Aesthetic Play: Engendering the Terrain for a Cosmopolitan-Minded Education

• In Event: Teacher Meets World: A Critical Conversation on Hansen’s Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

As a teacher and teacher educator, I aspire to Hansen’s (2011) thesis that teachers are well positioned to enable understandings of self “in and for the world” as they meet and occasion educative experiences alongside their students. And, I do see/hear accounts from teachers and their students that reveal the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic journeying of a cosmopolitan-minded education. I also respond as a teacher educator who struggles to provide the necessary experiences for prospective and practicing teachers to view education through Hansen’s cosmopolitan prism. This prism insists on a form of multisensory engagement with the world that I increasingly encounter as estranged or entirely foreign to many practicing and prospective teachers. I am cognizant of how this translates into disinterest, resistance, disregard, distrust, and fear on the parts of educators (and their students), unwilling to navigate the given multiplicities and complexities of any educative situation. And, these stances hold frightening significances for teacher education and professional knowledge as teaching is realized as being “severed” from curriculum (Pinar, 2009, p. 11).
It is the urgent need to “intimately” and “necessarily” (Dewey, 1938, p. 20) reconnect teaching and curriculum, providing access to the formative terrain of sense making for all educators and their students that I see as integral to Hansen’s (2009; 2011) vision of a cosmopolitan-minded education. The underlying workings at play assist “people in moving closer and closer apart and further and further together”(Hansen, 2011). The boldness to journey into this formative curricular terrain, navigating differences as productive and generative, cultivating a community sustained through differences alongside collaborative engagement, thus grappling with the ensuing “complicated curricular conversations” (Pinar, 2009, p.11), needs to be practiced. It is this “practiced receptivity” (Davey, 2006) that is absent from many teacher education programs, professional development initiatives, and constrained and thwarted all together in classrooms, given the outcomes-fixated educational policies and discourses of the last 40 years leading “to institutional neglect of the intellectual quality and character of the curriculum” (Pinar, 2009, p. 11).
I put forth that aesthetic play traverses the needed practice ground and holds much potential for bringing educators and students from across disciplines and interests, near to the journeying of a cosmopolitan curriculum. Drawing across thinkers from varied times, cultures and traditions, this terrain is explicated as being: i) generative in nature; ii) elemental to being human; iii) in need of the other; iv) embracing the temporal/spatial negotiation of risks and opportunities afforded; v) interdependent with imagination; vi) demanding attunement to process; vii) instilling embodied understandings; and viii) informing self-understandings in relation to a wider context and citizenry. Aesthetic play needs to be at the core of a cosmopolitan-minded education. Its terrain positions all involved to learn about other(s) and in turn self, to create and concomitantly be created, integral to the movement of thinking, the multi-sensory engagement inherent within a cosmopolitan curriculum. Thus, such terrain intimately and necessarily forms a body-world relationship, confronting the immediacies of the world lived in and envisioning the world being created together.

Author

• Margaret A. Macintyre Latta, The University of British Columbia - Okanagan