Curricular Conversations

Play is the (Missing) Thing

Margaret Macintyre Latta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136637650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

The central theme of Curricular Conversations is this: Play is the thing that brings aesthetic curricular complications near educators and their students, making the lived consequences very vivid, tangible, and possible. Viewing curriculum as genuine inquiry into what is worth knowing, rather than simply a curricular document, this book explores the significances instilled and nurtured through aesthetic play. Each chapter delves into the space a given artwork reveals. The artworks act as points of departure and/or generative vehicles, foregrounding the roles and possibilities of play within curricular conversations. Looking at relevant educational issues, traditions, and theorists through an illuminating lens, this book speaks to curriculum theorists and arts educators everywhere.

1

Introduction

Aesthetic Play Matters to Curricular Conversations

Figure 1.1 I Think That One Day I Shall See … a Dandelion as a Tree, Collage/Ink on Paper, Lorraine Cockle, 2005.

When the linkage of the self with its world is broken, then also the various ways in which the self interacts with the world cease to have a unitary connection with one another.

Dewey, 1934, p. 247

Curriculum as “complicated conversation” (Pinar, 2010) has much to offer to the nature and role of education and the reframing of knowledge. Complicated curricular conversations orient away from commodities to be controlled and inciting competition, toward investments in schools, educators, students, and communities, laboring “to understand themselves and the world they inhabit” (Pinar, 2003, p. 31). This book provides access to educators (and others) to the significance of such curriculum making, attending to the aesthetics of process alongside their students. Therefore, curriculum is understood as genuine inquiry into what is worth knowing, rather than simply a curricular document. It importantly assumes that within the inquiry process lives a worthwhile direction, a medium for teaching and learning that asks teachers and students to participate through adapting, changing, building and creating meaning together. This is the nature of curriculum as aesthetic inquiry. Curriculum is then restored to its etymological roots of currere (Pinar, 2009, p. 51), invested in prompting, sustaining, and nurturing a movement of thinking that forms the complicated curricular conversation. Artworks embody this movement through aesthetic play. And, the chapters that comprise this book turn toward artworks to reveal how aesthetic play matters to the formulation of these complicated curricular conversations. It seems there is much to be gained from the elemental nature of play and its aesthetic presence and potential within educative settings across disciplines and interests of all kinds.

As a curriculum theorist, teacher educator, and arts educator, I am concerned that educators world-wide have become weary of cultivating genuine interest in learning, given the lengthy barrage of like-minded global policies and practices concerned predominately with compliance and uniformity (see, for example, Day, 2004; Groundwater-Smith & Mockler, 2009; Kemmis & Smith, 2008; Korthagen, 2001; Loughran, 2006; Smith, 2006; Taubman, 2009). The consequences still the movement of thinking undergirding curricular conversations. Thus, the aesthetic play nurturing and sustaining complicated curricular conversations becomes estranged and foreign. The costly consequences for learners, learning, and the future are apparent as multiplicities are discounted, orienting teaching/learning toward oneness, resulting in generic learning processes and products, and thwarting differences as catalysts in coming to know the self and other(s). Complicated curricular conversations are completely undermined. Increasingly, I am cognizant of how this translates into disinterest on the parts of educators (and their students), unwilling to navigate the given multiplicities and complexities of any educative situation as the aesthetic play integral within all curricular tasks. I encounter educator disinterest as resistance, disregard, distrust, and fear. Dewey (1934) warns, “When the linkage of the self with its world is broken, then also the various ways in which the self interacts with the world cease to have a unitary connection with one another” (p. 247). Dewey identifies how sense, feeling, desire, purpose, knowing, and volition then fall away into separate fragments instilling resistance, disregard, distrust, and fear as ways to exist. His warning is the reality I confront and it does hold frightening significance for teacher education and professional knowledge as teaching is realized as being “severed” from curriculum (Pinar, 2009, p. 11).

This book “intimately” and “necessarily” (Dewey, 1938, p. 20) reconnects teaching and curriculum, providing access to the formative terrain of sense-making for all educators and students through aesthetic play. It is written for anyone wishing to pursue play seriously in their curricular practices, drawing on aesthetic traditions and engagement, including experimentation, multisensory attentiveness, and non-linear as well as linear ways of thinking and acting. It matters that teachers do not know the formative matters of aesthetic play and thus the complicated curricular conversation is a non-realized possibility. It matters that students do not get to play within complicated curricular conversations, encountering and navigating differences through interaction, deliberation, and debate. This book foregrounds the lived consequences of aesthetic play that are all too often resisted, dismissed, distrusted, and feared by many educators, their students, and others. Each chapter’s insistence on complicated curricular conversation as a fully human activity, assuming ways of being in the world that do not separate knowledge from interest, or theory from practice, seeking pervasive qualitative wholes, is intended to confront such stances. And, the book as a whole addresses such resistant, dismissive, distrustful, and fearful stances as constraining and calcifying aesthetic significances for curricular practices and associated understandings of professional knowledge, teacher education, and the nature of learners and learning. Thus, given that the formative nature of all learning seems very unfamiliar, it is curricular terrain more apt to be deliberately avoided by educators. The result is a language of impossibility that quickly consumes and calcifies educators’ attempts to aesthetically engage within their curricular practices. These concerns speak directly to the curriculum field because it is the enactment of curriculum that matters (Thornton, 2005).

Finding ways to interrupt the seductive acceptance of what Alexander (1998) terms “maimed versions” of curricular experiences becomes this book’s primary task (p. 12). Alexander (2003) explains, “To inhabit the world is not to dominate or renounce it, but to play in it, learn from it, care for it, and realize the beauty of its meanings” (p. 149). Gadamer (2000) insists the reciprocal interactions and modifications entailed within play are fundamental to being human, identifying play as the “clue” to such ontological reciprocity (p. 104). Thus, to learn about other(s) and in turn self, to create and concomitantly be created, is the elemental play ontologically fundamental to being human and integral to the movement of thinking inherent within curriculum as complicated conversation. This book delves into the texture undergirding this clue, exploring how aesthetic play caringly connects self and world and how such reflexive engagement becomes continuous and varied, forming the curricular matter that very much matters.

Philosophers for centuries, from across varied cultures and traditions, have turned to aesthetic experience manifested in and through art forms as means to give expression to and interrogate the play or encounter between self and other (e.g., Bakhtin, 1919; Bourriaud, 1998; Crowther, 1993; Dewey, 1934; Gadamer, 2000; Garrison, 1997; Greene, 1995; Hegel, 1835; Kant, 1790; Merleau-Ponty, 1964; Schiller, 1795; Winston, 2010). The location, purpose, and lived world of the knowing subject are addressed from multiple perspectives, but all value the arts for their capacities to reveal the “in-between” reciprocal space of self and other. Davey (2006) explains how art “works the [in-between] space,” stating:

By bringing to mind what is in effect a transcendent totality of meaning, the artwork reveals … the particularity of its rendition of its subject matter and reveals accordingly that its response is one of many other possible responses. The successful work commands the space that it opens, carefully refining the space between reference and rendition. It is in its ability to disclose and maintain this tension that the dialogical capacity of a work resides.

p. 63

Pinar (2011) interprets such in-between spatial workings as providing “pas-sages between subjectivity and sociality” (p. 96) and, thus, acting as points of departure, or as Greene (1995) terms them, “openings” (p. 116). Drawing on these thinkers alongside Davey’s (2006) explication that art works this in-between space, this book studies how art does so, residing and inviting us within it, to explore aesthetic engagement, the workings at play. Davey characterizes the understandings evoked as being “unquiet”; that is, understandings that challenge alongside offering opportunities. Contributing chapters embrace aesthetic play as a way to see/act with potential in situations, self, and other(s), entrusting enactment, and navigating unquiet understandings as expected and productive within the workings at play.

Organization of the Book

Dewey (1934), as a Pragmatist, grounds the aesthetic in the art-making experience. In doing so, attention turns to the phenomenology of self–other relations. Such grounding is embodied in the unique human being, located spatially and temporally, and having a particular relationship to all persons, objects, and events in the world. Thus, Dewey’s thinking always returns to the activity of the creating individual. It is fitting, then, that a quote from Dewey’s scholarship opens each chapter, deliberately selected to invite the reader to play, suggesting conversation among the reader, the imagery, and the associated artist’s website, and generating the chapter’s continued discussion. Dewey provides key insights and language throughout this book. These insights and language give expression to aesthetic play. Expression is then extended through the thinking of many additional historical and contemporary curriculum theorists, educators, and philosophers. Readers are expected to join the complicated conversation underway. Chapters can be read separately, but they are intended to fold into each other and collectively elucidate aesthetic play and its intimate and necessary connections within curricular conversations.

To concretely map out the terrain of the entire book, the second chapter experientially unfolds the moving character of aesthetic play. Begone Dull Care, (1949, National Film Board of Canada) a visual/music/animated film directed by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambert in collaborative response with Oscar Peterson’s performed jazz composition, becomes a medium to introduce, denote, and experience features of aesthetic play. The features encountered within the film position viewers/readers to enter into play, navigating the arising complications as interrelated and interdependent contingencies productive within curricular conversations of all kinds. Dull, distanced curricular care orients very differently than curricular investment of caring matters, intimately connecting self and world.

Chapters 3 through 9 delve deeper into the texture of aesthetic play, turning to a cross-section of contemporary art forms to explore ways to see and act with potential in situations, self and other(s), pursuing curricular implications. These artworks include installations, site-specific art, quilts, film, a physical-media performance, and photography. Each of these chapters studies the space a given artwork reveals to me, understanding the arts as “openings” to be experienced from the “inside” (Greene, 2001, p. 8), and as the generative ground worthy of inquiry. The artworks act as points of departure and/or catalytic vehicles within each chapter, surfacing the roles and possibilities of play within curricular conversations. These chapters elucidate how playing brings out the underlying possibilities of players and the underlying meanings of the world. Such indeterminacies ensure the “as if” character that Gadamer (1986) claims is essential to the nature of play (p. 126). Each artwork offers ways to see “as if,” increasingly understanding seeing as an achievement that is never ending. Akin to the title and imagery of Figure 1.1, “I think that one day I shall see a dandelion as a tree,”¹ the permeating task entailed across all chapters asks readers to become a part of this seeing movement, delving into the “as if” nature of aesthetic play. Aesthetic play is then experienced as central to curricular practices and meaning-making of all kinds, and as an investment in the future. As such, aesthetic play cultivates trust in learning with, from, and through other(s), with participants coming to see, again and again.

All chapters ask readers/participants to rely on the seeing movement integral within aesthetic play to incite complicated curricular conversations across disciplines and interests. Specifically, Chapters 3 through 9 navigate particular curricular complications that arise, with each chapter emphasizing an interrelated and interdependent feature of aesthetic play. But, it is important to keep in mind that all features form the workings embedded within each artwork and that the features identified are not finite. A closer look at specific features is intended to expose the clues, “hidden and withdrawn,” that Gadamer (2000, p. 112) refers to within the texture of aesthetic play, revealing curricular possibilities and impacts.

Chapter 3 navigates aesthetic play as elemental to being human. The Floodwall Project (2005–2011), a multi-dimensional installation by artist and community activist Jana Napoli with graphic artist Rondell Crier, provides access to the lived consequences of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. The play of individual curiosities, suggestions, and order-seeking is revealed to hold the vitality, profundity, and continuity for complicated curricular conversations.

Chapter 4 navigates aesthetic play as generative in nature. Site-specific artists’ embrace of place calls attention to significances inhering place. UK artist Andy Goldsworthy and the documentary of his site-specific sculptural forms in the making, Rivers and Tides: Working with Time (2004, Mediopolis Films), provide insights into valuing the given ground integral to entering into conversation with place and the wisdom harbored within the particulars of place for generating all curricular conversations.

Chapter 5 navigates aesthetic play as needing other(s). Yvonne Wells is an artist/quilt-maker from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA. Her quilt exhibit, Quilted Messages, (2012, Gottsch Gallery of the International Quilt Studies Center & Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska), conveys varied narratives of experience. These quilted messages clothe her reflections, encounters, and stances as she negotiates the materiality of her making processes. The integral role of other(s) within curricular conversations gains visibility, as Wells discloses the concrete realties of her life situated within contextual and historical happenings.

Chapter 6 navigates aesthetic play as embracing the temporal/spatial negotiation of risks and opportunities afforded. The New York-based artist Leighton Pierce uses film, video, and sound to create experiential site-based encounters in time-based media. The unity of space and time is accessed through his installation, Agency of Time (2008, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska). The agency and belongingness acquired through heightened attention to the abstractions, multiplicities, and uncertainties alive within the present foreground the possibilities and power of space-time at play within curricular conversations.

Chapter 7 navigates aesthetic play as interdependent with imagination, instilling embodied understandings. Heather Raikes is a physical-media artist based in Seattle, Washington, USA. Her (2011) performance artwork, Corpus Corvus, is an experimental, integrative telling of the Pacific Northwest Native American myth of the raven. The performance artwork provides access to how sense illuminates understandings, creating room for deliberation, intuition, anticipation, natality, and enlarged realizations. As means of comprehension, embodied imagination reveals the rootedness of all sense-making in the biophysical rhythms of the lived body.

Chapter 8 navigates aesthetic play as demanding attunement to process. Patricia Cain is an artist in Glasgow, Scotland. She collaborates with fellow artists Ann Nisbet, Phil Lavery, Alec Galloway, and Rosalind Lawless to create a multi-media installation, Drawing (on) Riverside (2011, Kelvingrove Art Museum, Glasgow, Scotland). The newly constructed Riverside Museum housing Glasgow’s transport collection and revealing its maritime history serves as a responsive medium for these artists to consider Glasgow’s past, and look to the future, examining the complicities of contexts and peoples. The undertaking entailed collaborators working on-site at the Kelvingrove Museum toward a collective response, continually reconsidered and reformulated through process. The ensuing creative tensions are explored as integral to meaning-making of all kinds.

Chapter 9 navigates aesthetic play as reflexively informing self-understandings in relation to a wider context and citizenry. Binh Danh is a Vietnamese-born photographic artist living in San Jose, California, USA. The images comprising his exhibit, Viet Nam, Nebraska (2011–2012, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska), convey experiences of the Vietnam War concerned with human memory linked to earth’s memory. Dahn’s chlorophyll prints, daguerreotypes, and color photography of associated imagery are displayed alongside multi-generational snapshots collected from Vietnamese American families living in Lincoln, Nebraska. The exhibit engages participants in uncovering and re-presenting underlying values, assumptions, and beliefs through expanding personal and collective horizo...