The cultivation of sensitive perception a perspective on aesthetic education.

摘要

This inquiry seeks to describe the nature of sensitive perception, which I identify as an embodied sensibility that mediates concepts and concrete phenomena, through an examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Johann Von Goethe. I draw extensively on the work of Claude Monet as a visual analogy for how sensitive perception functions. After linking sensitive perception to an embodied experience, I explore how this significant mode of perceiving may be cultivated in the educational environment through a deliberate attentiveness to the pedagogical nature of the interplay between students, spaces and objects of inquiry.;The result of this investigation is a vision of curriculum that offers teachers a way of envisioning their practice as an open, generative and progressive process. I argue that the cultivation of sensitive perception may permit students and teachers to perceive the interplay between concepts and concrete experience. Finally, I seek to make the case that when this way of knowing is denied in educational practice, it inflicts a form of knowledge inequality on teachers and students. This knowledge inequality arises when the teacher and the student are not permitted to perceive the generative possibilities inherent in conceptual and phenomenal engagements; when the objects of knowing become reified from their actual life in the world.