Aesthetic dimensions of educational administration and leadership

The Aesthetic Dimensions of Educational Administration and Leadership provides an aesthetic critique of educational administration and leadership. It demonstrates the importance of aesthetics on all aspects of the administrative and leadership world: the ways ideas and ideals are created, how their expression is conveyed, the impact they have on interpersonal relationships and the organizational environment that carries and reinforces them, and the moral boundaries or limits that can be established or exceeded.

The book is divided into three sections.
Section I examines various philosophical traditions in aesthetics as they inform administrative life, focussing on major modern traditions arising from Kant, romanticism and Nietzsche, Collingwood, the pragmatic school, and critical theory.
Section II explores four aesthetic sources for administrative critique - architecture, literature, film, and movement - as they serve both to understand the social construction of administration and leadership and provide a critique of values, roles, power and authority.
Section III examines more topical and applied problems of charisma, heroism, and authority in practice, concluding with a discussion of the aesthetic analysis of politics and power within the context of contemporary educational administration and leadership theory.

While presenting a significant departure from conventional studies in the field, the international contributors reflect a continuity of thought on the creation, use and abuse of administrative and leadership authority from the writings of Plato through to contemporary theory. This book should appeal to school administrators and leaders and those aspiring to these roles.

Somatic encounters: affect, presence and value in aesthetic practice

Reproduced with the specific permission of the copyright owner.

Harmony in and between aesthetic experience and moral experience

The thesis finds that the notion of harmony has been integral to the concepts of beauty and goodness from the earliest times, in Eastern and Western philosophy. It also argues that the experience of beauty and the experience of goodness are related through the human propensity to avoid disorder.

Gilles Deleuze : the problem of aesthetic constructions with case studies on the architectural projects of Louis Kahn

Analyses the late aesthetic writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, arguing that : Deleuze continuously refers to modern art and architecture as models of modernist thinking; his method can serve in the analysis and creation of architecture; this can be demonstrated through analysis of the work of architect Louis Kahn.

The aesthetic image : affect and the production of knowledge in practice-led research

This paper addresses the question of how we might provide practitioners with a framework for understanding how affect and aesthetic processes generate images that are implicated in the production of new knowledge in creative arts research. Drawing on the thought of Julia Kristeva, it examines the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and the significance of this for research training and the development of more effective pedagogies both within and beyond the university.

Aesthetic experience and innovation in practice–led research

Within the context of ERA, this paper addresses the question of how we might provide practitioners with a framework for understanding creative arts research as the production of new knowledge. Drawing on the thought of Julia Kristeva, it examines the aesthetic underpinnings of discovery and the implications and significance of this for research training and the development of more effective pedagogies both within and beyond the university.
Kristeva’s work constitutes both an implicit and explicit critique of science allowing us to conceive of artistic research as an experiential and performative production of knowledge. As a mode of enquiry, artistic practice reveals the inextricable and necessary relationship between practice and theory, interpretation and making, art and life. This interrelationship underpins the aesthetic dimension of revolutionary practice and its production of unfamiliar or mutant forms of knowledge that is often difficult to grasp in terms of its capacity to engender social change and innovation. In the context of creative arts practice as research, the notion of experience-in-practice indicates that interpretation and analysis must fall to the practitioner-researcher, himself or herself, rather than to another person who has been external to the procedures of making, to trace the significant experiential, subjective and emergent processes involved in the production of the work that allows it to reveal the new. This is necessary if the generative and revolutionary impact of artistic research is to be fully understood in the wider research arena. In the final part of this paper, I will apply and illustrate these ideas through an analysis of a number of artistic research projects successfully completed in Australia.

Aesthetic anxieties : the problem of defining the migrant house in Australia

The interest of this paper concerns the problem about the migrant house – why has it been so difficult to define? In order to examine the problem of the lack of literature on the migrant house it is important to look at the literature on the Australian house, and to examine how the migrant house is positioned or not included in this literature. It will approach this through what is accepted as discourse analysis, but with a particular position informed by the work of Stuart Hall on representation.

Examining the aesthetic dimensions of teaching : relationships between teacher knowledge, identity and passion

Having an appreciation for the subject, their students and what the subject can offer their students has both cognitive and emotional dimensions for teachers. This paper uses empirical data to explore the efficacy of a Deweyan inspired framework called “Aesthetic Understanding” to scrutinise relationships between teacher knowledge, identity and passion. The paper uses case study data of three teachers of maths and/or science generated from a video study to illustrate the relationships between the three elements of Aesthetic Understanding. The need to value the aesthetic dimensions of teaching when examining the subject-specific nature of secondary teaching is discussed.

Bowerbirds, art and aesthetics : are bowerbirds artists and do they have an aesthetic sense?

Male bowerbirds create and decorate a structure called a bower which serves only to attract females for mating, and females visit and choose one among many bower owners before deciding which male to mate with. Is what they do art, and do they have an aesthetic sense? I propose operational definitions of art, judgement, and an aesthetic sense which depend upon communication theory which allow one to get explicit answers to this question. By these definitions Great Bowerbirds are artists, judge art, and therefore have an aesthetic sense.