Institutional Pedagogy and Artistic Orientation: Examining Final Project Themes among Visual Arts Students

Abstract

Final project themes in visual arts education are often viewed as individual creative choices, while their association with institutional contexts remains underexamined. This study examines differences in the thematic orientation of visual arts students’ final projects across three institutions. A comparative quantitative content analysis was conducted on 156 final project documents from three anonymized institutions in West Java, Indonesia: a Science and Technology-oriented School (STS), an Arts and Culture-oriented Institution (ACI), and a Teacher Education-oriented Institution (TEI). Each document was classified into one dominant thematic category based on its title, conceptual description, and narrative. The data were analyzed using frequencies, percentages, cross-tabulation, the Chi-Square Test of Independence, Cramer’s V, and standardized residuals. Psychology was the most prevalent theme, followed by culture and environment. STS showed stronger representation of psychological, spiritual, gender, and science-related themes; ACI emphasized psychological, cultural, and medium-based themes; while TEI showed stronger representation of cultural, environmental, historical, political, and sports-related themes. A significant association was found between institutional context and thematic distribution, ?²(22) = 72.77, p < .001, with a moderate effect size (Cramer’s V = .483). The findings suggest that final project themes may be interpreted as empirical traces of the interaction between institutional contexts and students’ artistic orientations. However, they do not establish a causal effect of institutional pedagogy because individual interests, supervisory preferences, and social influences were not directly examined. The study contributes by positioning students’ creative outputs as empirical indicators for examining institutional patterns in higher visual arts education.