Aesthetics, Empathy and Education

Boyd White (PhD, Concordia University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Dr. White is the author of numerous journal articles, and has chapters in various texts, among them ReVisions: Readings in Canadian Art Teacher Education (3rd ed.), Starting with… (3rd ed.) and What Works: Innovative Strategies for Teaching Art. Recently, he has published two books: Aesthetics Primer (2009, Peter Lang) and Essays on Aesthetic Education for the 21st Century, co-edited with Tracie Costantino (2010).Tracie Costantino (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Associate Professor of Art Education at the University of Georgia. In addition to numerous published articles and book chapters, her recent work related to the transformative potential of aesthetic experience was published in the book she co-edited with Boyd White, Essays on Aesthetic Education for the 21st Century (2010).

• Contents: Liora Bresler: The Spectrum of Distance: Empathic Understanding and the Pedagogical Power of the Arts – Terry Barrett: Writing Towards Empathy – Laura Evans: Food for Thought: Idiom, Empathy, and Context in Lauren Greenfield’s THIN – Sherry Mayo: Art in the Expanded Field: Notions of Empathy, Aesthetic Consciousness, and Implications for Education – Indrani Margolin: Expanding Empathy Through Dance – Boyd White: Pay Attention, Pay Attention, Pay Attention – David Swanger: Notes on Empathy in Poetry – Sean Wiebe: Aesthetic/Empathetic Punctures Through Poetry: A Lacanian Slip into Something Other Than Education – Donald Blumenfeld-Jones: Johnson, Levinas, and Sensibility: An Aesthetic Avenue to Ethics? – Juli Kramer: Multisensory Aesthetic Experiences and the Development of Empathy: The Big Bad Wolf’s Not So Bad After All – Tom Anderson/Anniina Suominen Guyas: Earth Education: Interbeing and Empathy for Mother Earth – Tracie Costantino: Cultivating the Social Imagination of Preservice Teachers Through Aesthetic Reflection – Lauren Phillips/Richard Siegesmund: Teaching What We Value: Care as an Outcome of Aesthetic Education – Richard Hickman: Empathy and Art Education.