In the experience of building towards communism in our country we have witnessed the rising role and specific weight of art and aesthetic culture in the general system of developing a communist morale in Soviet people. A number of factors requires emphasis here:First, it is perfectly clear that, under the conditions of the building of communism, becoming a professional cannot mean confining oneself to education in one's field but presumes that the individual acquire a high general level of culture, (...) that he be capable of rapidly mastering knowledge and skills in related occupations, and that he have the ability to think and behave in a nonstereotyped fashion. (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)

The article reveals the features of the formation and functioning of aesthetic research in such two areas of Marxism as Soviet and Chinese. The study identified three key stages in the development of aesthetics in Soviet Marxism – the pre-war (the 1920s and 1930s), late Stalinism and the Khrushchev thaw, and the late period (1970-1980s). It should be noted that in the context of Soviet Marxism, the key tasks were that aesthetics becomes influential and in-demand science, included (...) in the program of "technical progress" and "education of the builder of communism", important ideological, aesthetic, and applied field of philosophy. Therefore, in addition to the fact that purely ideological works were developed within the framework of aesthetic discourse, aesthetics itself in Soviet Marxism was able to develop thanks to contacts with semiotics, psychology, anthropology, cultural history, and sociology. Relying on a selective stream of translations of Western philosophies of art, Soviet aesthetics is beginning to resonate with global trends, which is facilitated by the unspoken consensus of the idea of aesthetics as a part of philosophical and humanitarian knowledge that has its own autonomy. Proved that in China culture and the cultural revolution are inextricably linked with the Marxist projects of critiquing capitalist modernity and building alternative modernity. Aesthetics and culture also were at the center of attention in Chinese Marxist circles. In this respect, the diverse practices and designs of Chinese Marxism are similar to those of Western Marxism or an equally distinct variety of Euro-American Marxist intellectual enterprises. Aesthetic Marxism in China had a dual mission – to criticize the internal contradictions of revolutionary hegemony and to offer a constructive vision of culture in a post-revolutionary society. This is the value of Chinese aesthetic Marxism, the implications of which go beyond China proper in the world of global cultural criticism. Moreover, being non-Western, Chinese aesthetic Marxism deliberately questioned the inherent Eurocentrism of Marxism. If this Eurocentrism is to be challenged and problematized, the questions posed by Chinese aesthetic Marxists cannot be ignored. (shrink)

This study argues that Dōgen’s “Leaving Home Life” fascicle is not simply about leaving home/lay life to become a practicing monk. At first glance, the fascicle might not appear philosophically significant. To help bring the themes of that work into greater focus, I juxtapose Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō and John Dewey’s later works on aesthetic experience and education. Both the teachings of Dōgen and the later Deweyan works on aesthetic experience are similar in the sense that both describe nature as a (...) radically plural and interdependent world without recourse to an underlying substance ontology or reality antecedent to and outside of experience. Both Dōgen and Dewey also claim that the experience of nature as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Merging Traditional Technique Vocabularies with Democratic Teaching Perspectives in Dance EducationA Consideration of Aesthetic Values and Their Sociopolitical ContextsBecky Dyer (bio)IntroductionConventional aesthetic values in dance traditionally have been wed to long-established authoritarian teaching approaches in American professional dance companies and university dance programs. Developed over time from a mixture of enduring cultural tastes, aesthetic ideals, and historical influences, aesthetic values play a significant role in teaching (...) and learning processes in the classroom, although the impact of their presence on learning is often indiscernible or paid little attention. As dance educators in higher education make efforts to move toward more democratic teaching perspectives, they often find themselves philosophically lodged between established approaches to teaching traditional, codified vocabularies and aesthetics and more contemporary, student-centered, and democratically oriented perspectives to teaching and learning dance. Attention to the sociopolitical contexts of dance training gives practitioners opportunities to consider aesthetic values of dance from differing cultural vantage points and the perspectives by which these values are taught and learned.Each learning circumstance in dance is a complex weaving of personal and social experience involving individuals, communities, movers, and viewers. Movement aesthetic values emerge from personal and communal morals and ideals as well as social mores of the body, which create contextual lenses for experiencing, interpreting, and making meaning of movement vocabularies created and perpetuated in dance communities. It is important that teachers who seek to incorporate more democratically oriented, student-centered teaching perspectives become mindful of ways social values and perceptual/contextual frameworks impact personal [End Page 108] and communal practices in dance. Approaches to learning technique that consider sociocultural factors of dance movement aesthetics—wherein teachers and learners are led to recognize and reflect upon personal, social, and aesthetic values embodied in movement and embedded in movement vocabularies—can lead teachers and learners to better understand the significance of learning in dance as it relates to personal and social worlds beyond the classroom.This article will suggest how movement analysis from a socially contextualized perspective can inform understanding about the significance of sociopolitical contexts and aesthetic values in Western dance training. Perspectives of movement analysis will provide groundwork for discussing perceivable ways to address discrepancies between democratic and authoritarian teaching viewpoints and to challenge the prominent linking of conventional aesthetic values and vocabularies, as well as codified techniques, to authoritarian practices. The discussion will address relationships between pedagogical perspectives and ideologies held by teachers concerning the place and worth of conventional aesthetic values and the nature of aesthetic experiences in the dance technique classroom, and the potential understandings and meanings their students construct.Foundations of Movement Analysis: The Ideas and Practices of Rudolf LabanRecognizing embedded personal and social aesthetic values in movement is an important initial stage in developing more critically reflective practices that promote meaning, agency, and student interest in learning. The task is challenging because the only values accessibly evident to the bystander, and often the mover, are visual ones. Yet, as Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) suggested, intangible values also inspire movement. Laban created a theoretical framework—referred to as Laban Movement Analysis—for movement exploration, description, and analysis to consider both noticeably apparent and less-tangible values of movement by investigating movement phenomena and factors that generate them.1 The praxis-oriented system involves reflecting on movement observations, considering emotional and mental facets of movement, and taking into account experiential bodily perspectives of the mover.2Although one of Laban's fundamental purposes for developing a descriptive vocabulary for movement was to facilitate the mastery of dance technique,3 his teaching emphasized the "harmonious expressiveness of the whole individual," as he aimed to facilitate dancers' ability to understand and use their bodies in order to discover individual ways of expressing themselves and communicating.4 Laban's attitudes toward training were in sharp contrast to approaches of the day, yet interestingly, they were not [End Page 109] opposed to them. For example, common dance gestures and postures were expanded into free exploration and studied from diverse points of view rather than a narrow range of perspectives, aesthetic values, and movement qualities.5Laban's theory of "Effort," which he linked to emotions as well as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thinking Musically, and: Teaching Music GloballyJames AckmanBonnie C. Wade, Thinking Musically ( Oxford University Press: New York, 2004)and Patricia Shehan Campbell, Teaching Music Globally ( Oxford University Press: New York, 2004).Thinking Musically and Teaching Music Globally, the first two volumes in The Global Music Series, for which Wade and Shehan are general editors, offer concisely stated themes that permeate their texts and the authors' extensive (...) use of cross-referencing provides music educators at all levels the resources to achieve their educational and musical goals.Thinking Musically begins with Bonnie Wade's statement of the purposes of the book, which are to offer "a basis for the contrast and comparison of diverse 'musics,'" "provide a set of unifying topics that recur in multiple case studies," and "frame and complement a series of cases studies in The Global Music Series."1 Wade states unequivocally that Thinking Musically is ultimately a study of musical practices and ideas from around the world and that at its core, Thinking Musically "is a teaching book."2 A unifying theme throughout the volume is the view of how people constantly make music meaningful in their lives, including how music functions within a social group or particular society.3Thinking Musically includes a fifty-nine track CD containing musical examples that are designed for inclusion in the lessons and projects outlined in the [End Page 81] series. These provide aural illustrations of the topics discussed in each chapter. Activities include musical examples chosen by students which relate to the topic. The first chapter, "Thinking About Music," is based upon the concept of furthering students' awareness of musics beyond their everyday comfort level. Wade states that music is a process and not simply a method of organized sounds or compositions,4 and discusses music in terms of sound, values, and aesthetics.A striking aspect of this chapter is Wade's in-depth discussion of the contextual meaning of music within various cultures. Using such exotic examples as Central Javanese gamelan and a Navajo work song,5 she explores the rich variety of aural experiences available to students. The suggested activities exhibit Wade's understanding of educational philosophy and her awareness of what educators require in structuring appropriate musical experiences for their students.In Chapter 2, "Thinking About Instruments," Wade examines the roles of musical within a particular society and the topic of cultural diffusion.6 A succession of examples of instruments and musicians emphasizes her point that music has historically been interwoven with culture and society. Suggested activities include identifying extra musical links with instruments7 as a method of increasing students' awareness of music in daily life events, "the nature of the musical roles (of) musicians," and the meaning of musical terms (for example, soloist, accompanist) within the context of culture. Examples are drawn from the familiar, such as "New Orleans front-line," and the exotic, a North Indian singer.8Chapters 3–5 ("Thinking About Time," "Thinking About Pitch," and "Thinking About Structure") are devoted to the basic elements of music. Musical time is explored through its origins and function within specific cultures. Again, Wade uses an assortment of musical examples drawn from throughout the world in order to emphasize her points.Both the strongest and weakest aspects of the author's presentation style are on display in these three chapters. Wade has included an abundance of detailed suggested activities pertaining to various rhythmic concepts, such as Southeast Asian colotomic structure and Korean changdan, replete with detailed charts for presenting the material. Yet the amount of detail included borders on minutiae and the resulting format risks information overload for both teacher and student. A separate activities booklet might help reduce some of the clutter and also allow teachers to select more easily the concepts and activities they would like to use for a particular class session or unit.In chapter 6, "Thinking about Issues," Wade examines some arguably contentious topics that impact contemporary music education, including acculturation, gender, and "global versus local,"9 where her pithy assertions are eloquently presented. Student activities are designed to demonstrate the interconnectedness of musics among nations and communities as well as authenticity in their own cultures.10... (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)

By challenging the state and corporate prerogatives to distinguish between “good” and “bad” development, social movements by and in support of inhabitants of Rosia Montana (Transylvania) are subverting prevailing perceptions about Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)’s liberal path of development illustrating its injustice in several ways that will be detailed in this article under the heading “inhibitions of political economy” or Balkanism. The significance of the “Save Rosia Montana” movement for post-communism is that it invites post-communist subjects to reflect (...) and revise their perception about issues such as communism, capitalism and development and to raise questions of global significance about the fragile edifice of justice within the neo-liberal capitalist economy. However, r esistance to injustice (and implicitly affirmations of other senses of justice) is an ambiguous discursive practice through which Rosieni make sense as well as partake their sense of Rosia Montana. The movement brings about a public dispute which may be compared with a differend : (in Lyotard’s words), a conflict that cannot be confined to the rules of “cognitive phrases,” of truth and falsehood. This article argues that while post-communist events of “subjectification” are unstable and thus, are to be viewed aesthetically, this same ambiguous multiplication of political subjectivity may facilitate the creation of social spaces for imagining alternative possibilities of development. (shrink)

In comparative studies, Confucian teaching and learning have multiple meanings. On the one hand, they refer to contemporary educational practices and contexts in Asian countries and regions such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Comparative researchers contend that Confucian heritage Culture, a mixed and blended cultural tradition of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, has heavily influenced these countries and regions.1 As a result, their educational practices and contexts are different from those in Western countries.2 One (...) indication of this point is that, although teachers in Confucian teaching and learning environments conduct lectures, the learning tasks are... (shrink)

Enfolding Silence is a rare gem for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of epistemology and meaning-making through the arts in the context of historic communal injury. Author Brett Esaki invites his audience to consider how Japanese Americans have developed various art forms to cope with, resist, and transform traumatic experiences of racism, including the mass, unlawful internment of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. By examining an extended ethnographic case study, educators and students can reflect on (...) how a community teaches aesthetically across generations, as one generation traumatized by racism teaches what matters culturally, aesthetically, and spiritually to the next. Esaki is... (shrink)

Democracy has been a flawed hegemony since the fall of communism. Its flexibility, its commitment to equality of representation, and its recognition of the legitimacy of opposition politics are all positive features for political institutions. But democracy has many deficiencies: it is all too easily held hostage by powerful interests; it often fails to advance social justice; and it does not cope well with a number of features of the political landscape, such as political identities, boundary disputes, and environmental crises. (...) Although democracy is valuable it fits uneasily with other political values and is in many respects less than equal to the demands it confronts. In this volume prominent political theorists and social scientists present original discussions of such central issues. Democracy's Values deals with the nature and value of democracy, particularly the tensions between it and such goods as justice, equality, efficiency, and freedom. (shrink)

This book explores the writings of philosopher and educator John Dewey in order to develop an expansive vision of aesthetic education and everyday poetics of living. Robert Pirsig's best-selling book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, provides concrete examples of this compelling yet unconventional vision.