilst the same dance performance in a school affords presenting dance as stagecraft and an independent art form. The material environment, the established social practices and the intentions of an actor determine the affordances that are relevant for an actor. For artist visits, this means that new affordances arise in every new artist visit.

Affordances are relational as they emerge from the relationship between features in the environment and the abilities and intentionality of the agent (Chemero 2003, 2022; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; Risjord 2014; van Dijk and Rietveld 2017). The affordances of a painting are different for an art dealer or a school teacher because they have different intentions in relation to it. An art dealer might not primarily see the educational value of art, and a teacher might have difficulties estimating the investment value of the painting. Environments are dynamic, and the abilities and intentionality of an individual change over time, for example, through education, training, or ageing. Therefore, the affordances available to an actor are variable as well. This concerns physical skills, for example, a flute affords playing for people that can control their breath, but not for a new-born. This is also applicable to non-physical skills. Sheet notes afford reading music and playing music in an ensemble, but only for people familiar with that notation system. In regard to the teaching profession, this means that increased teaching skills influence which affordances in the classroom can be acted upon. For example, a teacher typically knows their pupils’ strengths and weaknesses. This, in turn, offers an affordance for differentiated instruction. Consider a task that involves folding geometrical objects. Different affordances for instructing how to fold the object open up. The teacher can distribute written instructions to stimulate pupils with good reading abilities, she can fold the objects herself for pupils who learn best using interaction, or she can provide a video which students can pause and replay for pupils who learn best at their own pace. This means that due to her relationship with the pupils and her knowledge of the pupils’ strengths and weaknesses, a teacher sees the affordances of written instructions, embodied interaction and videos for supporting pupils to apply their preferred learning strategies. These affordances arise in a particular context (cf. the situatedness of affordances) and in relation to the teachers’ skills.

In professional practice, a range of conventional affordances is established, such as the affordance of written assignments to evaluate pupils’ learning and progression. Such conventional affordances account for a landscape of affordances which are all available affordances based on particular forms of life or patterns of behaviour (Kolvoort and Rietveld 2022; van Dijk and Rietveld 2017). According to a sociomaterial understanding of professional qualification processes, practitioners are enrolled in a professional practice with established ‘patterns of behaviour’ where conventional affordances are available. The landscape of affordances is not dependent on individual actions. However, particular affordances in the landscape of affordances are relevant to individual actions. These affordances count as the field of affordances. Note that the landscape and field of affordances are differentiated for analytical purposes, they are not ontologically separated. The field of affordances can be understood as a cut-out of the landscape of affordances relative to and relevant to the individual actor. An actor is embedded in the landscape of affordances, and her directedness to that landscape opens up a field of affordances; that is, the field of affordances is constantly created and recreated by the actions of individuals. For example, classroom discussions provide a landscape of affordances for teaching and learning. A teacher can make use of particular affordances, for example, changing the seating arrangement and starting with an icebreaker to support participation in the discussion, planning the time and asking good questions, observing the class dynamics in the discussion, or recognising the strengths and weaknesses of the pupils. These affordances are part of the landscape of affordances of classroom discussions but are relevant to the individual teacher in a specific situation; therefore, they account for the field of affordance.

Affordances in artist visits

To act meaningfully in the sociomaterial environment that emerges through artist visits, teachers need to direct themselves to that environment with the awareness that there are affordances for education. In the following, I outline some of the affordances of art for education. They mainly consist of action-related properties of the emerging environment that support education through art.

There is a wide range of examples of how art affords teaching curriculum subjects. Dance, for example, affords teaching geometry, mathematics and physics (Hollett, Peng, and Land 2022; Leandro, Monteiro, and Melo 2018) or teaching reading and writing (Jusslin 2020). However, artist visits implemented on the artists’ premise, such as art projects provided by The Cultural Schoolbag in Norway, are rather connected to the overarching part of the national curriculum and foreground the holistic development of pupils across subjects as specified by the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (Utdanningsdirektoratet 2020a, 2020b). Here, art affords, for example, developing an aesthetic sense and seeing the inherent value of art, and the stimulating of pupils’ creative joy, curiosity, commitment and a desire to explore and create. Also, art affords identity development through providing insights into others and their history, culture, society and rights, creating a joint frame of reference to create solidarity and anchor individual identity in a larger community. Moreover, art affords developing general human values through cultivating respect for the diversity of humans, supporting democratic values, and highlighting diversity and different perspectives, attitudes and life views. This is in line with general affordances of encounters with art, such as exploring layers of meaning, creating material playgrounds and new ways for engaging with the world (Rietveld 2022). Thereby, arts education cultivates traversal competencies, creative capabilities and creative mindsets and identities (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009; Seitamaa-Hakkarainen 2022), which is considered key in 21^st century education (Binkley et al. 2012). Moreover, the affordances of art encounters in school also lie in forms of learning that are non-representational, embodied, performative, collective, aesthetic and non-linear (Dahl et al. 2019; Halverson 2022; Hollett, Peng, and Land 2022; Seitamaa-Hakkarainen 2022). These ways of learning complement the cognitive, abstract and linear learning in schools and might thereby equalise differences between pupils.

All these affordances, and many more, are part of the landscape of affordances that emerge through artist visits. The teacher is embedded in that landscape and needs to see the relevant possibilities for professional action in the landscape. The teacher can incorporate a role as facilitator and improviser that scaffolds risk-taking for the pupils (Halverson 2022) in the art projects provided through the artist visits. The affordances of artist visits can be actualised in the preparation and de-briefing of the pupils – a responsibility that is placed on the teachers – for example, through targeted discussions or activities reflecting on art projects. These affordances do not imply a utilitarian or instrumental view of art projects in schools. Rather, it highlights the teachers’ role in actualising the potential of arts education in school.

There is a relationship between perceiving affordances and teachers’ agency in everyday classroom situations. Here, the ‘capacity to perceive affordances beyond conventional affordances we are socialized into perceiving’ (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2022, 1) is understood as a key component of being a skilful and agentic teacher. This is a fruitful starting point for examining teachers’ necessary capacities in artist visits. In particular, short-term artist visits have insufficient duration to be an integrated part of the teachers’ professional practice, therefore, hardly any conventional affordances of ‘what one does’ are established. The local implementation of artist visits in schools and the trajectory of art projects are volatile, emergent and contingent. Therefore, teachers do not find themselves in a landscape of affordances in which established patterns of actions and interactions exist.

Attunement to a landscape of affordances

In the next step of my argument, I elaborate on the concept of attunement. This concept is important because it provides an understanding of how it is possible to relate to the landscape of affordances that opens up during artist visits. It also provides an understanding of the capacities that student teachers need to acquire to engage in teacher – artist collaborations. I argue that skills in attuning to affordances allow the teacher to shape a field of affordances and to exploit and explore affordances in artist visits. In the literature, attunement, attention and noticing are sometimes used interchangeably, but an analytical distinction is necessary to clarify how we relate to and recognise the affordances in a sociomaterial environment. I consider attunement to a landscape of affordances to be a precondition for attention, which, in the context of professional practice, can be analysed in terms of particular, profession-determined ways of perception (see below: Perceiving a field of affordances).

Attunement refers to our embodied directedness, awareness, and heightened sensitivity towards the sociomaterial environment in which we are embedded (Hopwood 2017; Ravn 2022; Risjord 2014). Based on the self and our attitude towards the encountered and enacted sociomaterial environment, we resonate with the environment; that is, we tune into what matters to respond to the environment (Dall’Alba 2020). Attunement concerns human beings as a whole and is thus deeply embodied. Through attunement, we become sensitive and responsive to the sociomaterial environment, which enables the recognition of affordances (Bruineberg et al. 2021; Risjord 2014, 2015). To be clear, attunement does not yet mean to perceive; neither does it involve the act of intentionally directing our attention or a discursive engagement with the environment (Riley and White 2019). I consider attunement to be a way of being in the sociomaterial environment, which is a precondition for perception.

Attunement in professional contexts depends on the self and professional practice. We can attune ourselves to the professional environment in which actions are to be performed. Attunement is, in that sense, teleological (Hopwood 2016). Based on the specific tasks to be completed within the profession, we can limit the field of affordances to which we are directed. For example, when entering a classroom, a teacher would attune to teaching and interacting with pupils and would likely ‘detune’ from the chat with colleagues during the morning break. Attunement is an anticipation that allows our embodied being-in-the-world to ‘holistically’ direct towards aspects of the landscape that are relevant for completing our action.

As a form of openness to the environment, attunement makes it possible to endure situations characterised by the unknown and, at the same time, to be prepared for the unexpected (Hopwood 2016). Bruineberg et al. (2021) highlighted the importance of attunement in messy and unpredictable situations, noting that it ‘allows agents to remain poised between exploiting affordances they are already familiar with because of their past history of skilled engagement and exploring novel affordances that allow them to creatively improvise and expand their repertoire of skills’ (13837). Hence, attunement anchors us in a complex world and gives us the possibility of defining and expanding the scope of our (professional) actions. This feature is particularly relevant in relation to artist visits.

To engage in short-term artist visits, teachers need to acquire the ability for attunement which means being prepared to perceive the relevant affordances for making the artist’s art project a part of their professional practice. As shown above, short-term artist visits are largely characterised by in situ situations in which teachers do not have extensive opportunities to prepare themselves for the artist’s visit or to establish interpersonal relations with the visiting artist. To engage with an unpredictable, unknown sociomaterial environment, teachers need to enter a state of perception-readiness, which consequently leads to action-readiness. Put differently, teachers need to attune to the landscape of affordances that emerge through artist visits. This attunement enables teachers to delineate fields of affordances for their professional practice.

The next step of the argument is to clarify how we proceed from being attuned and ready to perceive to actually perceiving relevant affordances. Perceptual abilities are a constitutive part of professional practice (Winch 2017), and in the following, I outline a conceptualisation of attention to provide a better understanding of what it means to perceive affordances that arise through artist visits.

Perceiving a field of affordances

Perception is shaped by the profession of the perceiver and is action oriented, which means that affordances can be actively sought with the aim of enacting professional practice. In the following, I show how these aspects of perception are key to understanding how teacher education can enrol future teachers in profession-specific ways of perceiving by actively seeking out affordances relevant to their professional practice.

Practitioners are embedded in a professional sociomaterial environment; therefore, perceptions of affordances are driven, structured and shaped by sociomaterial practices (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2022; van Dijk and Rietveld 2017). Members of a social group of professionals (e.g., teachers) perceive their professional environment differently and in a more detailed way than laypersons or professionals from another field (e.g., artists). The perception of professionals is structured in a way that reveals aspects of the environment that are important for the execution of their professional practice (Goodwin 1994). In other words, active perception is impacted by the professional community in which a practitioner is enrolled. In turn, this has an effect on the delineation of the field of affordances as the field is shaped by practitioners’ understandings of their own professional practice. Teacher education plays a crucial role in enrolling future teachers in the profession-specific way of perceiving the sociomaterial environment in which they are embedded.

There is a line of research on teachers’ perceptions focused on the concept of professional vision and teacher noticing. Roughly speaking, teachers’ professional vision consists of noticing, knowledge-based reasoning and interpreting and responding to developments in classroom situations (Barenthien et al. 2023; Barnhart and van Es 2015; Muhonen, Pakarinen, and Lerkkanen 2023). However, the case of artist visits adds another perspective on professional vision. First, due to enrolment in their professions, teachers and artists enact different ways of perception. These ways of perceiving affordances might not be mutually coherent and could be a reason for the challenges in artist visits outlined above. Second, perception during artist visits is not primarily concerned with selective attention in the classroom or domain-specific visual materials. Rather, it is a projective type of perception for anticipating possibilities for action regarding a specific professional task (Winch 2017). Teachers need to ‘see’ the value of artist visits for education and ‘see’ how to make such visits relevant for the pupils’ learning and development. In other words, they need to see the affordances of the artist’s visit (as outlined above in ‘Affordances in artist visits’), although, due to the contingent and situated character of the artist’s visit, few conventional affordances are established. This is in line with the conceptualisation of teacher agency as the ability to act on affordances beyond conventional affordances (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2022). To be agentic teachers during short-term artist visits, teachers need to see more than what is conventionally entailed in their profession and to actively seek out affordances.

Perceptual abilities of knowing what to look for and where and when to look help us to intentionally look for action possibilities in the environment (Winch 2017). Such perceptual abilities allow us to ‘structure the perception in such a way that this intention may be fulfilled’ (Winch 2017, 10). A teacher, for example, intends to make the artists’ visit relevant for pupils and therefore looks for the affordances of art projects for learning. This concerns knowing what to look for. She might make use of her theoretical toolbox and look at the affordances that learning theories offer to support the pupils in benefiting from artists’ visits. This means knowing where to look. For example, in art projects, pupils are often invited to experience and express themselves through an aesthetic language that does not set any requirements for verbal language skills. This is particularly beneficial for pupils who do not have extensive vocabulary. Knowing when to look, a teacher might look for pupils’ reactions and recognise affordances for supporting their participation during the art project. These perceptual skills are directly connected to the teachers’ didactical knowledge and skills (Gilje 2017) because they enable the teacher to see how it is necessary to act, intervene and react in a pedagogical context. However, such perceptual abilities require awareness of the overall situation, which brings us back to the importance of attuning to the sociomaterial environment that artist visits produce.

In sum, the ability to intentionally look for what is needed to enact professional practice is fundamental to being a professional. Particularly in new, unknown and uncertain contexts, such as in artist visits, teachers might not directly perceive relevant affordances and thus need to enact active perception, that is, deliberate seeking, to uncover affordances that are relevant to their professional practice. In the conceptualisation presented in this paper so far, I have emphasised attunement to the professional situation, which represents a deeply embodied way of interacting with the environment. Based on attunement to a landscape of affordances, the teacher delineates a field of affordances in which the teacher acts upon relevant affordances. In the following, I outline how the theoretical argument further advances our understanding of how to support student teachers in recognising affordances in artist visits.

Supporting student teachers’ perception of affordances in artist visits

The conceptual outline above has some implications for how it is possible to develop attunement and attention. First, attunement and attention are deeply embodied activities and therefore require embodied encounters. A theoretical introduction to teachers’ engagement in teacher – artist collaboration and a subsequent exercise among only student teachers would miss the point. Hence, attempting to respond to the challenges in short-term artist visits by ‘making the unknown known’ or simply learning more about the collaboration partners and their work is not a useful solution. Second, and as a consequence of the first point, an essential part of the embodied experience concerns the encounter with the ‘unknown’ and the meaning of that experience for student teachers. The ability to endure uncertainty and the unknown while still being able to attune to and actively look for affordances in the midst of practice should be considered a key capacity of teachers. Hence, teacher education must prepare student teachers for this. Note that a focus on the embodied experience of attunement and attention does not exclude the frequently emphasised development of reflective abilities in teacher education, but rather works complementary to this development. Third, to provide a learning environment characterised by emergence and uncertainty, teacher education needs to create a sociomaterial environment that is as similar to real professional situations as possible. This means that material, relational and bodily encounters that configure an educational setting (Klykken 2023) need to be arranged in ways that preserve the complexity of artist visits. In this way, teacher – artist collaboration can create a relevant site (Sjølie and Østern 2021) for educating future teachers.

Teacher education can construct a landscape of affordances in which affordances for teachers’ professional practice emerge. This means making teacher – artist collaboration a component of teacher education so that student teachers can attune to the new sociomaterial environment and actively look for affordances. While the landscape of affordances can be provided by teacher education, student teachers need to delineate a field of affordance and attend to these affordances. Due to the relationality of affordances, the salience of the affordances for the student teachers will be altered in the course of the educational process, with it becoming easier for them to attune to and attend to affordances as their education progresses.

In the following, I illustrate how teacher education can provide a landscape of affordance and embed student teachers in the landscape to allow them to attend to a given field of affordance. The examples show how a realistic sociomaterial environment can be created by physically bringing student teachers together with artists to plan and implement an art project in school. This is a non-simulated setting, as professional artists produce genuine art projects to be implemented in a school with actual pupils. Such educational experiences can sensitise student teachers to engage with new and unpredictable landscapes of affordances. I take examples from research projects and empirical work in Norway. I refer to the ‘artist’ in general because, in the scope of this paper, it is not relevant whether the artist works in dance, music, visual art, literature, film, or other art forms.

Exposing student teachers to the unknown

At the beginning of an encounter with the arts, student teachers often express negative feelings, including fear, uncertainty and even anger, towards arts projects (Kenny and Morrissey 2021; Møller-Skau and Lindstøl 2022). This is a difficult starting point for engaging in teacher – artist collaboration. To overcome this attitude, teacher education can initiate encounters between teachers and artists to initiate altered emotional attitudes as well as a desire to act (Møller-Skau and Lindstøl 2022; Richards and Hadaway 2020).

For example, artists can implement an art project originally targeted at schools in teacher education (Skregelid 2021, 2023) so that the student teachers experience on their own body what it means to participate in an unknown art project and how it feels to be creative and to engage in aesthetic learning processes. The student teachers have similar experiences to those which pupils will have when encountering art, but since it is only them participating in the art project, they do not have to worry about their professional role in relation to the pupils. The student teachers can be fully present in the art project. This is not equal to learning to produce artworks themselves, but it enables the teachers to experience art projects and gain an overall feel for the projects. Also, teacher education can expose student teachers to the unknown by letting them follow the artistic process ‘in the making’ (Bjørnstad and Karlsen 2023). Artists can present early and more elaborated drafts of their projects and share their thoughts about the projects so that student teachers can look in on the artistic process from the sideline. Thereby, student teachers can acknowledge the professional logic of creative processes and artistic work (Devonas Hoffmann 2024). Finally, the art project can be implemented in school so that student teachers can observe pupils’ reactions and interactions with the artist and the art project (Karlsen and Bjørnstad 2020). Often pupils are very open to and positive about arts encounters. At this stage, it is still not necessary that student teachers have an active role as practitioners. Rather, they can train to be in the unknown and learn to attune to a professional environment that is different from everyday teaching situations. In short, teacher education can bring student teachers together with artists in various ways to enable them to experience the unknown and gain a sensibility to the overall teaching situation.

In light of the conceptual framework established in this paper, teacher education creates a landscape of affordances for arts education in schools to which student teachers can learn to attune. Providing an embodied experience of encountering artist and arts projects can foster a positive attitude towards artists’ professional practice, their professional expertise and their work and artistic contribution. Openness and acknowledgement of the otherness in this collaboration, that is, a particular way of being in encountering the ‘other’, could result in changed feelings regarding the arts and art projects. In sum, teacher education can assemble a pedagogical encounter of bodies, affects and professional practices to expose student teachers to the unknown. Thereby, teacher education provides a site to learn to attune to the unknown and dare to dwell in the unknown while gaining awareness of the affordances that arise in artist visits in schools.

Navigating professionally in the unknown

Once a landscape of affordance is established by making artist visits a part of teacher education, student teachers can explore their professional roles by attending to relevant affordances. Teacher education can provide several pedagogical opportunities for student teachers to explore affordances and to delineate a field of affordances.

For example, teacher education can facilitate meetings between student teachers and artists to discuss didactic topics in an art project (Devonas Hoffmann and Karlsen 2022). Together, they can create solutions for potentially difficult situations, such as noise, intensive light, or change of location, or they can discuss possibilities for preparing the pupils for the artist visit. The student teachers can exploit and explore the affordances of their profession by actively looking at their pupils’ well-being and opportunities for genuine participation. Possibilities for action include, for example, choosing to sit beside a particular pupil to calm them down or encouraging them when necessary. Teacher education can also assign students the task of actively looking for affordances that lie in the art project, for example, by looking for ways to connect the art project to the curriculum (Bjørnstad and Karlsen 2023). While referring to competence outcomes in the national curriculum is an integral part of the teaching profession, teacher education can scaffold actively looking for affordances, enabling student teachers to explore novel affordances, such as connections between an art project and the curriculum of a specific subject. By guiding attention in teacher education, student teachers can learn how to recognise affordances for education through the arts and thus how to delimit fields of affordances for their professional practice. Finally, teacher education can instruct student teachers to prepare pupils for an art project, to de-brief the project after its implementation and to create activities connected to the art project during the ensuing days or weeks (Karlsen and Bjørnstad 2020; Devonas Hoffmann 2024).

In light of the conceptual framework in this paper, teacher education can design a landscape of affordances in which student teachers can experience and value the benefits of being a professional and of residing in their own professional practice when participating in the collaboration. Student teachers need to act on affordances that are relevant to teaching and learning, that is, they need to perceive their own field of affordances. The exploitation and exploration of affordances then generate feedback loops as newly discovered affordances become part of already known affordances; based on known affordances, new affordances can be explored and expanded. In sum, teacher education can assemble a sociomaterial environment that provides the landscape of affordances that arise during artist visits. That assemblage of people, responsibilities and places in and outside the classroom produces the capacities to attune to the landscape of affordances and attend to fields of affordances. Teacher education provides a site where student teachers can examine and explore their professional response-ability to artist visits and art projects in the classroom, that is, their ability to respond (Barad and Kleinmann 2012) through a responsiveness that is based on the awareness of the other.

Concluding remarks

In this article, I have contributed to the theoretical understanding of what capacities are necessary for teachers to engage in short-term artist visits and how teacher education can assemble pedagogical encounters to support future teachers in such collaborations. Due to the short-term character of these collaborations and the epistemic distance between the knowledge domains of teachers and artists, simply increasing knowledge and skills is not sufficient for engaging in collaboration as agentic teachers. Rather, teachers need to develop ways of being in relation to the newly arising sociomaterial environment. I have argued that attunement (i.e., an embodied directedness to the sociomaterial environment) provides a foundation for actively looking for affordances (i.e., possibilities for professional action). I have mobilised the concepts of landscapes and fields of affordances to show how teachers can track action-specific features in the environment and thereby enact professional practice. Attunement to the unknown with a positive attitude towards the art project can open up fields of affordances for teachers’ professional practice. By assembling pedagogical encounters resembling artist visits in schools, teacher education can provide a site for developing the necessary capacities for being an agentic teacher during an artist visit.

I have shown how teacher education can deliberately design a landscape of affordance that is similar to real teacher – artist collaboration in artist visits and thereby provide a site for developing attunement and attention. In this way, teacher education can realise its critical potential to shape future teachers’ being, seeing and acting in relation to the landscape of affordances that arise in any kind of interprofessional collaboration. When increased knowledge is not the solution, teacher education could try to move away from the dichotomies between theory and practice and focus on the professional self as a particular way of being in the world. This invites reflections about the learning approach in teacher education and about possible shifts from an individual-centred, output-driven approach to education to the relational space between bodies, things, ideas and affects (Mulcahy and Healy 2023). Moreover, it is worth considering making teacher – artist collaborations a component in teacher education as a means to develop attunement and attention. In fact, the enhanced ability of attunement and attention is directly connected to practical knowledge (Aspbury-Miyanishi 2021) and is thus transferrable to all teaching situations.

By designing a landscape of affordances so that student teachers can learn to navigate in the unknown, teacher education connects the personal and professional aspects of learning. Such an approach answers the need to avoid the overemphasis of theory and practice in education and to focus instead on the development of ways of being (Dall’Alba 2009; Korthagen 2017). Rather than focusing on becoming an expert in art and arts education, teacher education can contribute to transforming the way of being in artist visits and thereby provide a foundation for teachers to skilfully adapt to newly emerging sociomaterial environments in professional practice. Initial insecurities and a lack of knowledge about art can be turned into increased awareness of the teacher’s role in arts education and pupils’ well-being. Such awareness opens up the field of affordances, in turn leading to the perception of affordances and thereby to actions. Ultimately, in this way, the epistemological challenges in teacher – artist collaborations can be turned into the ontological possibilities of being a professional in such collaborations. Developing ways of being the professional in question is foundational and general enough to be applied to a wide range of collaborations with external partners. Finally, the benefits of including teacher – artist collaboration in teacher education are even more far-reaching. Making teacher – artist collaboration a component of teacher education would not only support the development of capacities for being an agentic teacher in artist visits, but also set the stage for developing a way of being when encountering the unknown in general.

Further research is needed to empirically examine teacher – artist collaboration as a component of teacher education. Also, phenomenological studies on teacher education focused on attunement and attention would be useful for capturing the lived experiences of student teachers. Regarding the design of courses on teacher – artist collaboration, teacher education could benefit from establishing long-term partnerships with local professional artists, since collaboration on the level of teacher education and teacher educators is an interprofessional endeavour itself which might encounter the same challenges as the implementation of teacher – artist collaborations in schools. Since this study focussed solely on the teachers’ perceptions of affordances related to their own professional practice, additional research is also needed on the recognition of joint affordances and affordances for others (in this case, artists), as these are fundamental aspects for upholding the structures of collaboration (Risjord 2014). Finally, empirical research on the potential of recognising joint affordances in an environment characterised by the ‘unknown’ would be interesting and could offer insights for how teachers can collaborate across epistemic boundaries.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Kristine Høeg Karlsen, Hege Hermansen, Mathew Stiller-Reeve, and Klara-Sofie Rosing Birkblad for their valuable input and support in the various stages in the process of writing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Research Council of Norway, project number 301594.