Learning by Art-Making: The Inner-Outer Experience. An Experiment within a Master’s Course in Audit, Control, and Accounting

Abstract

Purpose

This chapter analyzes art-based methods that focus on the deliverables required from the student in an academic exchange.

Methodology/approach

The study will focus on a group of second-year Master’s students who, accompanied by an artist-coach and a researcher, were asked to produce an artwork reflecting their views on the technical or theoretical issues in accounting. These works were invented and realized in a four-day workshop and exhibition organized by the students.

Findings

Student submissions were found to fit into four types of outcomes: instrumental, developmental, directed, and embedded. The first two are produced by the processes mobilized in art-based teaching, while the second two are linked to the specific form of the artwork engaged in by the teaching process. Observing that few theories have explored the range of outcomes attributable to the form, the author draws on the experiment as well as Winnicot’s concepts of transition and intermediate objects to define the specific transformative quality of art forms. By investigating the special area where the delimitations between the self and the world are blurred and changing, the art-maker student adopts a posture of a natural researcher who creates knowledge at the moment he defines his self — or to put it differently, through art-making, the student produces his/her self and his/her knowledge at the same time.

Originality/value

Recognizing that empowering the complexity of expression liberates access to knowing abilities and independent critical learning.

Citation

Mairesse, P. (2016), "Learning by Art-Making: The Inner-Outer Experience. An Experiment within a Master’s Course in Audit, Control, and Accounting", Wankel, L.A. and Wankel, C. (Ed.) Integrating Curricular and Co-Curricular Endeavors to Enhance Student Outcomes, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 67-98. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78635-064-020161004