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Rekindling Connectedness with Aesthetic Being

As stakeholders in the curriculum and pedagogy field, it is not unusual that we find ourselves grappling with questions from colleagues, mentors, and beyond that propel our inquiries around the nature of teaching and learning forward. Donald Blumenfeld-Jones’s (2012) recent publication, Curriculum and the aesthetic life: Hermeneutics, body, democracy and ethics in curriculum theory and practice is an artifact in response to such questioning posed to him while he was finding his way into the curriculum studies field some 20 years ago. During Blumenfeld-Jones’s doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the late curriculum studies scholar David Purpel challenged Blumenfeld-Jones to consider how the arts, in particular dance, could address the disparities and ghastly conditions present in the world. Blumenfeld-Jones remarks that Purpel’s commentary ignited in him a “re-awakening” to unite art and politics in such a way as to not simply make art “a servant to activate people to political life” (p. 12). Within the book’s three sections Blumenfeld-Jones blends his lived experiences as a dancer and an educator with a lifetime of scholarly inquiry around curriculum, teaching, research, and philosophy in order to construct an argument for the value of cultivating aesthetic sensibilities both within ourselves and students. Put simply, this book’s aim is to provoke within us curiosity, even desire, to reconnect and deepen our understandings of ourselves as creatures with “a natural capacity” for living aesthetically and creatively (p. 17). Throughout the chapters of the book’s opening section entitled “Thinking Curriculum and Aesthetics: The Ills of the World, the Loss of the Body,” readers are introduced to one of the central tenants anchoring BlumenfeldJones’s book’s entire argument—a view of living aesthetically that is rooted democratically. His positioning of aesthetics offers a challenge to the elitist and mawkish undertones that are frequently tied to the concept. Aesthetic experiencing, for Blumenfeld-Jones, is not phenomenon reserved for high art or those with art degrees. Moreover, such experiencing does not have to