Aesthetic Practices and Adult Education

Abstract

Creating transformational learning experiences through aesthetic practices, though not a new idea, continues to be a fruitful area of investigation in adult education. The authors in this anthology draw heavily from two foundational education theorists: American pragmatist John Dewey and Brazilian educator Paulo Friere. Emerging from radically different social contexts, Dewey and Friere shared a belief in the idea that education is a tool for social change, in which tangible experiences inform the learner through the integration of mind and body. In his only book on aesthetics, Art as Experience (1934), Dewey states his basic premise: When you learn by participating in aesthetic experience, you enrich the process and the quality of learning (p. 122). Friere, too, put great emphasis on learning as doing, seeing the learner as a “co-creator” rather than a passive receiver (1972, p. 60). It is on this foundation, of direct experience as transformational learning and its impact on wider community practices of social justice and adult education, that the authors in Aesthetic Practices and Adult Education articulate their perspectives and diverse case studies. The studies range across the topics of museum education, community arts practice, social justice, leadership, and mental health. While each chapter is notable for providing insight into a particular case study of how aesthetic practices have been integrated into an educational process within a specific context, all the chapters address, to some degree, the broader topic of “community arts engagement.” The authors analyze how adult learning can benefit from collective aesthetic practices, and they identify key issues within that area of questioning, including the relationship between the individual and the collective, the importance of embodied experience in transformational learning, and the relationship between collective aesthetic practices and social change. Community, in the democratic context, implies a collective social identity that can unify and give voice to underrepresented people. Yet the collective can also oppress individual difference within a generalized identity. In the chapter entitled “Imagining and Engaging Difference in the Art Museum,” Kimberly F. Keith explores the tensions involved when museum educators and curators seek to represent “difference” to audiences, using objects, images, and narrative texts. Aesthetic experience in this context is often restricted to a passive visual experience