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In today’s visual culture, young people produce, share, and interpret images that shape how they perceive both themselves and the world. Against this backdrop, this thesis investigates how student agency relates to constructions of knowledge and positions in visual art education in upper secondary school. Specifically, the study explores how teachers and students can negotiate the selection of images and teaching content, thus facilitating critical reflection on images as expressions of visual culture. The main research question addresses how visual art teachers can create conditions for students to construct and assume active and knowledgeable positions in visual meetings in the classroom. 

The study applies a Foucauldian discourse analysis approach by focusing on concepts of power relations, resistance, freedom and technologies of the self to articulate the notion of agency. Visual art education is understood as a discursive practice in which knowledge and subject positions are constructed through interactions between teachers, students, and images. By linking visual culture with discourse analysis, the study examines how discursive and institutional conditions shape student and teacher positions, emphasising the need for critical engagement with how educational practices affect possibilities for student agency. 

Employing an action research design, the study was conducted in collaboration with teachers and students in four visual art classrooms in upper secondary school. Data was generated through observations, interviews, and collaborative discussions that focused on how students constructed active and knowledgeable positions in classroom practice. The analysis centres on how students and teachers negotiate the selection of images and teaching content, and how these processes shape knowledge and subject positions in classroom practice. 

The findings show how teachers balance direct guidance with support for student autonomy while addressing the complexities of time management, institutional constraints, and power relations. When teachers maintained control over curriculum interpretation, students’ positions were limited to individual choices within predefined frames. However, when teachers engaged in dialogue and shared responsibility with students, space was created for students to draw on their visual culture experiences and assume active and knowledgeable subject positions. 

The thesis contributes insight into how visual art education can support student agency through dialogic processes and shared responsibility. Further, it highlights how such opportunities are shaped — and sometimes restricted — by institutional structures, prevailing power relations, and the overarching school discourse. Rather than assuming that agency is automatically fostered through participation, the study shows that creating space for agency requires the negotiation of teaching content, critical reflection on how knowledge is constructed, and attention to how positions are discursively formed in classroom practice. These findings offer implications for educators and researchers concerned with student voice, visual art didactics, and the conditions under which participatory and inclusive teaching practices can be realised.