Lecturer Marja Rastas: “As a teacher, you never finish learning”

Marja Rastas has seen closely how the focus of art education has broadened.

“The practices and ways of thinking of contemporary art have gradually moved from the margins to the core of art education. People are more interested in the processes themselves and the thinking that goes into the work than in the end result. With the ecological crises, material and environmental awareness have also become increasingly visible in the practices of art education."

Rastas sees, for example, community art as bringing visual art phenomena and art education closer together. At the same time, the role of the teacher has become more guiding and communal.

“In art education, we act, create, explore, and reflect together. This requires sensitivity and situational awareness."

However, according to Rastas, the most important long-term change in visual arts teacher education at Aalto is the strengthening of the research basis of teaching. 

The change is permanent

According to Rastas, her nearly 20 years of work at Aalto University have been interesting, rewarding and educational.

She began as a lecturer at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2006. The school's move from Arabia in Helsinki to Otaniemi in Espoo in 2018, following the establishment of Aalto University, has also brought about significant changes in teaching.

"From a teacher's perspective, the change in the learning environment has brought with it many new things: resources, facilities, and various opportunities to meet people."

The most important lesson she wants to pass on to young teachers and future art educators is openness to new learning.

"Art remains even though it constantly takes on new forms, but as a teacher you never finish learning – and you cannot know what is coming. That's what makes this job immensly interesting." 

Every art education student has to find their role as a teacher, but Rastas also encourages them, in the meanwhile, to enjoy the field where they can constantly learn new things about themselves, others and the world.

“When you teach, you learn all the time – and it doesn’t stop when you graduate.”

Rastas praises the students, future art educators, with sparkling eyes. 

“They are brave, skilled, cooperative, and ethically aware. They dare to throw themselves into play and experimentation, which can be used to address even the most complex issues and, on the other hand, to find new perspectives on familiar things." 

Rastas hopes that they will be able to take all this with them into their working lives.  

At the intersection of pedagogy and art

A strong common thread running through Lecturer Rastas' work is the idea that artistic and pedagogical knowledge are closely linked. They also constantly nourish each other.

“Although they are partly different ways of knowing and different in content, both involve attentiveness, the ability to observe phenomena on multiple levels, and to see the relationships between things and the effects of one’s own actions.”

She also emphasizes the importance of embodied learning.

“Embodiment means that we are constantly interacting with the world through our bodies. This is the basis of all my work and activities. We are not just rational beings, but much more than that.”

The embodied process is strongly present in Rastas’s own work. This was recently evident in her work consisting of hand-woven ropes, which was exhibited at the Hidas tila (Slow Space) exhibition by teachers in art education. 

“I collect, examine, and weave plants I find in nature into ropes. The act of doing it by hand, the scents of the plants and the rhythm of the work itself represent a kind of whole-body thinking for me."

Time for experimentation

Rastas would like to see an understanding of the slow process of creative, artistic activity and research, and its significance. She internalized this fundamental lesson during her own studies.

“At university, students, teachers, and researchers must have time for different kinds of experimentation, without predetermined outcomes. In both the arts and science, the most interesting and important things are often found on the sidelines.” 

In art teacher training and art education research, multidisciplinary approaches have become more common and have given rise to an interesting new dialogue between scientific and artistic thinking.

“I believe and hope that this kind of multidisciplinary dialogue will bring science and the arts closer together in our general education schools as well.”

Marja Rastas will retire at the end of February. Although she is leaving her teaching career behind, art will not disappear from her everyday life.

“Art is so deeply rooted in me that it may be a little difficult to ever get rid of it. In the future, I intend to continue practicing art, at least as a form of self-education.”