For example, Jung described the concept of active imagination, where the verbal free association of ideas, images, and beliefs could be expressed in visualizations, written and spoken narratives, drawn and painted images. Dewey’s observations were reflected in contemporary and subsequent ideas about how people learn. Therefore, art, as symbolic of lived and potential experience continues to change with every interaction to offer multiple, contextual readings and perspectives. The artist transfers values from one field of experience to another, attaches them to the objects of everyday life and by imaginative insight make these objects meaningful. Dewey suggested the artist is able to “actively internalize, then externalize in their art, landscapes, events, relationships and ideas,” thus facilitating new insights and possibilities (quoted in Goldblatt, 2006, p. The value of attending to the aesthetic dimension of pedagogy has been argued by Dewey (1934), suggesting that learning occurs through experience and that aesthetic encounters deepen reflection and integrate theory with practice. The arts, including sound/music, movement/dance, drama/theatre, visual, literary, and media arts, offer teachers and students multiple forms of expression and facilitate skills in sensing, perceiving, observing, listening, thinking, problem-solving, and collaborating ( Clapp & Edwards, 2013). While the recent coronavirus pandemic has forced us to make a rapid adjustment to how we teach and practice in the creative arts therapies, our hope is that these strategies may be useful going forward as we contend with course design, instruction and practice in blended in-person and online environments. We conclude with practical suggestions on how aesthetic presence may be enhanced in course design and instruction in the creative arts. We then argue the relevance of aesthetic presence within a Community of Inquiry (COI) model of online learning design and pedagogy and connect this to values espoused with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, an inclusive approach to pedagogy that attends to the needs of different kinds of learners ( CAST, 2018). We begin with a synthesis of literature on the arts in education and online learning in the CATs. In this article, we introduce the concept of aesthetic presence and discuss its importance in the education of creative arts therapists (CATs) with specific attention to the online learning environment. This is particularly true in online learning environments where, given the absence of a physical encounter and the ubiquity of multimedia, attention to multisensory engagement would have particular relevance. It follows, then, that the arts should play a formative role in training. We seek to facilitate aesthetic distance, an encounter within a representational realm that enables both emotional arousal and cognitive reflection ( Landy, 1983). A primary contribution of creative arts therapists, as compared to verbal psychotherapists, is that we create an aesthetic framework, embedded in a socio-cultural context, from which to explore and examine experience as it arises between the client as artist, art-making, and a witness, in reference to the client’s capacities to witness themselves, a group’s capacity to witness each other, and the therapist’s capacity to bear witness to what unfolds. We need to advance our understanding of the role of the arts and aesthetics in the education of creative arts therapists in person and online.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |