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 exemplifications of this compelling yet unconventional vision.

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 exemplifications of this compelling yet unconventional vision.

In this bestselling new book, his first in seventeen years, Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, takes us on a poignant and passionate journey as mysterious and compelling as his first life-changing work. Instead of a motorcycle, a sailboat carries his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus down the Hudson River as winter closes in. Along the way he picks up a most unlikely traveling companion: a woman named Lila who in her desperate sexuality, hostility, and oncoming madness threatens to disrupt his life. In Lila Robert M. Pirsig has crafted a unique work of adventure and ideas that examines the essential issues of the nineties as his previous classic did the seventies.

John Dewey is known as a pragmatic philosopher and progressive architect of American educational reform, but some of his most important contributions came in his thinking about art. Dewey argued that there is strong social value to be found in art, and it is artists who often most challenge our preconceived notions. Dewey for Artists shows us how Dewey advocated for an “art of democracy.” Identifying the audience as co-creator of a work of art by virtue of their experience, he made space for public participation. Moreover, he believed that societies only become—and remain—truly democratic if its citizens embrace democracy itself as a creative act, and in this he advocated for the social participation of artists. Throughout the book, Mary Jane Jacob draws on the experiences of contemporary artists who have modeled Dewey’s principles within their practices. We see how their work springs from deeply held values. We see, too, how carefully considered curatorial practice can address the manifold ways in which aesthetic experience happens and, thus, enable viewers to find greater meaning and purpose. And it is this potential of art for self and social realization, Jacob helps us understand, that further ensures Dewey’s legacy—and the culture we live in.

This carefully researched book offers a dynamic and expansive Deweyan vision for the arts and education. This (re)vision acknowledges the influence on Dewey's aesthetics of art collector and educator Albert Barnes, while also exploring the various ways Dewey's writings on the arts, in moving beyond Barnes' "scientific aesthetic method," were an important resource for many innovative twentieth-century American artists, art movements, and arts-related educational institutions. Neither Barnes' influence on Dewey nor the features of Dewey's naturalistic aesthetics that made his Art as Experience a favorite text of many artists and arts practitioners have been fully and adequately acknowledged in existing literature on Dewey's thinking about the arts and education. This book effectively remedies that situation. "Granger clarifies, advances, and augments a broad and open-ended 'Deweyan vision of the arts and education.' Enlivened on almost every page by concrete historical and contemporary examples drawn from the arts, Granger's highly readable book is essential for democratic educators, administrators, and policymakers who reject the zombie idea that 'real' academic work is inherently separate from aesthetic consummations." --Steven Fesmire, Professor of Philosophy, Radford University; President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy; Author of John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics "One of the most vexing characters on the American art scene was Albert Barnes: the self-styled, passionate collector whose good intentions to educate the masses ran amuck with a museum that, like his art theories, proved too rigid to be realistic. Thus, his friendship with John Dewey whose wide application of art to life has been puzzling--until now. With Granger, we see that Barnes' lessons in how to look, while frozen in a formal analysis of modern French art, nonetheless unleashed in the philosopher an expansive way to think about the aesthetic. As demonstrated here, Dewey's dynamic, embodied understanding inspired the evolution of radical art throughout the 20th century, providing insight into making and being in the world still." --Mary Jane Jacob, Professor and Director of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Author of Dewey for Artists "David Granger's valuable book begins by examining the mutually-influential friendship of John Dewey and Albert Barnes, along with significant differences between the two men. In contrast with Barnes' comparatively ridged formalism, Granger demonstrates compatibilities and/or relationships between Dewey's aesthetics and painters Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, as well as Black Mountain College artists and educators including John Andrew Rice, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham among others. Well researched, the book establishes many surprising relations among people, art, and ideas. Granger concludes with a refreshingly original vision of the arts and education." --Jim Garrison, Professor Emeritus, School of Education, Virginia Tech; Past-President of the John Dewey Society; Author of Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching

John Dewey's Imaginative Vision of Teaching explores key philosophical topics in John Dewey’s work, including epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, and relates them to teacher practice and education policy. Each chapter begins with theory and ends with practical implications. While there are numerous books on Dewey, there are relatively few that connect his philosophy of education to actual practice. By linking primary fields of philosophy with classroom teaching and education policy, Boyles suggests that the binary between theory and practice is a false chasm that can and should be bridged if teaching and learning are to change into more dynamic, reflexive, and authentic interactions. Perfect for courses such as: Becoming a Teacher | Applying Theory to Practice | John Dewey and U.S. Schools | Historical and Philosophical Ideas In Practice | Progressive Teaching

The sesquicentennial of the birth of John Dewey is in 2009. In recognition of this occasion, John Dewey at One Hundred-Fifty: Reflections for a New Century, with contributors drawn from the members of the John Dewey Society, will be published as both a journal issue and a book. The papers will appear as an issue of the Society's journal, Education and Culture, in late fall 2009, and as a book by Purdue University Press.