Hearts and Minds Without Fear

Aesthetic Education Program Models: Create Compassionate Communities to End Homelessness

Unmasking Homelessness: Poetic Compositions and Masked Emotions, New Britain Museum of American Art (2013)

  Utilizing place-based creative commons inquiry, the students depicted in the video below investigated the authentic issue of homelessness facing their surrounding local community of New Britain. They explored their cultural biases and stereotypes, values, beliefs, identities, and sense of self as a teacher with invited community artists and activists leading a myriad of arts experiences. The artistic community forums contributed to a developing sense of the power of aesthetic education manifested in the creation and design of symbolic messages using masks, poetry, dance, music, and theater to address ending homelessness, and breaking down stereotypes of poverty. As shown, symbolic ideas carried a compassionate message to build awareness, which was then integrated and shared within the community to empower transformative learning and societal contribution.

Clark, B. A. (April, 2013). Unmasking Homelessness: Poetic Compositions, Aesthetic Education and Masked Emotions Performance. Presented with CCSU elementary education students at the CCSU University, Museum Community Collaborative, A Home of One’s Own, New Britain Museum of American Art.

Clark, B. A. & French, J. (May 2009). Creating a Compassionate Community: Symbolic Messages to End Homelessness: CCSU Elementary Education Students & Gaffney Elementary School: Grades three, four and five, parents and community members. Gaffney Elementary School Auditorium.

Clark, B. A. (April, 2009) Art in the Heart of the City, Creating a Compassionate Community: Symbolic Messages to End Homelessness. Artwork developed by Gaffney School children was presented for New Britain Commission on the Arts: New Britain City Hall, CT.

Clark, B. A. & French, J. (March, 2009). “Masked” Messages to End Homelessness. An interdisciplinary aesthetic forum featuring guest artist Larry Hunt of Masque Co. and CCSU elementary education students: Torp Theatre, CCSU.

Clark, B. A. (March 2009). “Masked” Messages to End Homelessness. An interdisciplinary aesthetic forum featuring guest artist Larry Hunt of Masque Co. and CCSU elementary education students presented to grades three, four and five, teachers, and community members of Gaffney Elementary School. New Britain, CT.

 

 

The above video clip performance illustrates the energy behind how elementary pre-service teachers can reveal their emerging sense of identity as creative compassionate teacher leaders and citizens for change through civic engagement. Aesthetic education encompasses critical theory and questions status quo waste, consumption and human behavior. The whole of our revolutionary aesthetic curriculum, introduces our pre-service teachers to local, national, and international social and eco justice issues, selected to impact their ideas and beliefs of transformative learning, sense of imaginative societal contribution, core values, and coping with institutional conflicts. Topics have included the dolphin slaughter for profit in Taiji, Japan (of which the above “Respect” video is one performance) as well as ending homelessness within our university’s surrounding community.

When introduced in community efforts that embrace a sense of possibility, social imagination and empowerment, future educators are given an opportunity to design for elementary school children aesthetic symbolic messages within a community performance, promoting imaginative social action and making the possibility to change behavior evident. Experiencing a compassionate community commons methodology, teachers realize they can be an imaginative, innovative, and inspirational teacher of children and citizen of change.

 [F]or those authentically concerned about the “birth of meaning,” about breaking through the surfaces, about teaching others to “read” their own worlds, art forms must be conceived of as ever-present possibility. They ought not to be treated as decorative, as frivolous. They ought to be, if transformative teaching is our concern, a central part of curriculum, wherever it is devised (Greene, 1988, p. 131).

A critical aesthetic community commons within a teacher preparation course curriculum critically awakens our students to SEE with respect, heart and soul and to imagine, a wide-awakening of what could be possible in educational practice (Greene, 2001).

 

All references to outside sources can be found in the bibliography sections of our published work.