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?
Until next time,
Dr. Mon x
Images taken from free Unsplash.com
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