La didactique des arts plastiques et la mémoire agissante du dessin

Abstract

Fifty years after its introduction as a school discipline, the visual arts (AP) are still the object of recurrent questioning, particularly by certain supporters of the learning of “drawing” in the sense of strictly technical knowledge. From a cultural-historical perspective (Vygotski, 1930/1985), the purpose of this article is, on the one hand, to review the origin of this old antagonism, a survival of a quarrel between “ancients” and “moderns”, and on the other hand, to reaffirm the foundations of a AP didactics that does not deny drawing. What is the source of such regularly reactivated questioning? The current teaching programmes are bearers of memory: what changes, ruptures and continuities can be identified, for what effects on the norms and frameworks of the work of education professionals? The first part of this article proposes an approach to the prescriptions that will allow us to bring to light certain links of filiations and nodes of tension. The second part questions the foundations of a didactic of AP as taught today in France which continues to visit the function and place of drawing.