Letting Dance Teach. Esthetic Teaching in a Call for an Esthetic Turn in Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Arts based educational research and dance/movement

Abstract

A call for an esthetic turn in education, modelling dance teaching as esthetic teaching, ‘beyond’ controlled instruction and cognitive knowledge construction. The paper discusses the phenomenal world as subject offering its ‘gifts’ to the human ‘I’, receivable primarily through the senses (Biesta, Marion, Herbart, Roth), and the human subject becoming in ethical receptivity of the Other (Arendt, Levinas).
Dance and the arts are forwarded as indispensable to educational research for a precarious future already here, a world calling for social and natural survival. The paper compiles findings from qualitative and quantitative studies on teaching creative dance, math and science. What can dance and the arts ‘teach’ us about education as trying to be in and with the world?

Author

• Paul Edward Moerman, University of Jyväskylä