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Document Type

Book Review

Abstract

In Variations on a Blue Guitar, a collection of lectures to teachers presented at Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education, philosopher of education Maxine Greene addresses classroom teachers’ practice, their questions, and their thinking about teaching and learning for aesthetic education. This text is a philosophical call to bring the arts into the classroom, deepening the experiences and animating a sense of self that connects a particular kind of engagement. Greene argues that “Aesthetic education …is an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is there to be noticed (Greene, 2001, p. 6; emphasis mine). Effective teachers aim to foster awareness of whatever subject taught the seed of the acorn, the stem of a sentence, the struggle of a historical figure, the symmetry of an equation. For Greene, the role of art in our lives as well as in our classrooms and society is to awaken our imagination in order to see in new ways the world around us, and thus, see in new ways what it means to live in the world.

Genre/Form

articles

Subjects - Topical (LCSH)

Art teachers--Training of--New York (State)--New York; Aesthetics--Study and teaching--New York (State)--New York; Arts--Study and teaching--New York (State)--New York; Artists as teachers--New York (State)--New York

Subjects - Names (LCNAF)

Green, Maxine

Geographic Coverage

New York (State)--New York

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

Type

Text

Included in

Education Commons

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