Thesis (M.F.A.)--Kent State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed March 31, 2010). Advisor: Linda Hoeptner Poling. Keywords: art education and nature; environmental art education; art; art education; outdoor art education; nature based art education. Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-118)

The research reported in this thesis explores children’s perceptions of beauty. It investigates how children reflect upon and articulate their perceptions of beauty and examines how these perceptions relate to philosophical thinking about aesthetic experience. For the past 100 years, beauty has been marginalised in art and education and it is widely regarded as a problematic notion in a range of social and cultural contexts. Art educators have often portrayed beauty as a peripheral concern, and those who have studied children’s responses to artworks have tended to characterise their references to beauty as evidence of passive appreciation and a relatively low level of aesthetic development. In recent years there has been growing evidence of a revival of interest in beauty as a theme for reflection; however, to my knowledge, this is the first study to specifically research children’s perceptions of beauty. The theoretical part of the study examined two fields of literature, in terms of (i) art educators’ strategies for engaging children with art and (ii) philosophical theories of aesthetic experience. These sources influenced the design of the empirical part of the study, which consisted of 18 group interviews with 51 children aged 9-11 in two schools, one in inner London and the other in a rural village 40 miles from the capital. Before the interviews children completed two tasks independently in which they found and photographed images they thought were beautiful. Therefore there were two kinds of research data: (i) the images children found and photographed and (ii) the interview transcripts. A content analysis approach informed the interpretation of the images, while a number of themes that emerged from the interview data were identified and discussed in the context of the literature. The research findings indicated that children have diverse perceptions of beauty and that they are interested in a range of visual properties and expressive qualities of images. Children in one school tended to find beauty in images that reflected relationships, while those in the other judged the subjective nature of such images to be problematic. Children in the rural area often photographed landscapes, flowers and animals, suggesting their direct connection with nature influences their perception of it as beautiful. Those in London also found beauty in the natural world but preferred stylised, digitally generated representations of nature designed to appeal to the viewer. During the interviews children were often highly motivated to articulate their responses to beauty, and many reflected thoughtfully on their own and others’ images. Evidence suggests that children experience beauty in a wide range of contexts and that they variously understand it as an intersubjectively valid, shareable experience or, alternatively, as an individual experience. Several talked about beauty in ways that related to notions well-rehearsed in aesthetic theory while others, though less able to conceive or articulate such ideas, were nonetheless receptive to them when they heard them expressed. Photography played an important part in the research, and the findings suggest the medium has the potential to play a far more prominent role in art education as a means of expression. When combined with group interviews, photography can also be a highly effective method of understanding children’s perspectives on their experiences, and the study offers a useful model for researchers and educators to develop further. The research makes several contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it demonstrates that children’s experiences of beauty are often valuable and meaningful to them. Secondly, it provides evidence that children are motivated to explain their ideas about beauty and to engage with the ideas of others. Thirdly, it challenges previous assumptions in terms of both children’s aesthetic development and aesthetic preferences by highlighting the diversity and complexity of children’s perceptions of beauty.

The immense value of the arts has long been recognized by diverse cultures and such recognition has mostly guaranteed their inclusion in educational and school curricula the world over. The arts are considered valuable for numerous reasons, but their inclusion depends on particular interpretations of their merits that may sometimes have failed to realise their full or real potential. Although some ways of valuing the arts date back to antiquity, debates about the value of arts certainly deserve no less consideration in the modern context. Plato was sceptical about the moral value of the arts and regarded them as of dubious educational significance. He thought the arts were more a matter of rhetoric than reason. However, taking a more positive view of the moral power of the arts, Aristotle defended both the arts and rhetoric as potentially contributory to personal formation and the development of moral virtue. At all events, if the arts are to remain educationally defensible, it is arguable that educational theorists and policy makers need to demonstrate their capacity for: (i) objective aesthetic judgement; and (ii) the communication of knowledge and/or truth. Both of these are contentious, as artistic and aesthetic value judgements have often been said to be subjective or personal. In this context, the distinction between judging something as good (which requires reasons) or simply liking it (which does not) is crucial. Here, establishing the objective rational character of the arts seems to be a precondition of demonstrating their potential for knowledge or truth. Arguably, however, there are different respects in which arts may be said to contribute to the development of understanding and appreciation in human agents of themselves, of their relationships with others and of the world, e.g.: (i) aesthetic (sensory) appreciation; (ii) development of imagination; (iii) understanding of aspects of human psychology; (iv) education of the emotions; (v) and moral understanding. In this essay, various philosophical defences of the ‘intrinsic’ (personally formative) educational value of the arts will be drawn from the literature of philosophy and education. Following discussions of ancient arguments for and against the arts, the thesis will discuss at some length defences of the educational value of the arts offered by the American great books tradition, British literary and cultural critics and more recent educational philosophers and theorists. In the final ‘conceptual’ chapter of the thesis, two contemporary works of cinema are discussed to reinforce the key arguments of the thesis. However, having explored the nature and potential of the arts and arts education from a philosophical perspective, this study then seeks to enquire into recent Scottish educational policy developments with reference to the role of arts in arts education and in education more generally through: (i) the exploration of policy documents and official guidelines; and (ii) the voices of interviewees and other research participants involved in Scottish policy making. The thesis will conclude from this enquiry that the educational value and significance of the arts is not adequately appreciated in contemporary Scottish (and perhaps other) educational policy and practice. The study concludes by advocating a return to Aristotle’s conception of the arts as contributory to phronesis (the practical wisdom of virtue), rather than techne (the technical knowledge of skill). Narrow specialisation in forms of training are liable to leave people uninitiated into the wisdom and moral power of the arts –benefits that should ideally be available to all. From the perspective of this thesis, only a broad educational approach that encompasses thorough arts education will result in well-rounded, emotionally intelligent and truly educated human beings.

Critical review of performance is today one of the most common professional and commercial forms of music written response. Despite the availability of representative material and its impact on musicians' careers, there has been little structured enquiry into the way music critics make sense of their experience of performances, and no studies have to date broached the key question of how music performance is reviewed by experts. Adopting an explorative, inductive approach and a novel combination of data reduction and thematic analysis techniques, this thesis presents a systematic investigation of a vast corpus of recorded performance critical reviews. First, reviews of Beethoven's piano sonata recordings (N = 845) published in the Gramophone (1923-2010) were collected and metadata and word-stem patterns were analysed (Chapters 3 and 4) to offer insights on repertoire, pianists and critics involved and to produce a representative selection (n = 100) of reviews suitable for subsequent thematic analyses. Inductive thematic analyses, including a key-word-in-context analysis on 'expression' (Chapter 5), were then used to identify performance features (primary and supervenient) and extra-performance elements critics discuss, as well as reasons they use to support their value judgements. This led to a novel descriptive model of critical review of recorded performance (Chapters 6, 7, and 8). The model captures four critical activities - evaluation, descriptive judgement, factual information and meta-criticism - and seven basic evaluation criteria on the aesthetic and achievement-related value of performance reliably used by critics, plus two recording-specific criteria: live-performance impact and collectability. Critical review emerges as a highly dense form of writing, rich in information and open to diverse analytical approaches. Insights gained throughout the thesis inform current discourses in philosophy of art and open new perspectives for empirical music research. They emphasise the importance of the comparative element in performance evaluation, the complexity and potentially misleading nature of the notion of 'expression' in the musical discourse, and the role of critics as filters of choice in the recording market. Foremost, they further our understanding of the nature of music performance criticism as a form of reasoned evaluation that is complex, contextual and listener specific.

Teaching about culture at the college level is always a challenge with regards to the heterogeneous reality of Spanish. The debatable status of the language within the United States is not always reflected in the language and literature departments of institutions of higher education. Moreover, standardization has been continuously favored in the context of Spanish teaching and learning. From this perspective, it is challenging for the students coming from the mainstream culture of the United States to approach the culture of everyday life in the Spanish speaking communities inside and outside the country. At the same time, literature has mostly been used a pedagogical tool to promote accuracy in the foreign language. However, in my study, I argue the use of literature as a fundamental teaching / learning tool to expose students to the different aspects of cultural learning. Literature becomes a window to understand the nuances of living in Spanish with a critical look. In this process, cultural learning becomes a dialogic process through which the learners of a foreign language and literature incorporate and readjust their values, perceptions, and practices in a redefined internally persuasive discourse. In this journey, the role of the teacher seems fundamental to connect and dialogize the first culture of the students and the foreign one that progressively gets incorporated as their own in a sort of new space.

This thesis investigates one of the key figures of Russian pianism in the twentieth century, Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus (1888 - 1964). Although Neuhaus is known, particularly in the West, as an important pedagogue of the Moscow Conservatory rather than a performing artist in his own right, this thesis seeks to address the tension between Neuhaus's identities as a pedagogue and his overshadowed conception of himself as a performer - thus presenting a fuller understanding of his specific attitude to the task of musical interpretation. The reader is introduced to aspects of Neuhaus's biography which became decisive factors in the formation of his key aesthetic, philosophical, pedagogical and performative beliefs. The diverse national influences in Neuhaus's upbringing - from his familial circumstances, European education and subsequent career in Russia - are investigated in order to help locate Neuhaus within the wider contexts of Russian and Central European culture at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, this introduction will highlight ways in which Neuhaus's national identity has been oversimplified in recent literature by both Russian and non-Russian authors. Whilst this thesis draws on a range of contemporaneous and recent international sources throughout its investigation, it presents a substantial amount of Russian-language material that has previously been unavailable in an English translation: this includes many writings and articles by Heinrich Neuhaus, his colleagues and the leading musicologists and critics of his time. The core of the thesis traces Neuhaus's personal philosophical approach to the act of performance and explores the impact it had on his interpretations of Beethoven and Chopin. This will show that despite aspiring to a modern, Urtext-centred approach and sensibility to the score, Neuhaus's Romantic subjectivity meant that he was unafraid of making assumptions and decisions which often misinterpreted or transformed the image of the composer to reflect his own artistic identity. Thus, the investigation of Heinrich Neuhaus as a performing artist, alongside his role as a pedagogue, presents a powerful model of interpretation as a creative process, from which performers today can learn.

This thesis investigates conditions from an aesthetic and ethical viewpoint under which an artistic expression such as dance can exist in the realm of general education. In the thesis dance and education are regarded as acts of transgression and change. Efforts are made to define spaces where the acts of dancing and education take place and to enquire whether dance and pedagogy can share such space gainfully. The focus of the study is on dance in its own right, as an artistic mode of knowledge and expression, and as a manner of being with others. Dancing in teaching and curriculum learning activities is left outside the scope of this study. Research questions are asked about the essence and distinctive character of dance, its possibilities to bring about experiences of aesthetic and ethical nature and to provide a space in education for people to come together, dance and be with each other while finding knowledge and meaning in doing so. Questions are asked to the learner, i.e. the child, the pupil, the student, in this inquiry to two groups of students in teachers’ education, to describe their encounters with dance in a designed experiment. The accounts are analysed from an aesthetic and ethical angle and conclusions are drawn with implications for pedagogy and the educator. The theoretical framework to the study is informed by John Dewey’s and Maxine Greene’s thinking on arts and experience and on aesthetic education and literacy, in dialogue with Gert Biesta’s post-structural thinking on education and subjectivity, as well as the stances of Merce Cunningham and other creators in postmodern and contemporary dance. The empirical study consists of a field study at a teacher education program at Södertörn University. Data were collected, transcripts from two student group conversations concluding a series of instructional seminars in creative dance within a freestanding course on children’s existential questions. Methodologically, discourse analysis with Wetherell and Potter’s analytic tool interpretative repertoire were applied. The results of the study, analysed in accordance with the method, indicate that the participants through their utterances, making use of a variety of linguistic tools and metaphors, constructed meaning in their experiences of dancing primarily in terms of relational actions. Spaces were created in which these actions unfolded, characterised by presence, concentration, togetherness, speechless communication, proximity, trust, consideration, receptiveness and intensified perception. Creating dance appeared to be experienced in Dewey’s sense of aesthetic experience, and the relations described could be understood as ethical in line with Arendt’s and Levina’s philosophical thinking applied to education, fundamental in Biesta’s and Greene’s visions of education as a space for new beginnings and possible change. Resistance was experienced and dealt with in a range of manners and strategies. The creative aspect of dancing was experienced with great affect and an awareness of an intersubjective and disjunctive space of action. Conclusions of aesthetic and ethic nature may suggest that conditions can be provided to have people come together in an educational setting and dance and appear in front of one another, when consideration is taken to both the specific demands of dance and pedagogy as art expression and transgressing discipline, entailing the need of a clear and conscious design for the activities and the pedagogue’s readiness to guide the children and young to explore their individual dance expression, emotions and lived experiences.  Further implications and issues for continued research are to which extend dance as free expression can be maintained and granted a space in education when addressing specific urging social and ethical issues of coexistence and plurality in a rapidly changing global world, how academic and artistic research can cross-fertilise each other, how practical professional artistic and pedagogical knowledge and theory can inform one another, and to further investigate adequate research methods, designed experiments and appropriate linguistic means for research in the intersection of arts and science, dance and pedagogy.

This thesis offers a technically informed examination of Plato's pervasive, though not innocent, use of musical theory, practice and musical concepts more generally within the ambitious ethical project outlined in many of his dialogues: fostering the ‘excellence' of the soul. Starting from Republic 3, Chapter 1 will focus specifically on music stricto sensu in order to assess Plato's interpretation of the basic ‘building blocks' of musical performances, creating a core repertoire of musical concepts that will prepare the way to analyse Plato's use of musical terms or categories in areas that, at first sight, do not appear to be immediately connected to this art, such as politics, ethics and psychology. Chapter 2 examines a selection of passages from Laws 2 concerning the concept of musical beauty and its role in ethical education, demonstrating how Plato's definition is far from being moralistic and, instead, pays close attention to the technical performative aspects of dramatic musical representations. Chapter 3 looks first at the harmonic characterisation of the two central virtues of the ideal city, sophrosyne and dikaiosyne, showing how their musical depictions are not purely metaphoric: on the contrary, Plato exploited their cultural implications to emphasise the characteristics and the functions of these virtues in the ideal constitution. The second half of Chapter 3 analyses the Platonic portrayal of musical παρανομία, studying both its educational and psychological repercussions in the dialogue and in relations to contemporary Athenian musical practices. Chapter 4 looks at how different types of music may be used to create an inner harmonic order of passions in the soul in different contexts: the musical-mimetic education outlined in the Republic, the musical enhancement of the psychological energies in the members of the Chorus of Dionysus in the Laws, and finally the role of the aulos in the Symposium.