The Artistic-Aesthetic Curriculum

Greene, Maxine. (2007). In Randall Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of Education: an anthology. pp. 561-566. Blackwell Publishing.

Greene quotes John Dewey's approach to art as experience: art clarifies and concentrates the meanings of things ordinarily dumb and inchoate; works of art can keep alive "the power to experience the common world in its fullness"

In this light, Green argued: "This would not happen, I am sure, if it were not for the ability to pull aside the curtains of habit, automatism, banality, so that alternative possibilities can be perceived." (p. 562).

For Greene, art education contributes to developing the sense of agency when it takes participatory approaches or the "reader response" approach. She put it:

"How, on the various levels at which you teach, can you create the kinds of situations where involvement with the arts not only enables you and your students to combat boredom and banality, but develops among all of you the sense of agency that is most apparent (or so it seems to me) in encounters with the arts? This takes me back, of course, to the participatory approach or to the "reader response" approach. I have in mind the notion that works of art can never be realized by a merely passive attention. There has to be an active, energetic reading out." (p. 564)