In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionLori A. Custodero and Anna NeumannIn this symposium, three scholars present the genesis, meaning, and artfulness of creative work and its realization as aesthetic experience within three educational fields. Lori A. Custodero, working out of music education, provides a perspective emanating from an aesthetic of childhood wonder and playfulness; David T. Hansen, writing out of philosophy of education, discusses how being fully present in the teaching moment leads to (...) meaningful experience; and Anna Neumann, who writes out of the field of higher education studies, represents scholars as engaged in intellectual pursuits, often framed aesthetically, and as struggling to hold on to precious time for creation. Aware of the inherent tensions in learning environments from child care centers to graduate schools, we address ways in which our research has revealed people's sustained pursuit of imagined possibilities, oftentimes amidst perceived impediments.Creative work involves imagining possibilities whereby individuals, alone and together, pose personally relevant questions and pursue fluent pathways of inquiry within the shared meanings of cultural context. At its finest, such work is artful, simultaneously responding to and emanating from immediate circumstance and past experience. It is malleable and vulnerable and compelling, fusing familiar images and surprising perceptions into new "equilibria... stable, even though moving" whereby "changes interlock and sustain one another."1 As scholars and teachers committed to learning, we strive to create and discern meaning between established understandings and emerging ideas and images. As we dance between reception and action, between insight and "onsight,"2 fully attentive to the perceived potentials in our work, we move toward synchrony, experiencing the aesthetic. The realizations that arise from experiences such as these — new or newly reconfigured words, sounds, images, movement, and ideas — express new balances of sense and feeling and, sometimes, beauty. Whether in the shared, artfully expressive vocalizations between the newborn infant and mother or in the scientist's finessing patience with elegant mathematical imagery, creative work invites a drawing together of what we know and what we struggle to know. Over time, the interplay of this work and its realization, [End Page 33] what Dewey refers to as "movement and culmination,"3 creates a momentum that serves to define lives as aesthetic.We have created this symposium as a space for considering the meanings of the aesthetic in lives — from its earliest instantiations in the experiences of infants and young children, to its developed expression in the professional (in this case, intellectual) efforts of adults pursuing scholarly careers, to its representation in teaching as intergenerational fusions of knowledge, learning, and lives. We see the aesthetic as both native and learned; as individually held and formed and felt, and as collectively created and voiced, the product of lives in intersection; as marking bounded moments in time (those instants of compelling "present-ness") and as spreading through years, well beyond bounded present-ness, perhaps as memory. Yet while striving to define the aesthetic in lives, we also strive to understand lives, individually and interactively, as lodgings for the aesthetic, as locations that give shape, form, and voice to beauty and insight, to creativity and learning. As we explore the lives in which the aesthetic finds its home, and within which it forms, we wonder about the extent to which the aesthetic may, in its turn, illuminate the strivings of those lives, including human desires to create, know, learn, understand, sense. We are then collectively concerned with the meanings of the aesthetic in lives and about the lives themselves as "moving spaces" within which the aesthetic can grow.We pursue this theme, centered on the power of the aesthetic to illuminate human lives, out of a realization that current understandings of what it means to be human — and especially what it means to learn and create — have been framed within the rubrics of the social sciences, certainly in productive ways. And yet we suggest that the artful, though powerful in its abilities to voice emotion and beauty, has not been employed as intensively as it might in efforts to understand what it means to create and learn as virtues of human existence, as perhaps the ultimate of human strivings. We hope that these symposium papers will help invigorate such... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Experience and Education:Themes and QuestionsDeborah Kerdeman"Being with" music. Attentive responsiveness in teaching. Scholarly learning as engagement with beauty. Three evocative images of aesthetic experience come to light in the essays by Custodero, Hansen, and Neumann. From the musical play of children conducting imaginary orchestras to the vocational aspirations of adults who gaze through telescopes or study paintings at Chicago's Art Institute, aesthetic experience spans a range of activities (...) and ages. No matter the setting or moment, aesthetic experience vitalizes our lives with meaning and joy. Why this is so and what difference this makes for education emerge as overarching concerns in this set of papers. Addressing these issues, the authors articulate a number of commonthemes and reach similar conclusions about the nature and value of aesthetic experience.I want to identify and analyze key ideas that run throughout these essays. Doing so deepens our appreciation of the authors' insights and underscores the importance of the project they undertake. I also want to examine three questions that the essays suggest but do not develop. Exploring these questions, I hope to further enrich our understanding of aesthetic experience and its place in education.First and foremost, aesthetic experience for all three authors integrates multiple ways of knowing and enables individuals to perceive connections that they might otherwise overlook. According to Custodero, aesthetic experience harmonizes imagination, physicality, and "thinking-in-action." [End Page 88] Thinking-in-action, Custodero says, while "critical and consequential," is nonverbal and nonjudgmental — unifying rather than analytic. Synthesizing bodily movement, imagination, and thought, aesthetic experience reveals "surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena." The theme of integration is echoed in Neumann's description of scholarly learning as aesthetic experience. Scholarly learning does not shun feeling or lived experience, Neumann writes. This way of knowing instead is "deeply emotional and personal." Insight fuses with emotion, enabling scholars to "feel the whole picture," as David the astronomer puts it in his interview with Neumann. For Hansen, aesthetic experience connotes heightened perception, a way of being that attends to nuances of gesture that would otherwise remain invisible. "The aesthetic highlights aspects of wonder and of beauty that emerge, spontaneously and unrehearsed," Hansen explains. A form of creativity, aesthetic perception combines with moral and intellectual understanding to fully embrace "the living dynamic gestalt" of teaching and learning.Aesthetic experience thus integrates mind, body, and emotion. Hansen links aesthetic experience to moral judgment as well. Integrating various ways of knowing, aesthetic experience enables individuals to perceive and understand relationships that pulse throughout the social and natural world. Such understanding is pleasurable, the authors agree.Aesthetic experience not only is integrative. It also is interactive. Custodero's musicians interact with instruments, musical scores, and other individuals. Neumann's scholars interact with ideas and scholarly materials. Hansen's preservice teachers interact with works of art, subject matter, students, and one another. Interacting with people and things, individuals become absorbed in what they are doing. "Being with" music is howCustodero puts it. Carmen, the professor of music in Neumann's essay, says that playing music well "is like a complete focus of oneness."Being absorbed in aesthetic interaction does not discount or dissolve the ability to make decisions or direct action. Aesthetic experience rather presumes and promotes "aesthetic agency," to borrow a phrase from Custodero. "To 'be in the moment,'" Custodero writes, "is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital." Hansen's description of aesthetic perception combines attentiveness and responsiveness in a "dynamic combination of patience, listening, and initiative." Neumann states that scholarly learning is an experience of "deep engrossment." Such engrossment does not extinguish the self, however. In the words of David the astronomer, feeling "the whole picture... is a combination of both what you see, sort of an instinctive or primal thing, and also your knowledge of what, you know, you put together." [End Page 89]The interactive nature of aesthetic experience thus signifies a kind of "agency-in-situ." Aesthetic experience is shaped or directed by the contribution and initiative of individuals. But individuals cannot act in advance of experience or know what to do, unless they are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Glimpse Beauty and Awaken Meaning:Scholarly Learning as Aesthetic ExperienceAnna NeumannIntroductionIn this article, I portray university professors' scholarly learning as a location for aesthetic experience. To do so, I explore the intellectual and creative narratives of individuals who, with tenure newly in hand, position themselves to engage with beauty and to pursue its meanings, expressed distinctively through the subjects, creations, and questions of scholarly disciplines and professional fields. In (...) interviews, scholars — professors with tenure in major research universities — described the sparks of beauty they experience in their scholarly work. For many, such moments of beauty, and often of deep engrossment, had recurred through life. Yet these were truly "moments": brief, bounded, hard to evoke, and by no means continuous, assured, or predictable. They were hard won. Many of the professors I interviewed referred to persistent struggles to craft scholarly agendas, communities, collaborations, and work lives that might invite the aesthetic glimmer, however brief. Many drew for insight and inspiration on childhood memories of beauty to guide their intellectual and creative pursuits in adulthood. They hitched present-day desires for moments of passionate thought to vivid memories — what they saw and felt in their earliest, often out-of-school encounters with an aesthetic they would pursue through their lives. Even now, in tenured university professorships, they relied on these deeply imprinted images to light their intellectual ways.1I also claim that scholars may experience aesthetic moments as deeply emotional and personal. This is not something I inferred; this is something the professors I interviewed said to me — directly, repeatedly, with emotion. [End Page 68] Yet I am something of an organizational realist, and the social sciences strand of my conscience impels me to pepper these scholars' accounts of recurrent beauty in their lives with less than beauteous recognition of a hard academic fact: that within the normative structure of academe, the personal (and emotional) meanings infusing professors' scholarly learning get short shrift. Public academic talk about the personal meanings of one's work, or the emotional content of study, is largely taboo. The press for institutional survival, social legitimacy, and financial and political gain typically call for presentations of scholarship as objective and outwardly directed, negating the personal origins of research in researchers' lives.2 Scholarly learning as an aesthetic awareness — as moments of fused insight and emotion, as dazzling sensations of coming to know, as frustration over ideas that unravel or that will not gel — is often lost in translation between the personal life from which it derives and the modern profession, career, and organization within which it is housed and enacted.I worry that this lost awareness of scholarly learning, occurring in large scale, forces questions about its social worth. Yet to persist, scholarly learning requires substantial social legitimation, appreciation, and support. I suggest further that this state of affairs calls for response: that to garner societal understanding for and support of scholarly learning as a setting for pursuits of beauty and as the communal mission of higher education, we must learn to talk out loud, and in educative ways, about it. However, we, as scholars and learners ourselves, must understand, first, what it is that we are defending and then represent its worth to publics who may learn to care about it. We must first define among ourselves what scholarly learning means, what it takes to engage it, and what it entails — cognitively, professionally, aesthetically, and emotionally. My aim in this paper is to advance this collegial conversation by addressing its possibly most contentious element: its beauty, its emotion, its personal meanings in scholars' lives.3Roots of the StudyGiven that we have no well-honed public-professional vocabulary for speaking coherently about professors' scholarly learning and aesthetic experience, I devote this article to defining and exploring these terms. In earlier writing on this topic, I used the psychology of peak experience, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to frame professors' representations of passionate thought in scholarship.4 In this article, I seek to advance the concept of passionate thought as scholarly experience by exploring its aesthetic contents, namely its concerns with beauty. I begin by presenting the roots of the exploration — in... (shrink)