Mobilizing Evidence to Create Wide-Awake Citizens

• In Event: 43.040 - Research as Meaning-Making: Developing a Lens for Understanding the Impact of Aesthetic Education

Abstract

AERA’s 2019 Call for Proposals alerts us to issues confronting educators in today’s “post-truth” era, suggesting that we must “mobilize interdisciplinary and mixed-method bodies of evidence” to tell our powerful stories. This presentation outlines research findings of just such work, focusing on curriculum in a first-year college classroom that seeks to help students to see what there is to see – fully awake to their own lived lives – in the world they encounter every day.
When we leap among provinces of meaning, we experience a kind of “shock” of understanding, characterized by a different “attention a la vie” (Greene, 1978, p. 173). This way of knowing diverse things all at once is achieved through a process of dialogue that requires one to deploy analytical skills at the same time as opening one’s mind to the methods of other disciplines. In a world that seems obsessed by big data without regard for meaning, we must understand ever more clearly that learning to see relationships in new ways, among provinces of meaning, requires “the use of a new form of vision”, one that goes beyond mere labeling, and into discovering qualities of relationships – experiencing how the parts interact with each other and with the whole (Eisner, 2002, p. 76). Maxine Greene, the existential phenomenologist who along with teaching artists at Lincoln Center Institute developed aesthetic education methodology, believed in bringing together the “severed parts” of the world through situated aesthetic encounters with works of art (Woolf, 1985, p. 72). It is just this kind of attending that is most needed, in research and in education, to develop citizens-in-the-making able to take on the “post-truth paradigm” that dominates our learning landscape.
Describing the kind of education needed to create wide-awake citizens, Greene often quoted Arendt who wrote about education as “the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it” (Arendt, 1961, p. 196). Choosing to “love the world” in this way through education, Greene exhorts us to find ways, through attention to the world and its works of art, to engage students in dynamic personal encounters with the “colored sounding world” and its problems. This presentation proposes an approach to educational research and curriculum development that weaves skills of aesthetic literacy with interdisciplinarity enabling leaps across disciplinary boundaries and ways of knowing, creating a more integrated understanding of the whole. It reports on research into specific curriculum development that provides students with “sufficient command” (Newell, 2001, p. 17) of disciplinary insights along with skills of aesthetic awareness of various aspects of the world and its works of art, resulting in the kind of integrated understanding of the whole for which Arendt and Greene hoped. The report on the combined process of “educating persons into faithful perceiving” - seeing themselves doing so “against the background of their own personal history” (Greene, 2001, p. 55) and providing opportunities for attending by which multiple perspectives come alive closely addresses the collaborative nature, themes and intent of AERA 2019.

Author

• Heidi Upton, St.John's University