Developing Aesthetic-Empathy: A Capacity for Teaching in Constructivist Learning Environments

Jackson/McCullagh206

Developing Aesthetic-Empathy: A Capacity for Teaching in Constructivist Learning Environments

Favoriser l’empathie esthétique : la capacité d’enseigner en milieu d’apprentissage constructiviste

Renee JacksonConcordia University

Suzanne McCullaghCarleton University

AbstractWhere empathy is often construed in terms of an inter-subjective relationship between individuals, the ability of one person to have a kind of access to the feelings and thoughts of another, this dyadic structure does not explain how empathy might work in classroom dynamics where many persons, objects, materials, affects, and ideas are in play. Reconnecting empathy to its aesthetic roots can help us to elucidate empathy’s role in complex classroom situations. This paper utilizes Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of affects, assembling, and composition to illustrate that there is a “plane of composition” beneath formed subjects, objects, and their relations and that a kind of aesthetic empathy occurs on this plane. If we understand empathy as the immediate ability to “sense” affect, perceptions, and desires within complex interactions, then what role does aesthetics play in this? Aesthetic theory provides us with notions of sensation and composition that can enrich a theory of empathy, enhancing our understanding of how empathetic capacities are at work in responsive teaching praxes. Aesthetic experience heightens the senses, increasing both our affective and perceptive capacities. This may lead to more empathetic teaching. Aesthetics education can help to develop what we are referring to as aesthetic empathy, thereby enabling appropriate responsiveness in complex, dynamic learning situations that are composed of such diverse elements as classroom materials, moods, desires, comprehensions, groups, weather, subject matter, and world events. This paper explores the development of responsive teaching practice through the use of aesthetic tools like the elements and principles of design, and metaphor, to elucidate the components entailed in aesthetic-empathy

Keywords: aesthetics, empathy, constructivism, pedagogy, classroom, affect, assemblage, composition, organization, becoming

Canadian Review of Art Education 207

RésuméSi l’empathie est souvent perçue en termes de relation inter-subjective entre individus, c’est-à-dire la capacité d’une personne à accéder d’une quelconque façon aux sentiments et pensées d’autrui, cette structure dyadique ne saurait expliquer le fonctionnement de l’empathie dans un contexte de salle de cours où interviennent plusieurs personnes, objets, matériaux, affects et idées. Ramener l’empathie à ses racines esthétiques peut nous aider à comprendre son rôle dans le contexte souvent complexe d’une salle de cours. Cet article exploite la théorie des affects de Deleuze et Guattari, ainsi que l’assemblage et la composition, pour démontrer qu’il existe un « plan de composition » sous les objets et les sujets formés et leurs interrelations, et qu’il peut y régner une sorte d’empathie esthétique. Si nous percevons l’empathie comme la capacité immédiate de « ressentir » l’affect, les perceptions et les désirs lors d’interactions, quel est alors le rôle de l’esthétique ? La théorie esthétique nous propose des concepts de sensation et de composition qui peuvent nourrir la théorie de l’empathie, nous aider à mieux comprendre le rôle des capacités empathiques dans le cadre de pratiques d’enseignement réactives. L’expérience esthétique aiguise les sens et accroît nos habiletés affectives et perceptives, ce qui peut mener à un enseignement plus empathique. L’éducation esthétique peut contribuer au développement de ce que nous appelons l’empathie esthétique, facilitant ainsi une réactivité plus adéquate dans la cadre de contextes d’apprentissage dynamiques et complexes, combinant des éléments aussi diversifiés que matériel de cours, atmosphères, désirs, compréhensions, groupes, météo, matière et événements planétaires. Cet article se penche sur le développement de pratiques d’enseignement réactives par le biais d’outils esthétiques tels qu’éléments et pratiques de conception, ainsi que la métaphore, pour mieux cerner les composantes de l’empathie esthétique.

Mots clés : Esthétique, empathie, constructivisme, pédagogie, salle de cours, affect, assemblage, composition, organisation, devenir.

Part I

INTRODUCTION

Reading the Room

Powerful orators are said to be able to read a room as they speak, but what exactly does this mean? Typically we imagine that a person can “feel” the energy of the collective group. They are in tune with the audience. This ability requires an awareness of audience mood, desire, and attention and the ability to adjust content, pace, and mood in relation to the audience. Their speaking


resonates on both an emotional and intellectual level. This impressive skill requires some kind of empathetic connection between audience and orator.

This paper will explore this skill, being able to read a room, within the context of a constructivist-oriented classroom. Within this context, the ability to read a room will be examined as a kind of aesthetic empathy. Aesthetic empathy re-imagines the constructivist classroom as an environment that the teacher/facilitator feels-into in order to make aesthetically funded empathic decisions.

We begin by tracing the historical relationship between aesthetics and empathy and argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affective assemblage combines the two concepts. We then make a case for the idea of the constructivist classroom as an aesthetic composition by creating a parallel between the artist interacting with a composition they are in the process of creating, and the teacher interacting with the classroom-as-composition, also to be considered a work in progress, and the important role that empathy plays within these interactions. Finally we explore the idea of aesthetics as it is used in various artistic domains in order to illustrate how aesthetics can become a toolbox for re-imagining teaching/learning in terms of the classroom-as-composition. We pull from this toolbox in order to provide a few brief examples of how aesthetic approaches can help inform responsive learning contexts.

Aesthetic-Empathy

As an aesthetic concept, empathy has historically referred to the capacity of a spectator of a work of art to “feel into” or directly experience a work of art viscerally and emotionally (Nowak, 2011; Currie, 2011). This was the view of Robert Vischer who first coined the German term Eihnfuhlung, from which the English word “empathy” is a translation. Theodore Lipps popularized empathy as an aesthetic concept, and though he borrowed a lot from Vischer, he significantly modified the meaning of the term. For Lipps, empathy was more of a psychological and spiritual phenomenon, whereas for Vischer it was corporeal (Pinotti, 2010). When viewing works of art, Vischer thought that the spectator was physiologically affected by the work. There is, however, some disagreement amongst these theorists as to what the spectator


accesses in one’s empathetic engagement with the work. Lipps thought that the spectator of a work of art is able to empathize with the intentions of the author. Vischer thought that through empathy the spectator merges with the work itself. In both accounts of aesthetic empathy, however, the spectator is immersed in the work and there is some loss of individual subjectivity (Nowak, 2011). On these accounts, the identity of the spectator is destabilized by the empathetic experience (Koss, 2006). This aesthetic understanding of empathy sees the spectator of a work temporarily merging with it or with the artist’s intention. This idea that the spectator can merge, or become one, with an artwork became problematic in the early 20th century with the rise of mass spectatorship and fascism (Koss, 2006). The concept of empathy was critiqued within both aesthetic theory and philosophy.

Destabilization of Identity: Critiques of Aesthetic Empathy

Within the realm of aesthetic theory Bertolt Brecht is one notable critic of the role of empathy. In the same way that powerful orators can have too much sway over audience members, Brecht was concerned with the passivity induced by the loss (or destabilization) of identity that occurred when spec-tators were empathetically experiencing a work, or a spectacle such as a theatrical play or a public speech. Rather than creating works that provoked empathetic engagement on the part of audiences, Brecht attempted to create the sensation of distance, which would stimulate the audience to critically reflect and analyse what they were watching (Koss, 2006).

Edith Stein (1916/1989) and Max Scheler (1912/2008), like Brecht, also saw the loss of self entailed by aesthetic empathy, as problematic. However they were both interested in the communicability of emotions that something like empathy enables. They saw this communicability of emotions as enhancing our understandings of inter-subjectivity and ethics. Rather than rejecting empathy (as Brecht did) they developed philosophical theories of empathy that did not entail a loss of self. They both criticized Lipps’ conception of empathy as the identification with another person, or art object. Stein claimed that empathy entailed being with another, but not one with that other (Stein, 1916/1989). She wanted a theory of empathy that would account for the ability of individuals to have direct (unmediated by imagination, inference, and analogy) knowledge of the emotions of another, without at the same time


losing (even momentarily) their individual identity.

For Scheler, empathy is a form of intentionality whereby we are able to understand the experiences of others. Scheler’s account of empathy, in contrast with Lipps’, does not consist in the literal reception of another’s experience (Zahavi, 2010). Rather, Scheler distinguishes empathy from both sympathy and emotional contagion or infection. Sympathy, according to Scheler, is having compassion and good will towards another; it requires empathy since it is by way of empathy that we are able to understand the emotional states of others. Empathy, for Scheler, is thus more basic than sympathy, however in itself it does not have ethical value. There are cases where an individual may understand the emotional state of another, yet does not have compassion for that person. A torturer, for instance, needs to understand the emotions of his victim in order to be effective, but does not care for the victim. Scheler distinguishes empathy from emotional infection by arguing that in empathy one is directed towards the experience of another and thus maintains one’s sense of self in relation to the other. In emotional infection, however, one directly takes on the emotions of others. It is involuntary and is at work when people are infected by the gaiety of a party, or when laughter catches; “the infective process itself…generates purposes beyond the designs of any single individual” (Scheler, 2008, 16).

Scheler’s concept of emotional infection shares with the early aesthetic theories of empathy a destabilization of identity that comes about because of a momentary loss of self during the empathetic experience. Both Scheler and Brecht see this loss of self as ethically and politically problematic. Scheler points out that it is emotional contagion (in its heightened form he calls this emotional identification) that is at work in the mass followings of leaders. The followers give up their own ego ideals and identify with those of the leader.

Affective Assemblages: Aesthetic Empathy Revisited

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) theory of affect, assemblage, and becoming shares core features with earlier versions of aesthetic empathy in that distinctions between self and other, and subject and object break down. Their focus is at odds with that of Stein and Scheler in that the kind of empathy that emerges in their work is not based on inter-subjective


knowledge. Instead it is based on affects, assemblages, and transformation. Affect for Deleuze and Guattari is not the feeling of an individual subject but “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another” (Massumi, 1987, xvi). Seemingly unconcerned with the maintenance of stable individuality, they propose that it is by way of contagion that we enter into assemblages. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is “the plane of composition” that we cannot access by way of our formed and stable subjectivity, but instead by way of “non-subjectified affects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 262). Shifting the focus sharply away from the voluntary activity of an individual subject coming to know the emotional states of another, they suggest that we become with others and with the world by entering into affective assemblages:

all becomings are already molecular. That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject nor the proportionality of a form. Starting from the form one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 272)

There are strong connections between the concept of assemblage (as developed by Deleuze and Guattari) and the late 19th century version of aesthetic empathy insofar as both phenomena describe transformative affective events. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize this transformative aspect with the term becoming, which they employ so as to prioritize a view of individuals and the world in terms of mutual becomings, rather than in terms of static, and discrete beings. The radical nature of their view can be seen in their description of the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s contemplation of the death throes of a rat. They state: “It is in him that the animal ‘bares his teeth at monstrous fate,’” but deny that this is either pity or identification (both terms belonging to discourse on empathy). Rather, they argue, that his contemplation of the rat’s state is:

a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely different individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat become a thought, a feverish thought in the man, at the same time as the man becomes a rat gnashing its teeth in its death throes. The rat and man are in no way


the same thing, but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a language that is no longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms, in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 258)

This passage illustrates a mode of affective assemblage whereby none of the elements— rat, thought, man—remain the same. This affectability belongs to assemblages, and not to the individual subject because assemblages are of an order or layer of the world in its complex dynamism where affects proliferate by contagion and spark becomings.

Assemblages are a kind of “interactive relationship” (Dema, 2007, 6) that involve multiplicities, not just more than one individual, but individuals who are themselves multiplicities of different (heterogeneous) elements: desires, habits, capacities. Simone Bignall (2010) uses the term “affective assemblages” to describe Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of encounters which she claims can only be understood adequately by taking into account the “complex nature of bodies involved in the meeting” (83). Bodies, for Deleuze and Guattari, are multiplicities or assemblages; they have neither stable boundaries nor fixed characteristics. Instead, the body, Bignall tells us, is “a collection of relations into which its constituent parts enter” (83).

Assembling is a kind of symbiosis (Deleuze calls it sympathy but his description coincides with a kind of aesthetic-empathy), and “being in the middle.” He declares, with specific reference to speaking and writing, that one writes with: “With the world, with a part of the world, with people...There is no judgement in sympathy, but agreements of convenience between bodies of all kinds” (Deleuze, 2002, 52). In the larger context of Deleuze and Guattari’s work it is clear that for them assembling is a kind of acting with, whether the action be teaching or making art, it is to be done with the world and with others. Further, insofar as assembling implies becoming, Deleuze and Guattari remind us that we “are not in the world; we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, 169).

The concept of assemblage, understood as a mode of aesthetic empathy, is useful for theorizing teaching capacities because it enables us to develop an understanding of the capacities involved in “acting with.” J.D. Dewsbury, in his


analysis of the “Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage,” suggests that assemblage thinking is “attentiveness to the transformative potential in the world, which gives due regard to the fact that change is not just willed by us humans but comes about equally through the materialities of the world in which we are just a part.” (Dewsbury, 2001, 152) In teaching, the capacity for this kind of attention is essential if we are going to conduct classrooms in ways that are responsive to the contingencies of situations, and the capacities of students for learning and transformation. Deleuze and Guattari offer two general categories that clarify the kinds of actions that involve assembling: work and free action. On the work model we would tend to confront matter only in the ways in which it already conforms to our intentions, designs and desires to use it for a particular purpose. This model corresponds to the view of students as passive receptacles to be filled (Freire, 2008). When we approach a classroom in this way our focus is on what we have to teach. The curriculum and the lesson plan take priority over the assemblage of the classroom. On the free action model we allow our desires to be assembled or composed by the material we relate with. Any resultant action is a commingling of materials, both human, animal, plant and mineral (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). On this model, we allow our teaching to be composed by the classroom in significant ways. The capacities we confront and the contingent and dynamic elements all come into play.

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we can consider these two models of action in terms of two different planes: the plane of organization and the plane of composition. The plane of organization is the dimension of the world in which we consider things and beings as discrete, individual entities and we mark a divide between subject and object. The plane of composition is beneath or prior to the plane or organization and is where becomings occur. On this plane we do not think in terms of subjects and objects but in terms of “individuating affective states of an anonymous force” (Deleuze, 1998, 128).

The difference between the two planes accounts for the fact that what cannot be perceived on one cannot but be perceived on the other. It is in jumping from one plane to the other, or from the relative thresholds to the absolute threshold that coexists with them, that the imperceptible becomes necessarily perceived. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 282)

On the plane of composition (or the free action model) we perceive a dynamic world of affects, “those intensities that pass body to body” (Gregg


& Seigworth, 2010, 14) that we cannot perceive on the plane of organization. In teaching, since we both need be in composition with and to plan and organize, we need the ability to move from one plane to another. It is on the plane of composition where aesthetic-empathy is active. It is on the plane of organization that we can reflect and think about what to do next. William Connolly and Jane Bennett (2002) suggest that it is affect that should inform thinking.

It is the rapid play of affect that, above all, moves thinking. But since affect is not entirely under the control of consciousness that means that the flow of thinking exceeds its control too. Affect is often conveyed by contagion, contamination and inspiration; it moves across registers and constituencies by extra-logical as well as logical means. And remember, affect is not simply intra-corporeal; it flows across bodies too, as when anger, revenge, or inspiration is communicated across individuals or constituencies by looks, hits, caresses, gestures, the bunching of muscles in the neck and flushes of the skin. This contagion can flow through face to face meetings, academic classes, family dinners, public assemblies, TV speeches and dramas and films. Affect is contagious across layered assemblages, human and otherwise. (159)

For them, affect is rapid, contagious, and flows across bodies. In teaching, an ability to both register and respond to the affective milieu is essential. The affective milieu or plane of composition is necessary to the plans we make while organizing the classroom.

Part II

The Classroom as Aesthetic Composition

Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about the plane of composition and free-ac-tion and the plane of organization and work models, provide a more nuanced version of Paulo Freire’s articulation of transformation versus transmission approaches in education, transformational being at the core of a constructivist ontology, and transmission the basis for more traditional approaches. Within the transformational approach, the teach-er-student and student-teachers live actively with the world as opposed to passively in the world and Freire (2008) explains that living with the world in this way is key to education that is humanizing rather than oppressive. Deleuze and Guattari help to deepen and fortify the idea of


living with the world through affects, assemblages, and transformation/becoming. From the artist we can learn strategies for putting such ideas into practice.

Though there are many ways to compose a work of art, an artist can be said to enter into an affectively motivated assemblage with her medium of choice. The artist enters inside the plane of composition as she works, at times standing back from the work to experience it on the plane of organization, in order to inform her next action. The artist alternates between the two planes, almost simultaneously. The construction of an artwork is affected by the way the medium and composition speak to the artist, just as the reading of the room affects the delivery of the orator. Because creation is this type of process, it is rare that an artwork turns out exactly as one envisions it from beginning to end. Creative projects tend to be emergent in this way. In the case of the classroom, the teacher is literally embedded within a highly complex composition of multiplicities within multiplicities. Like the artist, the teacher responsively engages in assemblage, while simultaneously adapting the composition in relation to unfolding information:

The “....artist...may be induced to refashion an entire piece of work after the intrusion of some accidental detail, a petty incident which suddenly deflects the project from its initial trajectory, diverting it from what may well have been a clearly formulated vision of its eventual shape” (Guattari, 2008, 140).

Our capacity to feel-into the composition that is the classroom, or to enter into an empathetic becoming within this milieu, depends on our capacity to keenly perceive and plug into the composition. The more varied our aesthetic encounters and awareness in general, the more fine-tuned our capacity for aesthetic-empathy. When it comes to teacher education, there are also many avenues for thinking aesthetically directly in relation to the classroom, as another kind of strategy for such capacity development.

We are not the first to say that aesthetic understanding is important for educators (Eisner, 2002; Greene, 2001). Typically we develop our aesthetic understanding through aesthetic experiences. This can involve interactions with artworks, or artistic creation. A strategy for deepening our aesthetic capacity in relation to the classroom, in addition to these, is to apply, or recognize the classroom itself, as an aesthetic composition. The use of

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the term “composition” in education has referred to the composition of the student-body in terms of achievement and status (Leiter, 1983); racial composition (Hallinan, 1982); gender (Crombie, & Armstrong, 1999); and disability (Cook,1999). The aesthetics of the classroom, in terms of how it looks, is supported by a small body of literature (Cookson, 2006; Duffy, 1999), and consideration of the classroom itself as an aesthetic composition is not something we have come across directly. Liora Bresler’s work, from a research perspective, takes into account the researcher in terms of musicianship, creating a parallel wherein the research context would be considered in terms of an improvised composition (Bresler, 2006, 2009), indicating that learning to “perceive, listen and improvise”, important aspects of musicianship, are also key to becoming research practitioners. Bresler’s recognition that research practitioners can learn from musical improvisation, is similar conceptually to the improvisation between artist and “composition” as well as teacher and “classroom-as-composition”. Thinking of research through musicianship or the classroom-as-composition (unfinished/work in progress), suggests that both research and teaching capacity are composed of many other capacities, of which aesthetic-empathy is one.

Re-appropriating the classroom in terms of an aesthetic composition, is not only one way of deepening our capacity for aesthetic-empathy, but it is itself a move that can help us understand and deal with a constructivist ontology in education. Elliot Eisner (1985) has explained that artists are constructivists. They give form to knowledge through aesthetic choices, and they construct a type of aesthetic knowledge through the work they build. Summoning Herbert Read, Eisner argues that aesthetics should be at the core of education. Everyone must be able to compose quality sound, image, text etcetera in order to communicate ideas to others, including scientists and mathematicians who create theories and frameworks that culminate in some “stable form” (Eisner, 1985). Since Plato, he explains, we have been on a trajectory where rational knowledge is more valued than knowledge built through sense construction. From this genesis we have continued on a tangent where math is considered the ultimate show of intelligence. Whereas, as artists work with matter and material in the world, as opposed to “in the mind”, our work is deemed less valuable. So much focus on the mind and rationality has disengaged us from the skill required to connect with and experience the world in deep and meaningful ways. This estrangement can


only contribute to our disconnection from the environment and one another (Dewey, 1934, 1998). Aesthetic experience is a key to overcoming such estrangement:

......to know these [aesthetic] features is to know aspects of the world. To achieve such knowledge the percipient must be aesthetically literate. He or she must be able to read their subtle, often complex aesthetic features. (Eisner, 1985, 29)

It is for this reason that it is time now to turn to artists as a resource from whom to learn how to manage this “learning theory” and approach to pedagogy, which continues to be surrounded by controversy, given the perceived difficulty of “pinning down” methods within the complexity constructivism entails (Tobias & Duffy, 2009; Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006; Schmidt, Loyens, Van Gog & Paas, 2007; Sweller, Kirschner, & Clark, 2007). Approaching the classroom as aesthetic composition has the potential not only to build aesthetic-empathy in teachers, but can also enable a kind of deep, molecular change in the ways we encounter and think of education, providing space for sensory, aesthetic ways of knowing.

There are many ways of developing our capacity for aesthetic experiences, and these can be applied as strategies for taking up the classroom-as-composition. Like a swiss-army knife, the more tools we have for creating and perceiving works of art, the more prepared we are for various kinds of aesthetic encounters, and the more finely tuned our aesthetic-empathy and aesthetic ways of knowing can become. As we encounter, we enter into affective assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) suggest assemblage as molecular, or open, contextual, and individuated, akin to a temporary molecular bonding. This contrasts with molar, which refers to rigid, reified situations where assemblage is interrupted. In molar situations, affects bounce off, or are forced to stand beside one another. Rules and regulations or institutionalized methods become molar as they are increasingly disconnected from specific contexts, instead standing beside any unfolding situation, imposing rules for how things ought to be done (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Molecular strategies underlie transformational constructivist free-action model educational contexts, whereas molar strategies underlie transmission-based traditional work-model educational contexts. The tools used in the arts to develop aesthetic perception can help us enter into affective assemblage with the classroom. However, it is necessary for the


tools to be considered molecular, that is, constantly experimented with if such assemblages are to be consistently enabled.

Part III

AESTHETIC-EMPATHY IN ACTION: An introduction to ways of thinking of the classroom-as-composition

Contemporary Aesthetics in Arts Education

There are various ways we can learn to connect with a composition aesthetically. In order to read a book, literacy is necessary. Literacy not only means the capability to read and understand words, but also to make meaning on a deeper level through an understanding of literary aesthetics, that is to say, devices such as rhythm, metaphor, imagery, or allusion, that contribute to a deeper, visceral, multi-sensory experience of literature (Eisner, 1985). It is through such experiences with literature that one develops a real connection and love for literature (Eisner, 1985). Every artistic genre has such devices for making and experiencing aesthetic compositions. There are many ways of describing and individuating such processes based on particular works and contexts, and there are also many useful tools that can be applied and that remain to be invented. The term composition implies that parts are put together to form a whole, so it is important to consider the constituting parts. Each of the arts has a history of putting its parts together in particular ways to create particular schools or styles. Dance is made of particular movements of feet, hands and body as is music, which is also made of notes or movements, rests, and musical articulations (staccato, legato, grazioso, etc....) and both have particular ways of assembling, depending on the genre/style. The visual arts are made up of varying combinations of visual parts known as the elements of design and principles of organization, often identified as line, texture, colour, shape, value, space, balance, contrast, emphasis, pattern, unity, movement, or variations thereof. Each of these more traditional approaches to aesthetics are just some tools that can help us to create or experience a work of art.

The arts, infused with their time and place, become a metaphor, or story,


or series of clues about the artists’ experiences of the world. Like a snowball gathering up its surroundings, art contains the stuff of its era. During this contemporary time of mash-ups, trans-disciplinarity, and hybridity, categorical borders blur in life and work, and so too have contemporary artworks become less categorizable and predictable in their make-up. The parts that make up music, for example, can originate from many places and so are not necessarily made up of traditional “notes” as in the case of The Four Horsemen, who make a kind of music/poetry based on human-produced sound. Indeed, many musicians mix sound from the world into their music, as in TimberTimbre who, for example, builds loops with sounds from nature. Dance can involve movements that are not traditional or named as in the dance performance “Melt Montreal”, wherein the dancers are strapped to a wall and perform dance movements inspired by the act of melting, or Isabella Rosellini’s dance/performance series entitled “green porno”, based on the mating rituals of insects. The visual arts are often not even very visual at all, but can be conceptual, as in Yoko Ono’s Instruction Pieces (1960 - 2009), or the creation of soundscapes, as in Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet (2001). And, as evidenced also by these examples, each of the arts are often combined with other elements traditionally considered to be the territory of other arts, or even other fields like biology, and sociology (Rosellini’s work in particular is an example of such heterogeneity). Such loose borders between disciplines encourages us to consider combinations of aesthetic approaches within the context of the classroom-as-composition.

In the visual arts, we often still discuss work in terms of the elements and principles of design, first coined by Arthur Wesley Dow (1920). Olivia Gude’s (2011) post-modern principles: juxtaposition, appropriation, recontextualization, layering, interaction of text and image, hybridity, gazing, and representin’ are meant to encourage art educators to get beyond our habitual reliance on the elements and principles. In his book What do Pictures Want? W.J.T Mitchell (2005) provokes us to approach images differently by asking them what they want, rather than thinking about what they do to us, in order to change the type of hold images have on us. This is not to say that traditional methods should be done away with. Similar to George Orwell’s description of dead metaphors, overuse renders even the most powerful metaphors impotent. Over-reliance on one method or approach can dull any tool into uselessness. If we cease building and developing our ways of


encountering works of art on aesthetic grounds, we can dull our capacity to experience things anew, dimming aesthetic-empathy. Tools need to be sharpened and used regularly. Combining methods is one way of sharpening old tools. What is known as the Feldman method for interpreting a work of art, (description, analysis, interpretation, judgement) for example can be combined with Mitchell’s suggestion for the interrogation of a work of art.

Teacher Education and Aesthetics: Putting Theory into Practice

Formal approaches: The elements and principles of design in a classroom context

We have always thought of the elements and principles as concepts more so than as visual components. Each one can provide an interesting perspective through which to think of the classroom as an aesthetic composition. For the purpose of this paper, we will use balance as an example of how we can apply a principle of design to the idea of classroom- as-composition. We can understand visual balance more fully if we consider balanced ecosystems, balanced diets, balanced flavours, balanced teeter-totters, equilibrium, and also imbalanced versions of these. Understanding such a concept visually therefore has extensive applications. When approached in this way, aesthetics is not difficult to apply to classroom composition. We know of course that a balanced composition creates a sense of unity and harmony in a work of art. A classroom can certainly be visually balanced using harmonious colours, or by maintaining a large clear and open space while a smaller part of the room contains a concentration of supplies and resources. Balance in this sense contributes to the overall character of a space, creating a sense of harmony and well-being in occupants of the space. In addition to the visual, we know that a balanced diet is important to our health. What students choose to be affected by in the classroom, in the form of texts, both visual and literal, can be considered in terms of balance—some playful texts coupled with the macabre, fairy-tales and biographies, comic books and still life paintings. And then too, balance in terms of addressing different cultures.

And balance isn’t always what we should strive for. Through aesthetic-empathy, knowing when to tip the scale so that the class becomes off balance can be useful as well. I worked with a small class at one point that tended, in general, to follow rules too closely, impeding them from thinking in new


ways. To offset this “rule following” equilibrium, I set up an assignment wherein the solution to the challenge (organizing historical art reproductions according to the order they were made), could easily be solved by essentially doing what would seem like cheating—simply looking at the small print information beneath the images. The only instruction provided was to put the images in chronological order. One student, the most rebellious in fact, to the shock of the group (who hadn’t even noticed the dates at the bottom), completed the challenge very quickly, and was praised for applying what was an unconventional solution in a classroom context.

Capitalizing on emergent features: Applying Eisner’s Qualitative Forms of Intelligence

In his article What Can Education Learn from the Arts about the Practice of Education, Eisner (2002) articulated six artistic “modes” that relate to teaching, and can inform the classroom-as-composition in many ways: 1. the capacity to compose qualitative relationships for some purpose; 2. the capacity to capitalize on emergent features; 3. the capacity to recognize that how something is said or done effects meaning; 4. the idea that cognition is not limited by language; 5. the idea that there is a relationship between thinking and material; 6. the idea that aesthetic satisfaction is motivating and such experience enabled by the arts is not limited to the arts. These ideas can contribute to a repertoire of aesthetics-inspired tools that can be applied in relation to the classroom-as-composition.

The following story provides an example of Eisner’s second qualitative form of intelligence, the capacity to capitalize on emergent features, in practice. I (Renee) was learning to be a teacher and was in the midst of my teaching practicum at Sackville High School in Sackville, Nova Scotia. I was working on a drawing project with a grade 10 class. Having a personal appreciation for surrealism, and the creepy aesthetic of broken dolls, I had assembled my creepy-doll collection into a pile for the purpose of a still life drawing class. This decision was met with resistance from one male student in particular who complained about having to draw dolls and made several comments about “Miss Jackson and her freaky dolls”. At the time I sensed a danger from this student, knowing immediately that I had to do something to protect my vulnerability as a student-teacher. Within the live situation, or the


plane of composition, one has to be immediately responsive to the situation, just as the artist working on a composition responds to the behavior of the medium in-situ. At the time, I simply set up another still life involving objects within reach, an iron and a wooden spoon. However, like the artist, once I stepped back from the composition, to the plane of organization, I enabled further reflection.

The danger I faced involved the threat of giving in to a powerful student in a context that had the potential to infect other students, who then may have decided not to take me seriously as their teacher. Power dynamics flow through classrooms and require special attention. Philosophically I am a student-centered teacher, but the position of a student-teacher is vulnerable. With such elements in mind, I very clearly remember being upset, mostly because when I was in a becoming-with-the-class mode, I could feel that the student was attempting to ridicule me, and I could sense the potential for the rest of the students to dismiss me into the stereotype of “freaky” art teacher, not to be taken seriously. Stepping back from the composition, I developed a plan.

I gathered several tin cans from my recycling bin and removed the labels. When the students came in the next day, the cans were set up at the front of the room. With a very serious tone, I announced that they would be drawing tin cans for the duration of our three weeks together. This announcement was met with a chorus of resistance as I set the clock for the duration of our drawing session. When the session was over I asked, “Would you rather draw a variety of things, or tin cans?” The answer, as anticipated, was a resounding desire to “draw a variety of things!”. Without ever referring directly to the resistant student from the previous day, I was able to deflect his power by turning the class against, not him, but his resistance to drawing the “freaky dolls”. I achieved this by exaggerating the implications of his desire. He resisted drawing dolls/ something weird, whereas the opposite of weird was a worse option. Also, the deeper implications of my scheme had the potential to manifest a subtle lesson about something like democracy: A variety of options means we will connect more strongly with some and less with others, but this is inherently more interesting than working with only one idea or option—heterogeneity vs. homogeneity.

A more straightforward or traditional type reaction to the problem might have involved carrying on the next day as usual, enabling the student


to continue to resist. This solution obviously would have required less time to concoct. Good artists are able to capitalize on emergent, unpredictable features, and continuously reflect in various ways about a work in progress. Each work grows from past experience but is also a re-invention of what has come before, as their body of work evolves based on experience and events that occur in life and within the process of creation. Time for reflection is imperative to the creative process in both art making and teaching. In this teaching situation I took the time to think through the situation and the underlying learning opportunities. I transformed a situation that could have grown in a destructive way, into something constructive. I eventually developed a bond with this student. Our bond was a result of many “elements at play” and affects within the classroom composition, such as respectful interactions and humour, in addition to the strategy I took to defuse student-resistance in the classroom.

This kind of responsivity is important in many ways in the constructivist classroom context, especially when it comes to discipline. I could have taken a more traditional disciplinary measure and told the student that his resistance was inappropriate. Such an act of discipline would fall into a molar, work-model, a product of a positivist epistemology. This approach no longer works when the classroom is reinterpreted as constructivist.

Using Metaphor

Metaphor is an aesthetic tool that can be used in a multitude of ways to develop aesthetic ways of knowing. We apply the metaphor of the gut here, in conclusion, to deepen our understanding of aesthetic-empathy in relation to teaching.

The Teacher as FLOATING-GUT

The stomach forms a site in the complex formation of one’s subjectivity. Sometimes it functions in concordance with the brain and sometimes in discordance. Nietzsche knew this about the stomach before recent scientific study verified it, saying simply enough, ‘We think with our stomachs.’ (Connolly, 1997)

In more traditional classrooms we conceive of the teacher sharing her mind with those of students. Cognitive processes would be said to be the primary


resource from which the teacher draws. In the classroom composition we are describing, the gut also plays an important role. We think with our guts. Recent scientific research indicates that our gut and the microbes that colonize this space shortly after birth and remain there for the duration of our lives, have more influence over the ways we think and behave than previously imagined. Our gut composition affects our central nervous system in a way we had never conceived of before. It decentralizes the power of the brain over our actions (Foster & McVey-Neufeld, 2013). One could say aesthetic-empathy takes place primarily in our gut. The teacher with a keen aesthetic sensitivity is a floating gut barometer registering affective changes in the classroom. An empathetic teacher, like the good orator, feels the room. We can know, upon entering a room whether there is a lack of energy, or a tension, if a drama is brewing.

I was once a grade 7 teacher at a public school in Toronto. I filled in one day for a neighbouring grade 8 class known for being particularly challenging. As soon as I entered the room/composition, I knew something was amiss. A second later, I knew with my gut that the students had pulled the old switch seats trick. This story seems far-fetched now, even to me, but it is true. After feeling what was happening in the room, I located the student in the composition whose texture differed from the rest due to the sympathy he had for me in my position. Using very subtle gestures to communicate, he indicated to me which fellow students were misplaced. I pointed them out, one at a time, and the classroom fell silent. I heard whispers. “She’s psychic”. Like the artist, I entered into a becoming-with-the-classroom composition. The artist can feel when a composition is working aesthetically, just as a teacher must feel whether a classroom composition is working. The medium itself, and the affects at play inform what has to happen next to ensure this is the case. I never missed an opportunity to enthusiastically greet and engage with the sympathetic student for the rest of my time at that school.

CONCLUSION: Aesthetic-Empathy for Teaching and Living

In rethinking the constructivist classroom as a complex and dynamic composition we have shown how aesthetic-empathy is an important capacity for teachers that can enable their plans and decisions to be informed by


the plane of composition and affective assemblages with which they are engaged. In order to enable the capacity for aesthetic-empathy necessary for teaching in constructivist environments, educators require the exercise and growth of their aesthetic forms of thinking and perceiving as this will enhance their capacities to attend to and be affected by their environments. We have provided some examples of strategies towards this development of aesthetic forms of thinking, as well as examples of aesthetic-empathy in action, pulled directly from teaching experiences informed by a background in visual arts and art education. Aesthetic-empathy can be accomplished by incorporating aesthetic development in teacher education in terms of both making and experiencing art, as well as by considering the classroom itself as an aesthetic composition. Recognition of the significance of aesthetics is largely missing from teacher training, and more generally from our cultural awareness, though many scholars have argued for the importance of aesthetics to both life and education (Eisner, 1985; Greene, 2001; Eisner, 2002; Dewey, 1934, 1998). Aesthetic-empathy connects us to our classrooms and the world (Greene, 2001)—giving us the capacity to feel-into the energy of students or to feel-into a beautiful sunset. Further, this capacity for feeling or being affected by is transformative, we become with others and with the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). How can we properly care for and respect that which we do not attend to and cannot be transformed with?


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Developing Aesthetic-Empathy: A Capacity for Teaching in Constructivist Learning Environments

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