The purpose of this philosophical study was to clarify and synthesize a variety of theories and approaches in cognitive developmental psychology, curriculum theory and development, aesthetics, as they relate to visual art education. Four conceptual frameworks for teaching aesthetics as a component of a discipline-based art education program were proposed. These conceptual frameworks for aesthetics were developed from varying philosophical, psychological, and sociological theories as found in the writings of Monroe Beardsley, Harold Osborne, Morris Weitz, George Dickie, Melvin Rader, Joseph Margolis, and Richard Kostelanetz. / A conceptual approach to aesthetics as a subject of study for children was placed within a curriculum continuum ranging from traditional academic rationalistic and cognitive-empirical orientations, to more radical personal relevancy and social reconstructionistic orientations. Elliot Eisner's and Elizabeth Vallance's curriculum frameworks and Henry Giroux's, Anthony Penna's, and William Pinar's curriculum ranges were examined, and compared, and brought together to provide a comprehensive overview of curriculum theory options. Glenys and Adolph Unruh's background research into curriculum theory and practice was also reviewed to identify influences on educational policy making. / Cognitive developmental theories proposed by Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, and David Feldman were examined and compared to clarify the basis for organizing content and instructional sequencing, with regard to learning theory, student readiness, and levels of understanding as proposed in a discipline-based art education orientation. / The works of art educators and educational theorists interested in the area of aesthetics reviewed in this study included Tom Anderson, David Ecker, Gilbert Clark, Enid Zimmerman, Michael Parsons, Arthur Efland, Vincent Lanier, John Jagodzinski, Dwaine Greer, Margaret DiBlasio, Karen Hamblen, Merle Flannery, Betty Redfern, and Ralph Smith. Their varying approaches were compared and contrasted. / As philosophical inquiry, this study clarified and brought together varying views on the nature of teaching and learning in art. The particular focus of this study on the discipline of aesthetic inquiry and the manner in which young children could reasonably approach the subject resulted in a broadly based synthesis of divergent approaches to aesthetics. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-02, Section: A, page: 0333. / Major Professor: Jessie Lovano-Kerr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

This dissertation addresses a common, but troubling, educational interaction: when a facilitator (whether teacher, professor, or organizer) announces that a discussion will take place about some subject or question, but proceeds to speak at length and field questions regarding that subject. In this case, a controlled and unequal form of interaction known as recitation has occurred, though the interaction was called a "discussion" at the outset. Since discussion, as a form of interaction, connotes democracy, equality, and freedom, this interaction (where recitation passes for discussion) is distorted. After a survey of discussion's many pedagogical meanings, a Marxist theoretical approach--primarily drawing from Louis Althusser and Valentin Voloshinov--is used to critique the distortion of discussion. From the Voloshinovian perspective, the aforementioned distortion composes and iterates the social formation known as neoliberal capitalism. A psychoanalytic theoretical approach is then used to propose a new concept of discussion that works against this neoliberal distortion, one founded on Jacques Lacan's early concept of dehiscence. The dissertation concludes with suggestions for dehiscent facilitation practices, calling for greater emphasis on the form of interaction (as opposed to content) when working for social and political change.

Despite the ubiquitous presence of children in society, the dominant discourse of childhood does not admit room for much of the complexity that the condition of children presents. This project shows that reading for childhood in philosophy and literature makes space for re-imagining childhood as a complex and valuable concept that impacts both the experience of children and their relationships with others and the world. This project situates childhood as a magnified time of growth and development, a unique aspect of human life. At the same time childhood cultivates an interest in and with others, it is also a constructed concept. This inquiry engages this complexity by a reading of rich descriptions and inquiries of childhood in texts of philosophy and literature. These foundational texts are: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, John Dewey's Democracy and Education, Simone De Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vivian Paley's The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Helicopter, and Harriet Cuffaro's Experimenting with the World. Childhood in the texts functions to complicate and reframe conventional and historical interpretations of childhood. The readings in the project challenge a conventional rendering of childhood that serves to distance childhood from its wider community. Childhood is reframed as a concept of inclusion of the other, particularly the adult educator. The project expands scholarship examining how adult interactions with childhood manifest changes in conceptual understandings or practices. The project concludes that cultivating habits of reading for the concept of childhood assists educators in engaging their teaching practice meaningfully. Uncovering the complexity of the concept of childhood invites educators to uncover such ethical aspects of the educational relationship as responsibility, recognition, acceptance of difference, acknowledgement of power dynamics, freedom, and growth. In this context childhood functions as an ethical construct - a guiding value - in education. Multiple ways of viewing and reflecting on the concept of childhood illuminate possibilities for renewing and reengaging these ethical aspects within an educational context.

Responding to current concerns about the quality of public education, in this dissertation I look at teacher development. Specifically, I take up the question: how do we promote teacher flourishing? Though the "we" refers to anyone with a vested interest in education, my primary audience is teachers, administrators, and teacher educators. From this lens I investigate questions of how the teaching life can connect the teacher to the good life. I address this from two perspectives. More broadly, I ask: How can we support the teacher in a manner that contributes to his or her achievement of the good life? Focusing on more specific practices: How can we support the teacher to achieve success in the role of teacher? I assert that teaching is complex work that requires a professional who knows the content taught, has a deep understanding of individual students, and utilizes a host of methods for conveying information and creating community within a classroom. I will argue that the successful teacher depends on what has been defined as practical wisdom--knowing what knowledge to apply to a given situation and how best to apply it. Having argued the relevance of practical wisdom in teaching, the remaining chapters will look more closely at how those concerned with teacher education might help teachers develop it. Specifically, I will first explore: * How can practical wisdom be cultivated in teachers? (Chapter 2) * How does narrative promote practical wisdom? (Chapter 3) * How do narratives about teaching referred to as Reflective Teacher Narratives in particular promote practical wisdom? (Chapter 4) Reflective Teacher Narratives are first person narratives written by teachers about their classrooms. The texts focus on individual students, follow a plot, and highlight the teacher's strengths and areas of difficulty. Ultimately, I will conclude that reading Reflective Teacher Narratives support teacher flourishing by providing a means of looking closely at both teachers' practices and thinking. Reflective Teacher Narratives also provide the scaffolding for a means of talking with teachers that supports development and affirms the teacher.

My main goal while writing this dissertation became to mark off a differend between John Dewey’s philosophy of education and a couple of its contemporaneous Pragmatist readers, on the one hand, and Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern condition and a couple of its contemporaneous readers sympathetic to the French philosophy of difference, on the other. The Kantian sublime feeling is the pivotal point to establish a differend here between these two traditions. I hope to show the reader the possibility that this differend has to become a litigious situation in educational research. Therefore, the practical impact of this dissertation derives from the sense that a litigious situation shapes the understanding of philosophical discourses organized to produce practical knowledge to form teaching practices in teaching preparation. This dissertation thus creates the space to debate the role of the teacher/-educator in Colleges of education. In this case, the permanent Hegelian deposit in Dewey’s thought, his own trajectory along the historical lines of the construction of the American Bildung, and ultimately his theory of communication are crucial in the establishment of a litigious situation in educational research between contemporaneous thinkers in the field of philosophy and education. In the Preface, I thematize the infancy of a voice that precedes language in relation to the Kantian sublime feeling in the postmodern condition. That the work of thematizing this voice based on the sublime condition is lacking in John Dewey’s philosophy of education is the problem this thesis addresses. In the Introduction, I contextualize the main sources in my attempt to interpret the permanent Hegelian deposit in Dewey’s thought and his trajectory along the historical lines of the construction of the American Bildung. I also contextualize the main source in my attempt to interpret a voice based on the sublime condition. Hence, chapter one presents the renewal of Dewey’s philosophy of education. It was based on Dewey’s reconstruction of Hegel’s absolute idealism. In this case, I focus on Dewey’s metaphysical concerns on judgment’s movements, meaning creation, and social participation as they find a domicile in the American Bildung as a mode of education whose purpose is growth. I conclude this chapter by pointing out to a litigious situation in educational research based on the critique that postmodernists fail to achieve growth in experience because they linger too long to avoid consummation once they juxtapose consummation and foundationalism. In chapter two I focus on the value that Jim Garrison and Larry Hickman attribute to Dewey’s theory of communication at the same time I establish another litigious scene in educational research by criticizing their positions, which are rooted on the notion of unity of experience in Dewey. The critique is based on the works of Gert Biesta and Pedro Pagni. The point of tension is twofold: the formers’ assumption that postmodernists lack a concern for the public to dwell in the arts; and the latter’s accusation that Dewey’s theory of communication implies that language become an antecedent element in experience and, thus, outside of experience. I also introduce the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. She became crucial in this dissertation because she allowed me to connect Dewey and Lyotard. She criticizes Dewey’s appreciation for the problems of men as one detached from the reality of certain groups who had suffered the most particularly because of the advancements of democracy, science and technology. Meanwhile, Lyotard criticizes Arendt for rushing through the sublime feeling in her lectures on Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In chapter three I finally debate in more depth Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime and the sense of terror of abandonment. I also introduce his reading of sensus communis in Kant, the distinction between sublime feeling and the aesthetic of sublime, and the notions of different and inhuman in education. I conclude by addressing the question regarding professional knowledge and skills and the role of the curriculum in what Lyotard means by philosophizing, which is rooted in the sublime feeling and the condition of the infancy of thought in the search for a voice in teachers preparation.

Recent years have seen a rising trend of censorship in US secondary schools. This dissertation looks at incidents when censorship caused a sensation in schools and beyond. The censorship events explored are moments when a text, pedagogy, bounded notion of curricula, or a body was removed from a classroom because it was deemed objectionable to someone. I trace how certain texts, pedagogies, and subjectivities get affectively invested as inappropriate for secondary students in four events between 2008-2014. Since each of the events caused affective intensities in schools and communities, at times even reaching national media, I take up the affective turn in cultural studies to explore the intensities both motivating and resulting from censorship. I see affect as the body reading the world and as a particularly potent theoretical lens for the investigation of contemporary literacies. Patricia Clough (2010) urges that “affect studies calls for experimentation in methodology and presentation styles” (p.228) and this dissertation labors to take up that call. To work towards generating affect in addition to theorizing it, I explore different modes and method of ‘working’ data, including visual analysis, autographics, sketching, and glitch methodologies.

In the contemporary global neoliberal economy financial debt shapes indebted subjectivity. It also drastically alters education philosophy, policy and practice. This dissertation analyzes in an interdisciplinary fashion the impacts of financial debt on subjectivity and educational experience. As a work of philosophy of education, it also examines the ways in which education can be a practice that liberates subjectivity from debt’s delimiting force. Emancipatory education theory and practice play an important role in current and future struggles for debt jubilee.

In The Quest for Being, Sidney Hook defines naturalism as 'the systematization of what is involved in the scientific method of inquiry.' Since the formal educational process is a process of acquiring knowledge, and since Hook believes the naturalistic viewpoint to be the most adequate to this task, he therefore believes that naturalism should be the philosophical underpinning of the educational process. This study examines Sidney Hook's naturalism in an attempt to evaluate its adequacy as the foundation for a philosophy of education. Chapter 1 is a preliminary analysis of the philosophical implications of an explicitly naturalistic philosophy of education. Chapter 2 focuses on Sidney Hook's relationship to his philosophical predecessors in order to clarify the nature and roots of Hook's naturalism. In Chapter 3, Hook's naturalistic philosophy of education is elucidated, analyzed, and evaluated. Chapter 4 is concerned with advancing beyond Hook's work by considering the future possibilities of a naturalistic philosophy of education The thesis advanced in this study is that Hook's naturalistic philosophy of education is basically sound. Hook achieves in his philosophy of education the goal he aims for in his naturalism in general, viz., to offer a 'reasonable' point of view, a 'reasonable' view being, for Hook, one that is philosophically defensible, scientifically informed, and rooted in the problems with which men actually find themselves confronted. He achieves this goal despite what are ultimately the two major weaknesses in naturalism itself: its inability to establish absolute certainty in moral judgment, and its resulting inability to make a philosophically defensible position psychologically appealing as well. This study serves to highlight an aspect of Hook's work which has recently been in a state of eclipse--his philosophy of education--by showing that it provides not only an opportunity for serious philosophical reflection, but offers insights toward the resolution of perennially important problems in education / acase@tulane.edu

Institutional theories of art define works of art within a context of surrounding social relations, and in terms of their functions as the loci for specific social activities. The best known example of an institutional theory of art is that of George Dickie. While Dickie's attempts to define art in terms of behavioral patterns occurring within the "artworld" are significant, he ultimately fails to explicate the institutional basis of aesthetic behavior. Indeed, Dickie leaves obscure the complex social basis for any human institutional behavior. / The deficiencies of the theory may, however, be remedied with a thorough description of the intersubjectivity of aesthetic creation and appreciation. Toward this end, the pragmatic interactionism of John Dewey and the social behaviorism of George Herbert Mead are of use in reconstructing the institutional theory of art. / To execute this reconstruction, I draw upon Dewey's account of human propensities to respond creatively to novel situations arising in the everyday interactions between living creatures and a world--responses that reach apotheosis in artist production. Appreciation, too, has its place in reconstruction for it is yet another interactive response, one that mirrors structurally the gestures of creating artists. And here the precision of Mead's attention to the interactive behavioral basis for human communication and sociality complements Dewey's analysis. / Finally, my pragmatic reconstruction of the institutional theory clarifies the functional roles that one may fill within the artworld, may be used to ground an analysis of the unique value of the artworld as a social institution. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0835. / Major Professor: Eugene F. Kaelin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

This study investigates the development of a collaborative approach to instructional planning, in the context of a local, natural instructional setting in the educational system of a Caribbean island. Parallel teams of planners are brought together from both the development and the delivery systems of this instructional context; to develop an instructional plan of their choice. / The collaborative instructional exercise is developed as a series of planning sessions--utilizing the mechanism of a small group interaction/problem-solving process. The group of 12 main, direct participants consists of six developers and six deliverers of instruction. Data collection is done by means of preliminary questionnaire/survey and documents reviews; by in-process interviews by discussions, observations, recordings, documents reviews; and by post-planning interviews of individual participants. A comprehensive review of related literature is also presented, to put this study in perspective and lay the basis for useful analysis. Analysis of the collaborative planning process and description of the emergent model are presented in terms of the opinions, decisions, behaviors/actions, and approaches of the participants. Within-group comparisons are made in terms of the respective roles played by each team of planners, and in terms of the relative contributions of individuals in each team. / Findings of the investigation reveal that both sets of planners considered more elements that traditionally prescribed and described in instructional models. / Furthermore, the planners introduced new dimensions to, and derived new meanings from, aspects of the planning process. Findings of this study support some findings of earlier research studies (e.g., that instructional planners do not systematically follow the prescriptive models of instructional planning and development. It was also shown, however, that planners in this study context do use some traditional elements in the development of their own approach. The collaborative planning approach (model) that emerged is described, and implications for applications to the context are suggested. Implications for further research into collaborative planning are also discussed. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-01, Section: A, page: 0077. / Major Professor: Robert Morgan. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.