The Visual Representation of Collaborative Learning on the Axis of Aesthetic Experience: An Arts-Based Research on “The Stage”

This study investigates how individual aesthetic expressions are negotiated, repositioned, and reconstituted within a collective visual structure through an arts-based research (ABR) framework, focusing on collaborative learning in visual arts education. Conducted in the Spring semester of the 2024–2025 academic year, the study involved seven senior undergraduate students in a visual arts education program at a state university who collaboratively produced a large-scale acrylic painting. Each participant contributed personal imagery shaped by cultural memory and emotional experience to a shared composition conceptualized through the metaphor of a “stage.” Rather than framing collaboration as a purely harmonious process, the study conceptualizes the stage as a pedagogical and representational space in which aesthetic experience emerges through negotiation, tension, and shared authorship. Data were collected through systematic observations, process documentation, and semi-structured interviews, and analyzed using inductive thematic content analysis. Findings indicate that participants initially experienced uncertainty and tension regarding creative autonomy, intervention, and compositional balance. However, these tensions functioned productively, fostering empathy, reflective thinking, and collective aesthetic coherence. The study demonstrates that collaborative artistic production operates simultaneously as an aesthetic, pedagogical, and epistemic space in which individual creativity is not diminished but reconfigured through collective engagement. By foregrounding collective aesthetic agency and the performative dimension of collaboration, this research extends arts-based research beyond individual-centered models and offers a nuanced understanding of how aesthetic experience is restructured within shared creative practices. The findings contribute to pedagogical strategies in visual arts education that emphasize negotiation, reflexivity, and collective meaning-making.