Against The Flow The Arts Postmodern Culture And Education

This book calls for education to become an end in itself, as opposed to the means to an end, and for a place to be found in contemporary education for the spiritual, the aesthetic and the ethical.

This book calls for education to become an end in itself, as opposed to the means to an end, and for a place to be found in contemporary education for the spiritual, the aesthetic and the ethical.

Debates in Art and Design Education encourages student and practising teachers to engage with contemporary issues and developments in learning and teaching. It introduces key issues, concepts and tensions in order to help art educators develop a critical approach to their practice in response to the changing fields of education and visual culture. Accessible, comprehensive chapters are designed to stimulate thinking and understanding in relation to theory and practice, and help art educators to make informed judgements by arguing from a position based on theoretical knowledge and understanding. Contributing artists, lecturers and teachers debate a wide range of issues including: the latest policy and initiatives in secondary art education the concepts, skills and dispositions that can be developed through art education tensions inherent in developing the inclusive Art and Design classroom partnerships across the visual arts sector creativity in the Art and Design curriculum visual art and globalisation establishing the significance of 'Design' art practice as educational research. Debates in Art and Design Education is for all student and practising teachers interested in furthering their understanding of an exciting, ever-changing field, and supports art educators in articulating how the subject is a vital, engaging and necessary part of the twenty-first century curriculum. Each chapter points to further reading and each section suggests reflective questions to help shape art educators' teaching. In particular, Debates in Art and Design Education encourages art educators to engage in research by providing an essential introduction to critical thinking around contemporary debates.

This Australian text is about children’s voices – their minds, feelings, souls. It’s about how children’s voices are liberated through the arts, and how children make and communicate meaning through still and moving images, sounds, textures, gestures and the use of many other signs. It is also about how teachers, parents, peers and the community influence children’s early development, and how quality arts education in early childhood is an essential component of lifelong learning. The authors are teachers and researchers who are respected for their contributions to early childhood arts education. All of them have addressed their topics via practical examples, which are embedded in current philosophies and theories, often stemming from original research and firsthand interactions with children.

This book explains why the current education model, which was developed in the 19th century to meet the needs of industrial expansion, is obsolete. It points to the need for a new approach to education designed to prepare young people for global uncertainty, accelerating change and unprecedented complexity.The book offers a new educational philosophy to awaken the creative, big-picture and long-term thinking that will help equip students to face tomorrow’s challenges. Inside, readers will find a dialogue between adult developmental psychology research on higher stages of reasoning and today’s most evolved education research and practice. This dialogue reveals surprising links between play and wisdom, imagination and ecology, holism and love. The overwhelming issues of global climate crisis, growing economic disparity and the youth mental health epidemic reveal how dramatically the current education model has failed students and educators. This book raises a planet-wide call to deeply question how we actually think and how we must educate. It articulates a postformal education philosophy as a foundation for educational futures.The book will appeal to educators, educational philosophers, pre-service teacher educators, educational and developmental psychologists and educational researchers, including postgraduates with an interest in transformational educational theories designed for the complexity of the 21st century. This is the most compelling book on education I have read for many years. It has major implications for all who are in a position to influence developments in teacher education and educational policy. Gidley is one of the very rare scholars who can write intelligently and accessibly about the past, present and future in education. I was challenged and ultimately convinced by her contention that ‘what masquerades as education today must be seen for what it is – an anachronistic relic of the industrial past’. Gidley’s challenge is to ‘co-evolve’ a radically new education. All who seek to play a part must read this book. Brian J. Caldwell, PhD, Educational Transformations, former Dean of Education at the University of Melbourne and Deputy Chair, Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)

The future of public education and democracy is at risk. Powerful forces are eroding commitment to public schools and weakening democratic resolve. Yet even in deeply troubling times, it is possible to broaden social imagination and empower effective advocacy for systemic progressive reform. Re-envisioning Education and Democracy explores challenges and opportunities for restructuring public education to establish and sustain more broadly inclusive, deeply democratic, and effectively transforming approaches to social inquiry and civic participation. Re-envisioning Education and Democracy adopts a non-traditional format to extend social awareness and imagination. Within each chapter, one episode of an evolving strategic narrative traces the life cycle of a systemic reform initiative. This is followed by an exploratory essay that draws from theory, research, criticism, and practice to prompt consideration of focal issues. Woven through each chapter is a poetically framed meditative stream informed by varied historical and cultural conceptions of oracles. A developmental sequence of social learning strategies (exploratory democratic practices), accompanied by thematic bibliographic references, are included to model democratic teaching and learning applicable in classroom and community settings.

The school curriculum is a contested arena. There are competing pressures from those who advocate that it should be constructed on a subject specific basis, whereas at the other end of the continuum is the stance taken by this book, that learning, and especially learning in the arts, can transcend artificial boundaries between subjects. This book sets out a case for cross-curricular learning involving the arts in secondary schools. Cross-Curricular Teaching and Learning in the Secondary School...The Arts argues for the development of a new, skilful pedagogy which embeds an authentic, cross-curricular approach to teaching and learning in the work of the individual teacher. Teachers are empowered to think about creative pedagogies, and pupils are able to engage in deep learning as a result. Key features of the text include: theoretical examination of key issues curriculum planning materials and resources a wide range of case studies drawn from innovative practise frameworks for assessment and evaluation. Part of the Cross-Curricular Teaching and Learning in the Secondary School series, this textbook breaks the boundaries between curriculum subjects and the arts. It is timely reading for all students on Initial Teacher Training courses as well as practising teachers looking to introduce cross-curricular themes in their own subjects.

"Creativity in Language and Literature is a provocative and valuable book. Its breadth of topics, variety of approaches, and self-consciously creative and dialogic nature are especially appropriate and creative ways of approaching the subject of creativity. The scope, variety and original content of this book make it a unique contribution to the field" - Professor David L. Hoover, New York University, USA This unique resource brings together contributions from creative practitioners and academic researchers working across different disciplines. Researchers, literary authors, editors, performers and film makers reflect on their work and collectively explore the art of creativity in language and literature. Creativity in Language and Literature covers a range of texts, genres and practices, such as poetry, hip hop, film, story telling, web chat and pen-friend correspondence. Each part of the book begins with an introduction and the final part includes critical responses to the idea of linguistic creativity, encouraging ongoing dialogue and debate. This richly diverse collection is an ideal text for students and practitioners working at all levels. With contributions by Patience Agbabi, Daniel Allington, R. Amritavalli, Richard D. Brown, Lynne Cameron, Ronald Carter, Guy Cook, Jon Cook, Ruth Finnegan, Angela Goddard, Ben Haggarty, Graeme Harper, G. D. Jayalakshmi, Angel Lin, Janet Maybin, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Kate Pahl, Mario Petrucci, Rob Pope, Elena Semino, Fiona Sampson, Jane Spiro, Peter Stockwell, Joan Swann, S. Upendran and Michelene Wandor.

Providing a distillation of knowledge in the various disciplines of arts education (dance, drama, music, literature and poetry and visual arts), this essential handbook synthesizes existing research literature, reflects on the past, and contributes to shaping the future of the respective and integrated disciplines of arts education. While research can at times seem distant from practice, the Handbook aims to maintain connection with the live practice of art and of education, capturing the vibrancy and best thinking in the field of theory and practice. The Handbook is organized into 13 sections, each focusing on a major area or issue in arts education research.

This book explores the many dialogues that exist between the arts and literacy. It shows how the arts are inherently multimodal and therefore interface regularly with literate practice in learning and teaching contexts. It asks the questions: What does literacy look like in the arts? And what does it mean to be arts literate? It explores what is important to know and do in the arts and also what literacies are engaged in, through the journey to becoming an artist. The arts for the purpose of this volume include five art forms: Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts. The book provides a more productive exploration of the arts-literacy relationship. It acknowledges that both the arts and literacy are open-textured concepts and notes how they accommodate each other, learn about, and from each other and can potentially make education ‘better’. It is when the two stretch each other that we see an educationally productive dialogic relationship emerge.

This is a book about adult education in the sphere of public museums and art galleries. It aims to enrich and expand dialogue and understanding amongst adult and community educators, curators, artists, directors, and cultural activists who work within and beyond the walls of these institutions. The various chapters take up the complex and interconnected pedagogics of subjectivity, identity, meaning making and interpretation, knowledge, authority, prescription, innovation, and creativity. The contributors are a combination of scholars, professors, graduate students, heritage and cultural adult educators, artists, curators and researchers from Canada, United States, Iceland, England, Scotland, Denmark, Portugal, Italy and Malta. Collectively, they challenge us to think about the dialectics of passivity and engagement, didactics and learning, gender neutrality and radicality, and neutrality and risk-taking amongst a collage of artworks and artefacts, poetry and installations, collections and exhibits, illusion and reality, curatorial practice and learning, argument and narrative, and struggle and possibility that define and shape modern day art and culture institutions. The chapters, set amongst the discursive politics of neoliberalism and patriarchy, racism and religious intolerance, institutional neutrality and tradition, capitalism and neo-colonialism, ecological devastation and social injustice, take up the spirit and ideals of the radical and feminist traditions of adult education and their emphases on cultural participation and knowledge democracy, agency and empowerment, justice and equity, intellectual growth and transformation, critical social and self reflection, activism and risk-taking, and a fundamental belief in the power of art, dialogue, reflection, ideological and social critique and imaginative learning.

The notion of the individual creator, a product in part of the Western romantic ideal, is now troubled by accounts and explanations of creativity as a social construct. While in collectivist cultures the assimilation (but not the denial) of individual authorship into the complexities of group production and benefit has been a feature, the notion of the lone individual creator has been persistent. Systems theories acknowledge the role of others, yet at heart these are still individual views of creativity - focusing on the creative individual drawing upon the work of others rather than recognizing the mutually constitutive elements of social interactions across time and space. Focusing on the domain of music, the approach taken in this book falls into three sections: investigations of the people, processes, products, and places of collaborative creativity in compositional thought and practice; explorations of the ways in which creative collaboration provides a means of crossing boundaries between disciplines such as music performance and musicology; and studies of the emergence of creative thought and practice in educational contexts including that of the composer and the classroom. The volume concludes with an extended chapter that reflects on the ways in which the studies reported advance understandings of creative thought and practice. The book provides new perspectives to our understandings of the role of collaborative thought and processes in creative work across the domain of music including: composition, musicology, performance, music education and music psychology.

The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Music Education offer a comprehensive overview of the many facets of musical experience, behavior and development in relation to the diverse variety of educational contexts in which they occur. In these volumes, an international list of contributors update and redefine the discipline through fresh and innovative principles and approaches to music learning and teaching.

Creativity: Theory, History, Practice offers important new perspectives on creativity in the light of contemporary critical theory and cultural history. Innovative in approach as well as argument, the book crosses disciplinary boundaries and builds new bridges between the critical and the creative. It is organised in four parts: Why creativity now? offers much-needed alternatives to both the Romantic stereotype of the creator as individual genius and the tendency of the modern creative industries to treat everything as a commodity defining creativity, creating definitions traces the changing meaning of 'create' from religious ideas of divine creation from nothing to advertising notions of concept creation. It also examines the complex history and extraordinary versatility of terms such as imagination, invention, inspiration and originality dreation as myth, story, metaphor begins with modern re-tellings of early African, American and Australian creation myths and – picking up Biblical and evolutionary accounts along the way – works round to scientific visions of the Big Bang, bubble universes and cosmic soup creative practices, cultural processes is a critical anthology of materials, chosen to promote fresh thinking about everything from changing constructions of 'literature' and 'design' to artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Rob Pope takes significant steps forward in the process of rethinking a vexed yet vital concept, all the while encouraging and equipping readers to continue the process in their own creative or 're-creative' ways. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice is invaluable for anyone with a live interest in exploring what creativity has been, is currently, and yet may be.

This extensive Handbook addresses a range of contemporary issues related to arts education across the world. It is divided into six sections; Contextualising Arts Education, Globally and Locally; Arts Education, Curriculum, Policy and Schooling; Arts Education Across the Life Span; Arts Education for Social Justice: Indigenous and Community Practice; Health, Wellbeing and Arts Education and Arts-Based and Research-Informed Arts Education. The Handbook explores global debates within education in the areas of dance, drama, music, media and visual arts. Presenting wide-ranging research from pedagogies of adaptation developed in Uganda to ethnomusicology in Malaysia and community participatory arts to wellbeing in Canada the Handbook highlights the universal need for arts education and in particular the importance of indigenous (including both traditional and contemporary practice) arts education. With contributions from internationally renowned scholars and practitioners and building on the World Alliance for Arts Education Global Summit in 2014, the Handbook creates an essential resource for arts education practices in and out of school alongside institutional, traditional and contemporary contexts. Students, teachers and practitioners across the arts disciplines will find the text invaluable for developing further opportunities to promote and study arts education.

The Routledge Companion to Drama in Education is a comprehensive reference guide to this unique performance discipline, focusing on its process-oriented theatrical techniques, engagement of a broad spectrum of learners, its historical roots as a field of inquiry and its transdisciplinary pedagogical practices. The book approaches drama in education (DE) from a wide range of perspectives, from leading scholars to teaching artists and school educators who specialise in DE teaching. It presents the central disciplinary conversations around key issues, including best practice in DE, aesthetics and artistry in teaching, the histories of DE, ideologies in drama and education, and concerns around access, inclusivity and justice. Including reflections, lesson plans, programme designs, case studies and provocations from scholars, educators and community arts workers, this is the most robust and comprehensive resource for those interested in DE’s past, present and future.