Having an Experience Continued - Intent

To have an artistic experience I think is more than to have an aesthetic experience.  What separates the artistic has to do with intent, although I don’t think there is a clean break between aesthetic /integral/full experiences and purely artistic ones, I think as in all experience there’s a spectrum between the two.  I’m not sure that I could call my earlier ice climbing example art, despite the perception of related qualities, but maybe something like an art.  Art is a communication and so an artist “embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works” (p.50).   And to be creating art the artist must be creating a new vision, not mechanically repeating “some old model fixed like a blueprint in his mind.”  I think there is an art to a lot of things, but that art per se is something a little bit more, namely a communication.

So this gets me thinking about teaching as art or as an art.  Often I think we’re working from an old fixed model, and those of us who are enthusiastic are trying to desperately to make that model work as well is it can.  By this I mean we’re using lesson plans with standards and objectives (fixed models,) but I do think that thoughtful teachers embody in themselves the perception of their students.  We are hopefully acting with “sensitivity to the quality of things” (p. 51).  And I do think that part of our job is to teach our students to be perceptive, as Dewey writes, “For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience.  And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent” (p. 56).  The original producer, I think is the subject matter, content, or concept.  The aim is for students to create meanings which relate comparably to the original concept, the communication technically and qualitatively begins with the teacher, just as the artwork comes from the artist.  This all makes me think that maybe teaching cannot exactly be called art, but it is something a lot like it and to approach it as an art I think would help us to have fuller experiences.