Donald S. Blumenfeld-Jones – författare

This book is for anyone interested in how to build a teacher education program utilizing the arts as one central modality for teaching and learning or for those interested in building some of their program along these lines. Throughout the book you will find reference to the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, and teaching. We provide an integrated program devoted to good learning and the good society.

In the book we discuss how the program came to be and the underlying educational thinking that informs the whole program. This section of the book is invaluable for understanding how the reader can build her/his own arts approach to teacher education. The central section of the book is devoted to the specific coursework of the program. Each author describes in detail how she/he leverages aesthetics and art to expand the possibilities of learning and teaching (including a chapter focused on the core competency course, Teaching, Imagination, Creativity) in language and literacy, psychology of education, science education, mathematics education, social studies education, and classroom management including many examples from our teaching. The book ends with a focus group discussion about the program by former students.

This book addresses the crucial issue of how we value and deploy the idea of “freedom” that underlies contemporary curriculum studies. Whether we are conventional curriculum thinkers who value knowledge development or favor a Deweyan, individualist orientation toward curriculum or are a critical social justice curriculum thinker, at the heart of all these orientations and theorizing is the value of “freedom.” The book addresses “freedom” through novel sources: the work of Martin Buber on education, Julia Kristeva on the uses of imagination and the female/male dialectic, Emmanuel Levinas’ unique approach to ethics, and more. Readers will find new ways to understand freedom and the world of ethical life as informing curriculum thinking. It provides a more ecumenical vision that can draw our differences together. It helps readers to reconsider ourselves in fruitful ways that can bring more relevance and substance to the field.