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7ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ И КУЛЬТУРА
Patrick M. Jenlink
A POETIC FOR TEACHER EDUCATION: DEWEY'S IMPERATIVE FOR AESTHETICS
Keywords: Dewey, aesthetics, poetics, teacher education, aesthetic imperative, aesthetic form, aesthetic criticism, aesthetic cognition, aesthetic space, democratic possibilities.
Abstract: The author examines a poetic for teacher education, focusing on the problematic nature of preparing teachers for changing roles in schools. Considered is an imperative for aesthetics, as originally discussed by Dewey (1934). Further elaborated is the importance of a cognitive aesthetics for teachers, informed by considerations for aesthetic knowledge, aesthetic criticism, and aesthetic form. The construction of the poetic is situated amidst the challenges of standards and accountability, issues of social justice, shifting demographics, and the press for "what is measurable" at the expense of diminishing importance for "what is immeasurable" (creativity, imagination, aesthetic qualities of a learning experience, etc.). The author elaborates on the implications of a poetic for teacher education, juxtaposing the current drive for "what can be measured" as opposed to "what is immeasurable" in the learning experience. The paper concludes with an examination of the democratic possibilities that a poetic for teacher education offers for educational systems and society.
Патрик М. Дженлинк
ТВОРЧЕСКИЙ ПОДХОД В ПОДГОТОВКЕ УЧИТЕЛЯ
В СВЕТЕ ТРЕБОВАНИЙ ДЬЮИ К ВОПРОСАМ ЭСТЕТИКИ
Ключевые слова: Дьюи, эстетика, творческий подход, подготовка учителя, эстетические требования, эстетическая форма, эстетическая критика, эстетическое познание, эстетическое пространство, демократические возможности.
Аннотация: Автор рассматривает творческий подход в подготовке учителя, заостряя внимание на проблематических вопросах подготовки педагогов в изменяющихся условиях в свете требований к вопросам эстетики, о чем говорил Дьюи в 1934 году. Далее автор статьи пишет о необходимости владения учителями творческой эстетикой, то есть творческими знаниями, творческой критикой и творческой формой. Формирование творческого подхода подчинено и зависит от требований стандартов и подотчетности, вопросов социальной справедливости, демократических изменений. Подобное формирование осуществляется в условиях давления категории «что можно измерить» на вопросы «чего трудно измерить» (креативность, воображение, эстетические вопросы опыта приобретенных знаний и т. д.). Исследуя творческие подходы в подготовке учителя, автор сопоставляет современные подходы к проблеме «что измеримо» с вопросами «что неизмеримо» в рамках учебной деятельности. Наконец, автор рассматривает вопрос о том, какие демократические возможности может предложить творческий подход в подготовке учителя системе образования и обществу.
doi: 10.21510/1817-3292-2017-1-11-22
The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness. (Dewey, 1927, p.184)
. . . there is an obligation, I think, on the part of all who educate to address themselves, as great artists do, to the freedom of their students, to make demands on them to form the pedagogy of their own liberation - and to do so rigorously, passionately, and in good faith. (Greene, 1981, p. 303)
Introduction
At this moment in history, education is confronted with many problems. One is the treatment of persons as "resources," with changes in education being called for in the name of economic productivity, global competition, and national defense. As Greene (2000) argues, preoccupations "with testing, measurement, standards, and the like follow from a damaging approach to children as 'human resources', their supposed malleability and the belief that they can and should be molded in accord with the needs of the technological society" (p. 270). While assessments are important in the larger picture, this is true only "if they do more than simply sort people out for places on a hierarchy" (p. 270). Likewise, standards are important to education "if they connect with learners' own desires to appear as the best they can be, to achieve in response to what they hope to be" (p. 270). However, when standards are extrinsically "imposed they can deny the human effort to reach further, to imagine possibility" (p. 270).
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Analyzing the problems confronting society, Dewey (1931), over eight decades ago, argued that what is wrong, lies
. . . with our lack of imagination in generating leading ideas. Because we are afraid of speculative ideas, we do, and do over and over again, an immense amount of specialized work in the region of 'facts'. We forget such facts are only data; that is, are only fragmentary, uncompleted meanings, and unless they are rounded out into complete ideas - a work which can only be done by hypotheses, by a free imagination of intellectual possibilities - they are as helpless as are all maimed things and as repellent as needlessly thwarted ones. (p. 11)
Today, as in Dewey's time, the incompleteness of mere facts remains important, as does the linking of imagination to possibility. However, little or no attention is paid to the implications of Dewey's idea of incompleteness of meanings when not rounded out by the imaginative projection of possibilities (Greene, 1995). In the throes of standards and accountability, we seem to have forgone the necessity of imagination—dismissing aesthetics from teaching and teacher preparation, and rather culminating our attention on the voices of the practical (political) and the scientific activities (Oakeshott, 1962).
The perspective of a "poetics for teacher education" presented in this paper is primarily a philosophical examination of poetics complimented by an analysis of current policy mandates for teacher education. In this paper, the author constructs a poetic for teacher education, premised on Dewey's (1934) notions of aesthetics and "an experience", in part. Crafting the poetic was i n-structed by the works of Brown (1990), Dewey (1916, 1927, 1931, 1934, 1938), Granger (2001), Greene (1973, 1978, 1981,1986, 1988), Giroux (1992), Hansen (2004), Sartre (1965, 1972), Stevens (1951), Marcuse (1978), and Oakeshott (1962). Three primary elements shape the poetic for teacher education: aesthetic knowledge, aesthetic criticism, and aesthetic form. The poetic also articulates the importance of aesthetic cognition (Brown, 1989; Dewey, 1934; Reimer, 1992) for teaching.
The author's purpose in this paper is to examine a poetic for teacher education. Specifically, the author focuses upon the problematic nature of preparing teachers for changing roles in schools amidst the challenges of standards and accountability, issues of social justice, shifting demographics, and the press for "what is measurable" at the expense of diminishing importance for "what is immeasurable" (creativity, imagination, aesthetic qualities of a learning experience, etc.). Importantly, the inquiry into a poetic for teacher education is instructed by a concern for the current political and ideological bounded discourses shaping teacher education, and importantly argues the necessity of an aesthetic imperative in rethinking the nature of teacher education.
Poetics
Poetics is an ancient term, with many meanings (Hansen, 2004). In contemporary terms, it is derived from philosophical and structuralist studies of literature, descriptive of the way sounds, words, phrases and sentences form literary units. But conventional poetics might also be construed as the way ideology, 'master narratives', is threaded into the text, in content and in genre: fiction and nonfiction, objective and subjective voice, definite and indefinite register. It can, as Hansen (2004) explains, " . . . represent studies of makings, creations, and compositions," and it "can constitute a theory of such making" (p. 122).
Poetics for teacher education serves to illuminate the experiences of learning to teach, within the social and political contexts of education. It offers students of teaching and teacher educators alike an opportunity to examine the social texts of their experience, causing them to ask not only what the text means but also how it means, what its epistemological and theoretical grounds are. A poetic translates into aesthetic form and criticism, considering the aesthetics of cognition and meaning.
A poetics for teacher education translates, in part, is a "process of active response to the world, involving a deepening understanding and sensitivity" to democracy, and "mirrors how
events, actions, and the conduct of others can all express intellectual, aesthetic, and moral meaning" (Hansen, 2004, p. 122).
Dewey's Aesthetics of Experience
Dewey (1934), writing in Art as Experience, suggests that the roots of aesthetic experience lie in commonplace experience, in the consummately experiences that are ubiquitous in the course of human life. Art and aesthetics are "prefigured in the very processes of living" wrote Dewey (1934, p. 24). Individual artistic expression is "wrought into being" (p. 89) through aesth etic experiences that reflect the realities of the moment, the possibilities of the future. Aesthetics serves to guide artistic expression, creative imagination, and political interrogation; making public the hidden and otherwise overlooked beauty and horror of society. An aesthetic experience has the power to transform—to change people, ideas, and the future. Aesthetics provides the foundation of culture as an active, transformative medium in which people mutually civilize one another and proclaim their necessary sphere of freedom from the state (Schiller, 1967). The heart of Dewey's aesthetics resides in his formulation about the artistic experience (as opposed to a normal experience). According to Dewey's definition, an experience is viewed as a total encounter with external phenomena which runs a complete course from beginning to end and is totally integrated into consciousness1 as an entity distinct from other experiences."
Artistic expression, aesthetic experiences are the processes and backdrops of imagination. By cultivating imagination—the source of human freedom and possibilities—in teacher education, teachers learn how to help children to understand that things have not always been as they are and that they can be changed now and in the future. This openness to imagined alternatives is important to an educational process of transcending the present. Overcoming the "inertia of habit" is necessary to engendering consciousness of our experiences, integrating new learnings through the "imaginative phase of experience" (Dewey, 1934, p. 272).
Teacher education necessarily is challenged with the responsibility of fostering in teachers, and therein students, an aesthetic capacity to interact with the world, to see the world as it really is and to challenge its existence. This requires putting imagination at the heart of curriculum. It also requires putting aesthetic criticism at the heart of learning to teach as well, preparing teachers for educational settings all too often void of artistic expression and imaginative possibilities. There is a need to revisit teacher education, to consider the value of an "aesthetic imperative" to guide teacher learning and practice, not disconnected, but reflexively in concert so as to engender an appreciative value for imaginative possibilities.
An Aesthetic Imperative
Sartre (1965), writing in Lterature and Existentialism, advanced the "aesthetic imperative" as how works of literature address themselves to the "freedom" of their readers. A work of literature may be seen "as an imaginary presentation of the world insofar as it demands human freedom" (p. 63). Much the same, teaching that invokes an "aesthetic imperative" advances the "freedom" of the students—an emancipation of the mind from the constraints of reality as it is experienced daily outside and in the classroom. A curriculum may be seen as a presentation of the world so as to illuminate the needs for human freedom; examining the injustices and inequities of human existence and at the same time illuminating the beauty and possibilities of a world different than children have come to understand or expect. As Marcuse notes
1 The nature of consciousness Dewey refers to concerns the social as an entity or group and therefore social consciousness connotes the collective consciousness. Social consciousness as a communal quality or quality of associated living, is concerned with an ethical ideal of democracy that embraces ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity (Dewey, 1888, p. 204). For Dewey (1927), the process of people discussing their individual and group desires, needs and prospective actions, allows them to discover their shared interests in the consequences of their actions. This is what generates "social consciousness" or "general will," and creates the ability to act on collective goals. It is this process of communication and deliberation over collective goals that constitutes a democratic public. Social consciousness, lived communal life, had be "emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained" (p. 151).
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in The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), aesthetics—the language, the images we find in art "make perceptible, visible and audible that which is no longer or not yet perceived, said, and heard in everyday life" (Mar-cuse, 1978,p. 72).
Such an "aesthetic imperative" demands of teachers and students that they transcend what appears to determine and define and limit them. It is to take a stand, to refuse indifference, to act to close gaps that disadvantage some while advantaging others, to pursue justice where injustice exists, to address the inequities in their lived worlds. This is to join in what Oakeshott (1962) termed the "conversation of mankind," where the voice of poetry joins with the voices of the practical—the politics, and the voice of science—the inquiry. This conversation is the "meeting place of various modes of imaginings" (p. 206). Such a conversation, he said, is an "unrehearsed intellectual adventure" (p. 198):
Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance. (p. 199)
Teacher education and teaching each contribute to the "conversation," preparing the teacher and the student equally to take her/his role in the aesthetics of teaching and learning, respectively. The rich imaginings Oakeshott speaks to signify the "aesthetic voice" necessary to mediation of a well-regulated political state—to fostering democratic possibilities. These imaginings, all too often absent from current experiences in education—standards, accountability, high-stakes testing—are necessary to mediating the dominating voices of the political and the scientific that work to constrain and otherwise domesticate individuals, shaping identities and futures. Such imaginings are the "voice of poetry" in education that takes form in the "meeting place" of the educational conversation—the collective classrooms of our colleges and schools. These imaginings must necessarily be intertwined with the "aesthetic and imaginative experience," which
. . . draws upon the material of other experiences and expresses their material in a med i-um which intensifies and clarifies its energy through the order that supervenes. The arts accomplish this result not by self-conscious intention but in the very operation of creating, by means of new objects, new modes of experience. (Dewey, 1931, p. 244)
For Dewey (1934), the aesthetic experience was a challenge to philosophy, a challenge to the kinds of thinking that constrain or otherwise restrict the imaginative possibilities that students and teachers might develop. Dewey called aesthetic experience the "experience in its integ-rity...experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience" (1934, p. 274). Dewey's focus was on how art, and therein aesthetic experiences, moved indivi duals to a conscious ordering and reordering of meanings, bringing the not-real into the realities of the moment. Dewey's concern was for "the gap between the here and now of direct interactions whose funded result constitutes the meaning with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring" (1934, p. 271).
When we examine teacher education and teaching today, we find the constraining affect of standards and accountability, high-stakes testing, and policy agendas. Notably absent are the aesthetic experiences in learning to teach, and importantly what we find missing in classrooms the opportunities for students to engage in imaginative possibilities. The aesthetic imperative is crucial in considering teacher preparation programs as well as practices that are concerned with alternative realities. Important is our attention to the extension of the mind as Wallace Stevens speaks to in his essays on imagination and reality, The Necessary Angel:
2 Discursively, college and school is a spatial metaphor used to represent the space in which educational practice is carried out on a daily basis. Spatial metaphors work to define, visually, the conditions of experience and the practice of place. Spatial metaphors such as "home," "school," or "classroom," reflect spaces defined by different actions on the part of individuals, spaces where exchanges and symbolic power are quite different. There are, according to Lefebvre (1991) "spatial codes" (p. 16) that work to encode space, through language and discourse. Po etics in this is a language through which the space of educational settings may be examined.
The extension of the mind beyond the range of the mind, the projection of reality beyond reality, the determination to cover the ground, whatever it may be, the determination not to be confined, the recapture of excitement and intensity of interest, the enlargement of the spirit at every time, in every way, these are the unities, the relations, to be summarized as paramount now. (1951, p. 171)
The extension of the "mind beyond the range of the mind" speaks to aesthetics as the condition of both human freedom and possibilities. As Dewey (1934) explained, the mind "denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressively with situations in which we find ourselves" (p. 263). That is to say, it is the mind engaged imaginatively that permits human beings make connections between the normal experiences of life and those aesthetic experiences that enliven future possibilities. Greene (1994) further argues that an such a stance leads to "viewing knowing primarily as a [personal] search for the meaning of things with respect to acts performed and with respect to the consequences of those acts when preformed" (p. 435).
Aesthetic Criticism
The aesthetic imperative illuminates the importance of bringing a voice of critique to the experiences of teachers and students—the critical examination of society as it exists and all the conditions and politics that define reality, or more accurately constrain reality to particular ideological views. Dewey (1958), in Experience and Nature, explained criticism as "discriminating judgment, careful appraisal" (p. 398), which "includes a heightened consciousness of deficiencies and corruptions in the scheme and distribution of values that obtains at any period" (Dewey, 1958, p. 412).3 In this sense, aesthetic criticism is concerned both with acknowledging how reality is changing as well as fostering change in reality. To further this point, Sartre (1972) writes of the artist:
It is the artist who must break the already crystallized habits which make us see in the present tense those institutions and customs which are already out of date. To provide a true image of our time, he must consider from the pinnacle of the future which it is creating, since it is tomorrow which will decide today's truth...a work of art is at the same time an individual achievement and a social fact. (p. 222) Sartre was concerned with the reconstruction of the present in relation to future possibilities. Aesthetic criticism plays an important role in teacher preparation and in teaching, for it is through such criticism animated by an aesthetic imperative that teaching enables a fostering of change in reality. The efficacy of aesthetics in teaching is premised, in part, on the teacher having the capacity to live with doubts, dissonance, and contradictions in a creative way and to have an aesthetic intuition to create wholeness and order out of chaos and to bring harmony to a discordant world. Herein imagination is necessary, an aspect of the conflict between the individual and the "organized society" as Wallace Stevens (1951) explains,
It is part of our security. It enables us to live our own lives. We have it because we do not have enough without it. This may not be true as to each one of us, for certainly there are those for whom reality and reason are enough. It is true enough of the race. (p. 150)
Whereas aesthetic criticism makes the realities visible to the teacher, and therein the students with whom the teacher engages through an aesthetic imperative, imagination enables the teacher to offset the implications of "organized society" by creating different possibilities— alternative realities—in the classroom.
Returning to Dewey (1934), the heart of his aesthetics resides in his formulation about the artistic experience (as opposed to a normal experience). According to his definition, the artistic
3 Giroux (2003) argues Dewey's point well for contemporary education when he states:
As the space of criticism is undercut by the absence of public spheres that encourage the exchange of information, opinion and criticism, the horizons of a substantive democracy in which the promise of autonomous individuals and an autonomous society disappear against the growing isolation and depoliticization that marks the loss of politically guaranteed public realms in which the realized power of people, political participation and engaged citizenship make their appearance. Rapidly disappearing are those pubic spaces unmarketed cultural spaces in which people neither confuse the language of band names with language of autonomy and social engagement, nor communicate through a commodified discourse incapable of defending vital institutions as a public good. (p. 94)
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"experience exemplifies more fully than any other kind of experience what experience itself is in its very movement and structure" (p. 281). An experience is viewed as a total encounter with external phenomena, which runs a complete course from beginning to end and is totally integrated into consciousness as an entity distinct from other experiences. The artistic experience, Dewey argued, contributes to people's capacity for "critical judgment," and it does this through an "expansion of experience" (Dewey, 1934, pp. 324-325). Dewey called this the "moral function" of art: "to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive" (p. 325). This moral function of the artist involves a "refusal to acknowledge the boundaries set by convention" (p. 189).
Thus, critical judgment is necessary to imagining possibilities—democratic possibilities— as response to the political conventions and dominant ideologies of the moment, such as the boundaries set be standardized curriculum or high-stakes testing, boundaries that constrain students into current realities and determined futures. Dewey (1934) also argued that "one of the functions of art is precisely to sap the moralist timidity that causes the mind to shy away from some materials and refuse to admit them into the clear and purifying light of perceptive consciousness" (p. 189). For the teacher, aesthetic experiences guided by criticism serve the function of illuminating materials and experiences that otherwise work in the background to control lives and limit possibilities.
Aesthetic criticism, for teacher educators as well as teachers in the public school classroom, is necessary to understanding the moral function of teaching and therein the moral responsibility of the teacher. Recognizing boundaries set by political conventions and explore how to give voice to the problems such boundaries create for students is the moral work of the teacher. Aesthetic criticism—the artistic-political voice of an aesthetic imperative—guides the teacher as s/he works to help students imagine a different future against the backdrop of current dominant realities. The importance of aesthetic criticism is in seeing the gaps between what is and what can be, to "name the unnameable" (Marcuse, 1978, p. 132).
Aesthetic Form
The importance of form in learning to teach, and perhaps more importantly in the practice of teaching students in the classroom, lies in understanding the role form plays. With the press of standards for curriculum and therefore defining what stands as knowledge, teachers all too often find that form is determined by the standards rather than emerging from the processes of learning—form precedes function rather than form following function. The imaginative, creative dimension of learning is rendered sterile and pedagogy becomes defined by accountability rather as a function of learning. Aesthetic form lends to understanding intrinsic qualities to which one attends when is attending aesthetically. One may enumerate, as Reimer (1992) explains, the characteristics means by which each form art achieves the interrelations constituting its forms. Teaching, like each art, has a comparable list of elements by which it establishes its forms. In describing aesthetic form in teaching, the qualities one " . . . has an experience "of" when perceiving aesthetically, the terms include the relational dynamics they capture and display but refer to the means by which they are so captured and displayed" (Reimer, 1992, p. 30).4
Dewey (1934) conceived of knowledge as a doing rather than a seeing, and so he rejected all notions of a spectator theory of knowledge. This idea carries over even more emphatically to the problem of aesthetic perception. The importance of aesthetics takes on new meaning when we consider aesthetic form as a crucial aspect of students being able to see beyond the realities
4 Reimer is instructive in understanding aesthetic form:
The qualities that constitute the interrelationships may be described at several levels. One may speak of repetitions, contrasts, variations, developments, tensions, resolutions, unities, disjunctions, expectations, deviations, uncertainties, symmetries, distortions, energies, and so forth. Such terms call attention to the dynamic nature of aesthetic form - the sense it gives that forces are at work (across the broadest range from tremendous activation to stillness and quietude) - and to their effects on us when we internalize them. (1992, pp. 29-30).
of the moment, beyond what constrains them in a world not of their making. Aesthetics is what permits human beings to emerge from the purely physical world, emerge from the experienced realities structured by an ideological dominating perspectives that predetermine the world without involvement of those impacted. Marcuse (1978) explains aesthetic form "as the result of the tran s-formation of a given content (actual or historical, personal or social fact) into a self-contained whole: a poem, play, novel, etc." (p. 8). The teacher who embodies an aesthetic imperative in her teaching enables students to engage in an aesthetic transformation
achieved through a reshaping of language, perception, and understanding so that they reveal the essence of reality in its appearance: the repressed potentialities of man and nature. . . . The critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resides in the aesthetic form. A work of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content (i.e., the "correct" representation of social conditions), nor by its "pure" form, but by the content having become form. (Marcuse, 1978, p. 8)
Teaching that embodies aesthetic form is concerned with aesthetically interrogating the world and the immediate affects of the world. Aesthetic form is emergent, and is concerned with knowing situated within an aesthetic experience such that it is always open to something other and different.
Form is created as students engage with the teacher as a struggle for liberation from the world as it is, and transformation of the world as it can become. It is beyond the repetitive and the uniform that an aesthetic experience plays its transformative role and leads to an essential openness to imaginative possibilities for different realities, different futures. Aesthetics both transforms content form and mediates the alienation individuals' experience from their functional existence and performance in society.
Aesthetic Cognition
There is growing recognition that traditional conceptions of cognition, equating it with verbal and symbolic conceptualization, are inadequate to describe or explain the varieties of modes in which human knowing occurs and by which human knowing may be represented (see Bergeron & Lopes, 2012p Epstein, 2004; Reimer, 1986; Shimamura & Palmer, 2012). Human knowing, the aesthetic dimension of human experience as aesthetic cognition, is seen as a distinctive cognitive domain requiring to be understood and valued on its own terms and taught in ways relevant to those terms.5
Dewey conceived of knowledge as a doing rather than a seeing, and so he rejected all notions of a spectator theory of knowledge. This idea carries over even more emphatically to the problem of aesthetic perception. To him, any solutions of the question that resides in "contemplation" or the achievement of a certain "psychical distance" represented "a thoroughly anemic conception of art" (Dewey, 1934, p. 253) in which the viewer stands in the impossible position of being separated from his environment. Dewey's assumption that life was "activity" compelled him to view the problem of aesthetic perception as a sensuous, appetitive, and active process in which contemplation was only a small factor.
Dewey's (1934) aesthetics transcend traditional conceptions of cognition, recognizing that equating cognition with verbal and symbolic conceptualization are inadequate to describe or explain the varieties of modes in which human knowing occurs and by which human knowing may be represented. Aesthetic cognition, Reimer (1992) explains, is "the 'knowing a' required in aes-
5 Aesthetic cognition as it relates to teacher preparation and practice is concerned with "within-ness" of intrinsically related events, with "within-ness" of relationships between teacher and students. Reimer is instructive here in understanding aesthetic cognition:
. . . the scope, detail, perspicacity, and ingenuity of one's perceptual structuring of formal qualities are essential determinants of what one knows within an aesthetic interaction. Such knowing, I suggest, is an essential component of aesthetic cognition, and is an essential component of aesthetic intelligence construed as a capacity to gain such cognition. (1992, p. 31).
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thetic engagements must transcend, through form, the designations, including objects and emotions, which may be present in particular works" (p. 38). Aesthetic cognition transcends any content—including emotional content—through form. Aesthetic experience in general, and in particular aesthetic cognition, is " marked by a greater inclusiveness of all psychological factors than occurs in ordinary experiences, not by reduction of them to a single response" (Dewey, 1934, p. 259).
Reimer (1992) is instructive here, noting that "expressive form allows one to be infl u-enced by but to pass through designations of whatever sort, including designated emotion categories, and reach their aesthetic conclusions in cognitions form has substantiated" (p. 38, italics in original).
Aesthetic cognition, in the context of Dewey's aesthetics, understands that knowing within an aesthetic experience is always open to something other and different. It is beyond the repetitive and the uniform that an aesthetic experience plays its transformative role and leads to an essential openness to "moreness" and "newness" of experiences. Aesthetics, for Dewey (1934) is central to all aspects of education. It defines the nature of relationships and the space within which teaching and learning are situated. A poetics for teacher education necessarily considers the aesthetics of space in relation to learning.
Aesthetic Space
John Dewey (1958), in his Experience and Nature, notes that "a large part of the goods of life are matters of richness and freedom of meanings," poetic and moral meanings, "rather than of truth; a large part of our life is carried on in a realm of meanings to which truth and falsity as such are irrelevant" (Dewey, 1958, p. 411). Teacher education, and teaching practice as spatial practice, has a significant poetic dimension with respect the search for personal meaning and the development of authentic understanding.6 Such a search is conjoint activity involving the teacher and "Others" (students, peers, cultural workers, parents, etc.), bound by practice and purpose in the shared context of the school. This poetic dimension is significant in terms of the teacher's own engagement and the "Other's" role as essentially receptive-responsive both towards the "Other" and the living traditions in which things receive their significant. The poetic provides an important orientation, not just with respect to how teacher educators interact with Others, but also with respect to the larger institutional context in which this interaction is situated.
The teacher - Other relationship is, in significant part, a response to many other factors, not least the current institutional and political climate of education. It is fundamentally affected by what are perceived to be the central aims and priorities within education, the approaches to pedagogy - critical, democratic, aesthetic, culturally responsive - which are seen as best serving these objectives and serving the needs of children, as well as by the individual personalities of those involved in the microcosms of particular teaching environments. In this sense, then, the relationship is highly susceptible to external influence.
The 'poetics' of space perspective "refutes any conception of the teacher as some relatively fixed 'entity' whose ideal properties can be prescribed by external agencies" (Bonnett, 1996, pp. 37-38).7 This perspective of the teacher requires social practices that instruct the basic moral principle of respect for persons. Within the space of the school and classroom, the teacher is con-
6 Teacher preparation and teaching practice as spatial practice must consider critically, the pragmatic consequences of discourse and practice. This is important when we reflectively consider that a place may be understood as a configuration of positions. The practiced nature of place connotes a sense of fixedness that often works in conflicting ways for different individuals and groups (see Lefebvre, 1991).
7 The success of a 'poetics' of space perspective is not simply a case of achieving the specific abstractions of the representations of space, or the strict prescriptions developed from these in conjunction with the accepted spatial practices. Rather, as Dewey (1916, 1927) argued, it is an ongoing process of mutually informed development, where for example the spaces of representation, the lived experience, continually refers to the representations of space and spatial practices.
cerned with how to enable Others to act out of their own (i.e., authentic) understanding of the issues that concern them and/or make practice problematic (Bonnett, 1996)
Thus, the teacher must attempt to listen to the social spaces in which the Other, however inchoately, is attempting to operate, to participate, to learn, to practice. The high degree of reciprocity involved here suggests a triadic relationship between teacher, Other and what is at issue, which is essentially poetic in character, poetic in the sense that it celebrates engagement that is open to the voices of Others within social space, rather than a preoccupation with falsity and truth, or imposing a pre-formed structure on otherwise unintelligible 'data', or with seeking detailed pre-specified outcomes and prescribed social practices (Bonnett, 1996; Dewey, 1934, 1958). Rather, it requires the teacher to challenge and provoke Others through questioning, suggesting, offering new perspectives, etc., but all in a way that is responsive to and respectful of her or his understanding of the Other's engagement.
What is central to the poetic is the sense in which no one initiates it, is wholly responsible for it, or able to control it. It is a matter of co-responsibility. The 'task' is the product of a set of constantly evolving mutual relationships; it is the expression of an interplay, one relationship with another. Indeed, what it is to be a teacher, an Other, in the conscious sense is a function of this interplay - it is a matter of responding freely and responsibly to that which is occurring within the interplay - and from, as it were, certain 'locations' or perspectives within it. Dewey (1916, p. 408) emphasized the "conscious deliberating and desiring" that identified the engaged teacher. As teacher, "the self is not something ready made but something in continuous formation through choice of action . . ." (Dewey, 1916, p. 408). The poetic perspective of spatial practice refutes an conception of the teacher "as some relatively fixed 'entity' whose ideal properties can be pr escribed by external agencies" (Bonnett, 1996, p. 38).
Democratic Possibilities and the Aesthetic Imperative
In Dewey's 1927 essay, The Public and Its Problems, perhaps the most salient statement is: the "prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist" (p. 166). Dewey's concern for the future of democratic publics is elaborated in Art as Experience (1934), where political aesthetics weaves the connections of meaningful work and civic experience. The basic problem formulated by Dewey is "that of recovering the continuity of aesthetic experience with normal processes of living" (p. 10), a problem exacer bated by the "chasm between ordinary and aesthetic experience" (p. 10). For Dewey, the disordering of experience too often results in a consequent loss of "the power to experience the common world in its fullness" (p. 133).
Our first studio for the development of an "aesthetic imperative" in teaching is our teacher education program - learning to teach as aesthetic experience. Importantly, and interconnected with learning to teach, the cultivation of a voice of "aesthetic criticism" begins in teacher preparation and carries forward into the classroom where the teacher practices—the public space of our collective classrooms. The development of an "aesthetic imperative" premised on fostering clas s-rooms as "democratic publics" rests on the valuing of "aesthetic criticism" in the development of wide-ranging, critical, engaged debate in a democratic society.
Aesthetic experiences provide the imaginative and cognitive contexts in which students may experience the world different from a world, as Maxine Greene (1986) characterizes: "the world we inhabit is palpably deficient: there are unwarranted inequities, shattered communities, unfulfilled lives" (p. 427). Such a world is reified by the absence of an aesthetic imperative in our schools and in our teacher preparation programs.
The importance of aesthetics in teaching lies in the ability of the teacher (and the teacher educator as well) to understand that that teaching is a constant symbol of what is possible, or not, in the student's experiences—be they normal, artistic, or imaginative. Teaching must incorporate
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the "voice of poetry" as a mediating affection on the voices of the practical and scientific (Oakeshott, 1962).
Poetics is the necessary grounding of aesthetics and an important element in any productive construal of the notion of the aesthetic. Robert Frost (1995/1947), writing of poetry in The Constant Symbol, is instructive in understanding the value of artistic voice when he explains that poetry is simply made of metaphor,
Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deeper and deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be judged for whether any original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost; be it in art, politics, school, church, business, love, or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career. Strongly spent is synonymous with kept. (p. 786)
Aesthetic experiences, like poetry, are a constant symbol of the possibilities, of children creating different the future they will take part in as citizens. When "strongly spent", the aesthetics of teaching invests in the development of students whose wills "pitch into commitments deeper and deeper" developing through aesthetic experiences an a ability to see beyond existing realities, to engage in imaginative possibilities.
Aesthetic experiences guided by aesthetic criticism give form to democratic possibilities through students struggling, along side teachers, with the conventions of an organized society. Poetics is the grounding the aesthetics of teaching and learning, and necessary to enlivening the critical voice of aesthetic criticism. Poetics speaks to differences, to possibilities, to actualization of aesthetics in teaching—of the aesthetic imperative and democratic possibilities.
Aesthetic experiences work to offset the dominant voices of the political and the scientific, to work toward the well-regulated political state. Experiences instructed by aesthetic criticism enable the student and the teacher to find a voice of aesthetic criticism that challenges the cultures of schools. Teachers who embody an aesthetic imperative in teaching employ an aesthetic criticism to create new forms from the languages, materials and contents of cultures and politics. Giroux (1992) acknowledges the importance of a "new language of imagination" (Giroux, 1992, p. 248). It is a language of
. . . democratic possibilities that rejects the enactment of cultural difference structured in hierarchy and dominance; it is a language that rejects cultural, social, and spatial borders as shorelines of violence and terrorism. In opposition to this view, the concepts of democracy, border borderlands, and difference must be rewritten so that diverse identities and cultures can intersect as sites of creative cultural production, multiple resources, and experimentation for expanding those human capacities and social forms necessary for a radical democracy to emerge in this country. (Giroux, 1992, p. 248)
Identity, Dewey (1934) argued, is formed through meaningful interactions by individuals with their social world, at the same time that these individuals transform their world. The aesthetic imperative, then, as we work within teacher education programs and school classrooms where teaching practice comes alive, works to liberate the mind. This imperative enables the mind to move beyond the mind guided by the imaginative possibilities of a democracy different than currently exists from many children, to mediate the crossing of borders, and to embrace differences as necessary content in the aesthetic experiences that, when guided by aesthetic criticism, gives aesthetic form to democratic possibilities. Therein, teaching is connected to democratic possibilities. Such possibilities are imperative for the future of American society and for the future of our children.
Final Reflections
Democratic possibilities exist in the aesthetic experiences we as educators can make possible, the imaginative moments through which we can enable our students to move beyond the realities of a world as it is experienced in the present. To move the mind beyond the mind. We must remember that as Wallace Stevens explains, "Reality is life and life is society and the imagi-
nation and reality; that is to say, the imagination and society are inseparable" (1951, p. 28). A democratic possibility, like an aesthetic experience, has its own rhythm, tone, resonance, and drama. To follow Dewey's (1934) notion of an aesthetic experience, in its inception, development, and fulfillment, an aesthetic way of teaching concerned with democratic possibilities needs to start with the imagination, evolve with an absorbed engagement with the world, and reach consummation in transformative moments. Democratic possibilities become reality when reality is transformed by the liberation of the mind.
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