Abstract
Beginning with a desire to develop an aesthetic model for curriculum and teaching in the arts, the author was challenged by an awakening of her moral concerns within arts education. First considering multiple sources who found a connection between morality and art or the aesthetic dimension, she finds limitations to each of their arguments, realizing further exploration of both the moral dimension and the aesthetic dimension was called for. The work of Martin Buber, Carol Gilligan, and James Macdonald is used to illuminate the significance of relationship as central to understanding the moral dimension. In probing the significance of relationship to the aesthetic dimension, the author identifies three particular views of relationship in art, each with quite different implications when applied to curriculum. Finding moral limitations to the first two (the objectivist approach emphasizing relationships within the work of art, and a second emphasizing relationship between the perceiver and the art work), the author proposes a third. An emphasis on the relationship between the perceiver and the larger world, with the aesthetic object as the lens through which we see/make sense of the reality of being a person-in-the-world, is suggested as the only kind of aesthetic model which sufficiently responds to moral concerns in curriculum.
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Stinson, S.W. (2016). Curriculum and the Morality of Aesthetics (1985). In: Embodied Curriculum Theory and Research in Arts Education. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20786-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20786-5_2
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