Nordic Visual Studies and Art Education (NoVA) educates professionals and researchers on contemporary art and education, digital communication, and visual studies. The main objective of NoVA is to achieve knowledge and skills of the best Nordic values, research, and practices in art education and visual studies. NoVA provides relevant competences and pedagogical interaction skills for working in cross-cultural and international educational and communication environments, or for continuing research at the doctoral level.
Through courses on visual culture, social theory, pedagogy, aesthetics in digital communications and games, for example, students investigate seeing and being seen. NoVA students explore how digital technologies affect perception and how vision is constructed. Students research visual events to understand the relationship between institutions, the media, society, and the economic sphere. Thus the NoVA programme provides students with opportunities to critically reflect upon and synthesize previous experiences and knowledge as well as generate new knowledge on contemporary art and education, digital communication, and visual studies.
NoVA pushes geographical, pedagogical, and research boundaries through its network of international partners, diverse experiences, and research topics and methods. The program is committed understanding and teaching the best of Nordic art education practices while responding to learners from around the world, and addressing global challenges and possibilities.
NoVA is based on e-learning, contact teaching, and face-to-face meetings. The idea of blended learning is the foundation of NoVA. Learning by doing, problem oriented approaches, and learning by using is integrated with practical and theoretical e-learning based activities. Contact teaching is a combination of lectures, seminars, peer working and student presentations, using multimodal approaches: texts, images, audio, and different physical and digital interfaces and communication. Teaching is provided by four Nordic universities, and each student will study in person at two universities. Each student stays one or two semester at a NoVA partner University and is guided to study minimum 20 ECTS and maximum 40 ECTS in one other NoVA partner university.
In addition to Aalto University, the partner universities and departments in NoVA are the Department of Visual Arts Education at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (SE), Department of Art, Design and Drama at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science (NO), and Department for Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University Copenhagen (DK).
Between and among the NoVA partners, a broad range of study areas include:
All the NoVA courses are mapped three themes: 1) Digital communication, 2) Visual Culture and Critical Social Issues, and 3) Contemporary Didactics and Sensuous Knowledge.
Code |
Name |
ECTS Credits |
NoVA on-line joint studies |
40 |
|
Visual cultures and aesthetics in digital communication and learning designs |
5 |
|
Gamification |
5 |
|
Critical social issues in art education |
5 |
|
Research methodologies I |
5 |
|
Research methodologies II |
5 |
|
On-line thesis seminar I |
5 |
|
On-line thesis seminar II |
10 |
|
NoVA Courses at Aalto University |
50 |
|
NoVA seminar I |
5 |
|
NoVA seminar II |
5 |
|
NoVA seminar III |
5 |
|
Master’s thesis |
30 |
|
NoVA alternative studies |
5 |
|
Student chooses 5 ECTS of following courses or other NoVA studies at NoVA partner university. |
||
Theories and practices of Visual Culture |
5 |
|
Intercultural seminar |
5 |
The students select altogether 30 ECTS of elective studies. The studies completed during the exchange period at a NoVA partner University will be placed to elective studies. In addition to this student can choose freely studies from Aalto ARTS, other Schools of Aalto University and/or studies in other universities in Finland (Joo-studies).