Presentation: May 1, 2026. SCU, GoldCoast, WOW Conference
Resisting the Neo-liberal Stranglehold—Turning up the Volume on the Aesthetic Self: A Portrait of PRISCILLA
When did you last dance?
By re-articulating the self, we re-articulate the systems we are part of.
The arts do not have to remain confined to “the arts” as separate domains. They can instead be understood as modes of thinking and a way of being.
It is a self that extends beyond The Arts and into the creases of our everyday being.
This aesthetic way of interpreting the world aligns with John Dewey and Maxine Greene’s understanding of aesthetics and aesthetic sensibility as lived experience through doing.
We know that children are highly expressive and express themselves in many ways, willing to get messy with life through drawing, movement, sound, play and relationships. You understand multiple languages.
Priscilla extends this invitation further.
She turns it back toward us: The educator.
It is about who we are and how we live.
It is about whether we allow ourselves to remain open.
Curious.
Responsive.
Alive to the world.
At the ready to accept and dive into potential transformations.
To be aesthetically sensible suggests that arts-based explorations never really leave us: it simply moves in and out of our spectrum of possibility and how we express and make meaning.
The issue is when the arts disappear from our awareness altogether.
Within our busy lives and the demands and expectations of neoliberalism, the arts can vanish entirely.
When they vanish from our lives as educator-researchers, they also vanish from within the system.
The arts are never really absent from our lives, although they can become very quiet.
Therefore, the task is to turn up the volume on Aesthetic Education in our lives and living. This, in turn, influences the spaces within which we work.
Priscilla speaks of something she calls displacement.
Where imagination, reality, and play come together.
Where children see things that are not there—and yet are entirely real within their experience.
They become the sun.
They become the movement.
They become the moment.
“This is all semiotic understanding,” she says.
Ways of knowing that extend beyond language.
Beyond text.
Beyond what can be easily measured.
And this matters.
Because we live in a time when education is increasingly defined by measurement.
By outcomes.
By efficiency.
By what can be counted.
And in that world, the arts are often the first to be reduced.
Or removed.
Or treated as an “extra.”
But Priscilla offers something different.
Not through policy.
But through practice.
Through how she lives.
Through how she continues to engage with the world.
Priscilla paints regularly and exhibits her work when possible.
She collaborates with other artists.
She sings.
She dances.
She continues to learn.
Even now, in her seventies.
Priscilla challenges us to think about:
What is language?
What counts as knowledge?
What do we prioritise in our own lived experience?
And perhaps most importantly—
When did we stop prioritising ourselves as highly expressive learners in this way?
The story of Priscilla has been collected via the research method of portraiture.
This method captures lived experience—much like a painter creates a portrait.
It allows the researcher time to explore complexity, contradiction and the texture of lived experience and to attend not only to what is said, but how it is lived through story writing.
In portraiture, the researcher does not stand outside the story.
They are in a relationship with it.
Listening.
Noticing.
Interpreting.
Composing.
Portraiture allows us to appreciate moments that might otherwise be dismissed.
Overlooked.
But in portraiture, they are held.
Attended to.
Interpreted to become meaningful.
Priscilla’s data highlights that this should not be confined to childhood. Rather, aesthetic sensibility, as that which engages the willingness to inhabit imaginative spaces and welcome the multiplicity of modes of expression and voice, can be welcomed and engaged across lifespans (Baldacchino, 2017; Eisner, 2002; Greene, 1967).
Aesthetic education, Greene (2011) understands, cultivates forms of awareness that support active learning environments, where curiosity, inquiry, imagination, empathy, and connection are prioritised. Through encounters with the arts and aesthetic forms, Greene (1973) considers how teachers are afforded greater capacity to question taken-for-granted realities and engage in interpretive processes that open up alternative possibilities (Barone, 2000; Eisner, 1994; White & Costantino, 2013).
This position engages embodied experience, relational meaning-making, and the development of critical consciousness as central to educational practice as modelled by the educator. Through Greene’s life’s work, aesthetic education is not merely about students and their learning or about the teacher developing art skills but is more directed toward cultivating a teacher’s capacity to perceive, imagine, and respond critically. Greene (1973) positions aesthetics as a means of wide-awakeness to the world, inviting teachers to see things as if they could be otherwise.
Such perspectives align with post-structural understandings of subjectivity (Grosz, 2017; Massumi, 2002), where meaning is not fixed but continuously produced through interaction, discourse, and experience. From this viewpoint, the teacher is not a facilitator of doctrine and standards but an active participant in their construction (Alexander, 2013; Hickman, 2020; Massumi, 2017), which is not static, fixed, or linear but endlessly divergent and opportunistic.
Thank you,
Monique Füss
Reference List
Alexander, T. M. (2013). The human eros: Eco-ontology and the aesthetics of existence (1st ed.). Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823252305
Baldacchino, J. (2012). Art’s Way Out: Exit Pedagogy and the Cultural Condition (Vol. 81). BRILL. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-794-3
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Capricorn Books.
Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. Yale University Press.
Greene, M. (1973). Teacher as stranger: Educational philosophy for the modern age. Wadsworth Pub. Co.
Grosz, E. A. (2017). The incorporeal: Ontology, ethics, and the limits of materialism. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/gros18162
Hickman, L. A. (2020). Classical Pragmatism: Waiting at the End of the Road (pp. 13–29). Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823285167-003
Massumi, B. (2017). The Principle of Unrest: Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field. Open Humanities Press. https://doi.org/10.26530/OAPEN_630732
Massumi, Brian. (2002). A shock to thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (1st ed.). Routledge.Images taken from free Unsplash.com
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