Flourishing with Shared Vitality: Education based on Aesthetic Experience, with Performance for Meaning

Abstract

In this paper, I set an aspect of what it is to live a flourishing life against the backdrop of neo liberal trends that continue to influence educational policy across the globe. The view I set out is in sharp contrast to any narrow assumption that education’s main task is the measurement of high performing individuals who will thus contribute to an economically viable society. Instead, I explore and argue for a conception of what constitutes a flourishing life that is embedded in a more pragmatist analysis of what education may be. The argument begins with developing the centrality of embodiment to aesthetic sensibility and goes on to suggest how collective understanding of this within a community could constitute a sense of performance and thus contribute to the educational aim of developing a full and flourishing life. The argument is that this way of seeing life could have implications for educational practice, the role of the teacher and could help to reconfigure how education is experienced by the young.

Integrating affection, emotion, and aesthetics into a General Theory of Learning

“…Thus, aesthetics has been elevated as a way of enhancing learning (Tordini, 2018), broadening thought processes (Gulla, 2018), and of fighting standardization and opening the learner to discovery (Greene, 1980). More recently, Doddington (2021) argued in favour of an educational practice based on aesthetics experiences as a way to "both promote human flourishing and foster better forms of cohesive and enriched social living" (p. 273).…”

Pedagogical Prospection of the Metaverse Through Curatorship. Case Study of the 1964 IBM Pavilion as an Example of Curatorial Pedagogy

“…As a pedagogical mediation, art curating offers experiential learning settings that are difficult to design and program in formal educational contexts. Considering art as experience [26], curators are providing the audience with new forms to understand the world through the sensory embodiment of existing reality [27][28][29]. Furthermore, within the framework of Future Studies, art design and interpretation hold pedagogical value as foreshadowing into the future by means of creativity and imagination [30].…”

Pedagogical prospection of the metaverse through curatorship. Case study of the 1964 IBM pavilion as an example of curatorial pedagogy

“…As a pedagogical mediation, art curating offers experiential learning settings that are difficult to design and program in formal educational contexts. Considering art as experience [ 26 ], curators are providing the audience with new forms to understand the world through the sensory embodiment of existing reality [ [27] , [28] , [29] ]. Furthermore, within the framework of Future Studies, art design and interpretation hold pedagogical value as foreshadowing into the future by means of creativity and imagination [ 30 ].…”