Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)

Kanu
					, Yatta

English

Curriculum as Cultural Practice: Postcolonial Imagination

Irwin
					, Rita

Toward an Aesthetic of Unfolding In/Sights through Curriculum

Upitis
					, Rena

 
 
 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
Volume 1    Number  2   Fall 2003 
 
 
1 
Making Art, Making Connections 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
RENA UPITIS 
Queen’s University 
 
When adults are asked to think of something they love to do, something 
they have learned about over an extended period of time, something that 
gives them pleasure (though not without struggle), nearly everyone will 
identify a pursuit that is connected with the arts, the body, or the natural 
world. For many years, I have pondered what it is about these three areas 
that are linked, and why it is that pursuits in the arts, pursuits involving 
learning through one’s body, and pursuits that involve intimate 
interactions with the natural world, are so important to our out-of-school 
learning. I have come to believe that what composing music, playing 
soccer, and hiking in the Rocky Mountains have in common is that they 
have the potential to fully engage the intellect, the emotions, the spirit, 
and the physical being. Further, it is these kinds of activities that connect 
us, in some fundamental way, with the earth and with what it means to 
be human on this spinning blue ball. I would make the claim that the 
passion and seriousness with which people engage in such pursuits is 
precisely the passion that is required to nurture and sustain meaningful 
learning in schools.  
This kind of learning is possible in all subjects. Mathematicians and 
scientists who are at the top of their form—whether they are six or sixty 
years old—experience the same exhilaration from their creations and 
discoveries as do artists and dancers. Mathematicians talk about the 
beauty of proofs, the elegance of solutions—judgments that involve an 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
aesthetic dimension. One of the great lessons the arts have to teach is that 
real learning ought to be measured by standards of beauty. 
Indeed, one of the guiding principles in assembling this issue of 
JCACS was that of beauty. As Brent Davis (in press) has so eloquently 
stated, “Science has not provided meaningful answers to such questions 
as ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What are beauty, love, and honour?’” The 
papers assembled in this collection are, in a humble way, an attempt to 
address precisely those questions. 
Davis further argues that “those traditions that are aligned with … 
questions of deep meaning are the ones that seem best fitted to the broad 
senses that were originally suggested by the word teaching.” He claims 
that “educating was originally and fully focused on matters of gnosis,” 
that is, matters that addressed spiritual knowing and beauty. Davis 
claims that, with the dawning of the modern era, the emphasis on 
teaching shifted to practical know-how, to episteme, and with the triumph 
of episteme over gnosis, the comfortable co-existence of these two states 
of knowing—and being—collapsed. Perhaps it is in this century that the 
two states of knowing will, once again, find a harmonic co-existence. 
Certainly, such a harmonic co-existence seems not only desirable but 
possible to me, after reading, many times, the essays and other 
contributions contained in the pages herein. 
This seems an appropriate place to comment on the ‘new look’ for 
JCACS. If you are already familiar with the journal, you will realize that 
with this issue, we have re-designed the website. The images that you see 
throughout the website were created by members of the Queen’s 
University arts education research group—undergraduate, graduate, and 
post-doctoral students, administrative staff, and faculty. Every 
Wednesday morning, we meet in the kitchen of the old Stone House to 
engage in a couple of hours of art-making. The Stone House sits in the 
middle of a open field just north of the Education building (we moved 
here a few years ago when our pile of data for a national research project 
on arts education grew too high to accommodate in our university 
offices). It is in this house that activities of both work and play thrive in 
‘comfortable co-existence’, as we deal with the practical matters of 
teaching and research, but also with matters of gnosis. Our art-making has 
become both a welcome and necessary ritual. It grounds us and our work. 
It reminds us why we became involved in education and the arts in the 
first place. And it leaves us with a sense of mid-week renewal, giving us 
energy and direction for our other work. As it happened, we were 
creating collages when the JCACS re-design was being envisaged, and 
this medium lends itself well both to paper and the electronic format. 
2 
Making Art, Making Connections 
RENA UPITIS 
Because many of us were also involved in various aspects of getting this 
edition of JCACS ready, it made sense to us to integrate these images into 
the journal, just as the production of these images is integrated with other 
aspects of our intellectual and spiritual landscapes. 
This issue opens with a feature that was introduced in the inaugural 
issue of JCACS. “Curriculum Genealogies” reproduces previously 
published work, coupled with a retrospective by the original author. An 
excerpt from the work of Ellen Dissanayake is reproduced in the present 
issue, along with her response to that excerpt. I first encountered 
Dissanayake’s work when I read her book Homo Aestheticus: Where Art 
Comes from and Why. It is from this book that a chapter is excerpted for the 
Curriculum Genealogy. In it, Dissanayake takes a bio-evolutionary 
perspective in explaining why the arts are fundamental to human 
experience, and indeed, to human survival. It is through a re-reading of 
her work that I have come closer to answering the question I posed at the 
beginning of my remarks, that is, why the arts, the body, and the natural 
world seem so fundamental to adult learning. Dissanayake makes a 
compelling case for how these three areas have been important to the 
human condition since pre-modern times, and how they continue to 
thrive in many contemporary human societies. She shows, for example, 
how ritual and repetition associated with ceremonies that involve the arts 
at their heart have assisted in shaping and ordering our physical and 
social worlds. She also shows how the arts make enjoyable experiences 
memorable and, conversely, how the arts make otherwise unbearable 
experiences bearable. In her charming revisiting of the chapter titled “The 
Core of Art: Making Special,” Dissanayake speaks of the particular 
circumstances by which her two first books were created, and how her 
term “making special” has fared over the past decade. 
Following the “Curriculum Genealogy” are four essays that explore 
the connections between art-making and curriculum. In recognizing that 
the arts provide ways of looking at the kinds of questions raised by 
Davis, and that these ways of thinking about curriculum could be widely 
applied to other disciplines, the idea for a symposium titled “Learning to 
Create Insight: The Work of the Arts in Curriculum Studies” was 
conceived. “Learning to Create Insight” was presented at the 2003 annual 
meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) in 
Halifax, Nova Scotia. The symposium was co-hosted by the Canadian 
Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS) and the Artists, Researchers, 
and Teachers Special Interest Group (ARTS-SIG). Organized by myself 
(as President of the ARTS-SIG) and Dennis Sumara (then Vice-President 
and now President of CACS), we invited scholars who were active both 
 3
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
as artists and as curriculum theorists to participate in the symposium. We 
asked them to portray some aspect of their art-making and to link that 
art-making to curriculum theory and classroom practices. This they did. 
Following the conference, the presenters were invited to submit papers 
for publication in this issue of JCACS. All four of the presenters agreed, 
and their essays are contained in the pages that follow. In preparing their 
papers, presenters were challenged to bring the art-making alive in the 
electronic format. Consequently, you will find a mixture of words, 
images, and sounds in these presentations along with the theoretical 
implications of their art and ideas. 
The first of these essays, by Heesoon Bai, is titled “Learning from 
Zen Arts: A Lesson in Intrinsic Valuation.” With flawless logic and a 
heartfelt rendering, Bai takes the reader on a dazzling philosophical 
journey through Western and Zen traditions of art and philosophy. When 
we reach the destination, we find ourselves concluding that the arts—
particularly where ethics and aesthetics are merged—can, and must  be, a 
healing force for the prevailing instrumentalism that many of our popular 
cultural habits and practices now entail. Bai claims that instrumentalism 
is a “hegemonic ethics” that is “objectivized and depersonalized,” an 
ethics that threatens our very existence. In her illustrated essay, Bai comes 
to the same conclusion that Dissanayake came to in Homo Aesthetics—
albeit by a very different route—and that is that  “the arts are essential 
and critical to planetary survival.”   
Bai’s essay is followed by Katharine Smithrim’s musical offering 
titled “Singing Lessons: A Hidden Pedagogy.” The essay begins with a 
10-minute excerpt of an hour long recital in which Smithrim details the 
lessons that her various singing teachers have instilled over many 
decades. Both the script itself and video segments featuring Smithrim and 
her accompanist are used to present this portion of the recital. Following 
the performance, Smithrim describes how her teaching is enhanced when 
she remembers to bring the singer to class. Smithrim tells us, for example, 
that “all parts [of the singer] are required to sing well: the physical, the 
intellectual, the spiritual and the emotional. The singer knows how to 
engage her whole being and the whole beings of her students in the 
process of teaching.” Now, to a singer—and to others involved in other 
forms of art-making—it is impossible not to engage the physical body in 
the production of the art and in the learning. Indeed, it is hard to imagine 
any learning that does not involve the body in some way—yet, much 
curriculum is presented as if to a being without a physical existence.  
In the essay “Toward an Aesthetic of Unfolding In/Sights through 
Curriculum,” Rita Irwin also makes the claim that cognitive ways of 
4 
Making Art, Making Connections 
RENA UPITIS 
knowing are limiting, while, at the same time acknowledging that these 
are the most prevalent ways of thinking embraced by “government 
created policies, laws, and curricula.” She argues that aesthetic 
approaches “appreciate the awkward spaces existing between chaos and 
order, complexity and simplicity, certainty and uncertainty,” noting the 
importance of novelty, surprise, and humour in invigorating such 
‘spaces’ to be active for creation of many forms. Irwin weaves images of 
jazz improvisation and the practice of ‘underpainting’ to make the claim 
that teaching practices, and, moreover, educational institutions, could  be 
transformed through the sensibilities that these two forms of art-making 
offer. She states that “just as [artists create underpaintings] destined to be 
re-painted, teachers re-create plans for instruction, researchers re-imagine 
the design of their research programs, and curriculum leaders re-envision 
projects, events and policies.  When this happens, teachers, researchers, 
and curriculum leaders are moving beyond comfortable practices and 
imagining new futures.” Two of Irwin’s own forest paintings are 
incorporated into the heart of this essay. 
Rebecca Luce-Kapler’s opening poem in the final essay “Orality and 
the Poetics of Curriculum” is titled “The Milky Way.” In it, images are 
painted with words: images of the early autumn, a mother’s body, the 
light of stars, a reading lamp, the light “where dying goes  … a pathway 
to brilliance.” Images of the body and the natural world, once again—and 
images that are delivered with a rhythmic grace. However, Luce-Kapler 
tells us that her aim, in this essay, is not to explore the “interrelationship 
of rhythm with image and word” or even the place of poetry in schools. 
Instead, she has chosen to focus beyond the writing of the poem, beyond 
the text on the page, to a consideration of “the oral origins of poetry.” 
Like Dissanayake, she invites us to think back to earlier times, coaxing us 
with the claim that “poetry reaches back to the structures of memory 
before words were written down”.  In so doing, we hear Luce-Kapler’s 
own voice on audio segments throughout the essay as she tells us that 
“we remember with bones—the bones of our bodies, the bones of our 
language.” 
Although this issue of JCACS does not include the “Curriculum 
Lives” feature that appeared in the inaugural issue, two other features 
that were first envisaged by the founding editors, Dennis Sumara and 
Rebecca Luce-Kapler, appear in this issue. “Curriculum Pedagogies” 
presents a paper by Betty Hanley that describes the changing demands 
for the preparation of music teachers for contemporary schools. Hanley’s 
comprehensive account describes the trials and tribulations of 
challenging the traditional Western music curriculum and the ways in 
 5
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
which it has been taught. She also provides detailed accounts of the kinds 
of questions she and her students have asked of one another, the musical 
repertoire she has chosen to include in the course that has recently 
emerged, and teaching vignettes—moments of frustration, moments of 
triumph.  It is my hope that the fundamental shifts that Hanley has made 
in her teaching of the music education curriculum are ones that other 
professors, teaching in other disciplines, will find both instructive and 
inspirational. 
This issue of JCACS closes with two short Reviews. Eileen Harris 
offers her views of Elliott Eisner’s new book titled The Arts and the 
Creation of Mind, from her perspective as a former elementary classroom 
teacher, and from the perspective of  a curriculum scholar in arts 
education who is familiar with Eisner’s earlier work and that of other 
theorists in arts education. In Ann Patteson’s review of the film The Hours, 
she closes with these words: 
 
[L]ives and living are rarely straightforward, but are, rather, 
ambiguous. The Hours prompts us to consider the creative impulse 
that may be fed and sustained through the exploration of that 
ambiguity and to wonder what moments of beauty we may have 
missed in the drive to achieve mandated curricular outcomes. And, 
the fact that we can still hear the voice of Virginia Woolf through the 
layers of decades, Cunningham’s book, and the film, reminds us that 
art transcends time to add radiance to the moments of our lives 
inside and outside the classroom. 
 
Moments of radiance. Beauty. The exploration of ambiguity. Indeed, 
these are themes that are illuminated throughout the offerings in this 
collection. May you be enraptured, perturbed, and, ultimately, find 
resonance and energy from the ideas contained in the pages that follow.  
 
 
References 
 
Davis, B. (in press). Inventions of teaching. Lawrence Erlbaum 
Dissanayake, E. (1995). Homo aestheticus: Where the arts come from and why. 
Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press (originally published in 
1992 by Free Press). 
Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven, CT:  
Yale University Press. 
6 
Making Art, Making Connections 
RENA UPITIS 
 
 7


Making Art, Making Connections

Weber, Sandra

Mitchell, Claudia

Collaboration and Coauthorship: Reflections from the Inside

Hanley
					, Betty

Navigating Unpredictable Possibilities in Postmodern Music Education

Smithrim
					, Katharine

Singing Lessons: A Hidden Pedagogy

Davis
					, Brent

39
Toward a Pragmatics of Complex Transformation
BRENT DAVIS
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Volume 1  Number 1  Spring 2003
Toward a Pragmatics
of Complex Transformation
BRENTDAVIS
University of Alberta
While browsing the abstracts of a recent issue of Educational Evaluation and
Policy Analysis, a journal of the American Educational Researchers Associa-
tion, I came across a report in which statistical methods were used to “con-
trol for” such “confounding variables” as “teachers, schools, and classrooms”
(Pong & Pallas, 2001).
I had to read the abstract a few times, a little stunned by the fact that
there still exist educational researchers who regard teachers, classrooms,
and schools in such terms. It seemed like it had to be a parody, akin to a
spoof of social science research that circulated several years back in which
it was reported that a statistically significant correlation exists between ut-
terances of the phrase “Please pass the salt” and the behavior of “salt pas-
sage.”
Of course, not too many decades ago, studies rooted in statistical meth-
ods and assumptions were the rule of educational inquiry, not the excep-
tion. But that’s changed. Dramatically. Surveys of library stacks and cita-
tion indices reveal that interpretive and critical discourses have won the
day. And thankfully so. We know, deeply, that such nested and co-impli-
cated influences as teachers in classrooms in schools cannot be bracketed or
ignored in discussions of any aspect of formal education. That being said,
the success in exorcising statistical analysis seems to have had an unfortu-
nate side effect, namely concomitant rejections of scientific methods and
mathematics-based tools of interpretation.
40
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Before I go much further, I should emphasize that I’m not advocating
renewed embraces of the analytic method, rationalistic argument, or em-
piricist demonstrations around matters of learning, pedagogy, and curricu-
lum. My point is, rather, that the contemporary habit of demonizing science
as a mindless monolith is as problematic as the previous deification of ana-
lytic and statistical methods. That is, the tendency to couple “science” to
“statistics” is an error, and one that might now be hindering curriculum
studies when it could be supporting our efforts.
Just as there are many, many perspectives that might orient interpretive
inquiry, there is a diversity of scientific attitudes. One particularly useful
rubric for distinguishing among the varied interests and methods of sci-
ence was proposed by physicist Warren Weaver in 1948. He noted that mod-
ern science has evolved around at least three different categories of phe-
nomena, each of which lends itself to particular interpretive tools.
The first he called simple systems. These include collisions, orbits, ballis-
tics, and other events that involve only two or three well-defined objects
and their interactions—the sorts of events that are studied in high school
physics and that occupied the attentions of Galileo, Descartes, and New-
ton. Such phenomena are suited to the ideals of prediction and control,
through appropriate applications of the sorts of relatively simple and el-
egant mathematical laws that are presented in Newtonian mechanics.
However, Newton himself recognized that these systems of physical laws
can give rise to intractable calculations when the number of interacting
agents increases only slightly. Partially in response to this sort of realiza-
tion, by the early 1800s scientists borrowed from a new class of analytic
tools—probability and statistics—that mathematicians had invented to serve
the needs of business (specifically, for the construction of mortuary tables
for insurance companies). These tools were trained on phenomena that in-
volved thousands, millions, and more particles and variables. Examples of
complicated phenomena, Weaver’s second category,1  included flowing wa-
ter, chemical reactions, air movements, and games of chance. The new meth-
ods also supported the emergence of a “stochasticized” mindset, as terms
such as probably and likely took on new meanings and new prominence in
both scientific and popular discourse (Davis & Hersh, 1987).
That being said, probability and chance were understood as a veneer
that we humans, owing to our perceptual and conceptual limitations, were
compelled to impose on a universe believed to be certain and pre-scripted.
The underlying mentality was still deterministic, consistent with Pierre
Laplace’s pronouncement at the close of the 18th century:
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all forces by which
nature is animated and the respective situations of the beings which compose
it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analyses—it would
41
Toward a Pragmatics of Complex Transformation
BRENT DAVIS
embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies and those of
the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future as the past,
would be present to its eyes. (1795/1951, p. 3)
The move to probability and statistics, then, was in response to the realiza-
tion that no flesh-based intelligence was sufficiently vast. It was commen-
tary on the limits of humanity, not on the nature of the universe. There was
no questioning of the laws of mechanics or their appropriate application,
merely a resignation to the fact that increasingly complicated phenomena
made for decreasingly reliable characterizations.
In fact, far from representing a break from prior mindsets, the develop-
ment and embrace of probabilitistic and statistical models was an amplifi-
cation of modernist sensibilities. This point is perhaps most apparent in the
emergence of a discourse of normality—which was prompted and enabled
in the coupling of Darwinism and statistics in the mid-1800s. In the process
of dissolving the assumption that “creation” was static (actually, in dissolv-
ing the assumption of creation), Darwin proposed a mechanism that ac-
counted for the emergence of diversity. He recast variety as something that
was caused, not something that was pregiven. In the realm of the social
sciences, it suddenly made sense to measure difference, to define “normal”
in terms of arithmetic means, and to pathologize everything that “devi-
ated” from arbitrary zones of “average”.
With the 1900s came the gradual realization that these sorts of practices
might be problematic. In the “hard sciences,” this insight emerged in the
articulation of a previously unrecognized category of phenomena that
yielded neither to Newtonian mechanics nor to statistical analysis. These
instances of complexity, in Weaver’s terms, include brain function, stock
market activity, cultural evolution—in effect, phenomena that are dynami-
cally adaptive and that we tend to describe or regard as living systems. (I
might also mention that teachers, classrooms, and schools—and other phe-
nomena that some researchers continue to ignore and factor out as con-
founding variables—fall into this category.) Such forms sustain their exist-
ence in the ongoing generation of diverse possibilities, which means that
methods that seek to define universal rules or normal ranges of acceptabil-
ity are utterly inappropriate for their study.
Unfortunately, social science research had already dug itself into a statis-
tics-lined hole by the time proposals such as Weaver’s had begun to emerge
within the scientific establishment. And those who recognized social sci-
ence research to be in a rut tended to blame the imagined culprit of a uni-
fied and monolithic science rather than overzealous and uninformed re-
searchers for the problem. The critical point here is that the spread of statis-
tical methods among educational researchers, while enabled by science and
mathematics, was certainly not a proper reflection of those cultural projects.
42
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Rather, statistics-based educational research occurred in ignorance of sci-
ence and mathematics—an ignorance that was and is supported by schooled
versions of these discourse systems. The following commentaries, all from
prominent mathematicians, underscore this point:
[Some] psychologists and sociologists have come around with their question-
naires and chi-square statistics, purporting to study the human mind quantita-
tively, but most such investigations are so remote from the target that the critic
need hardly say, “Pooh!” They fall over of their own absurdity and pomposity.
(Davis & Hersh, 1987, p. 13)
The introduction of mathematical methods in biology, economics, psychology,
and other branches of the . . . behavioral sciences has always been accompanied
by controversy. . . . [It] is important to state publicly that among professional
mathematicians the skepticism about behavioral-science mathematics . . . is much
stronger than it is among non-mathematical behavioral scientists. (ibid., p. 61)
Too much research in the social sciences . . . is a mindless collection of . . . mean-
ingless data. If property X (say, humor) is defined in this way (number of laughs
elicited by a collection of jokes), and property Y (say, self-esteem) is defined in
that way (number of yes responses to a series of positive traits), then the corre-
lation coefficient between humor and self-esteem is .217. Worthless stuff. (Paulos,
1988, p. 161)
Stewart & Golubitsky (1992) (also mathematicians) offer one explanation
for the sorts of concerns announced above. In brief, they suggest that two
tools of interpretation have been inappropriately collapsed:
Linear models are based upon straight lines, flat planes, and constant growth
rates. Nonlinear models are based upon curves and variable growth rates. If,
like the classical mathematicians, you want to write down formulas that solve
your equations, then it’s best to stick to linear models. But, with computers and
new mathematical tools such as topology, formulas have taken a back seat. Non-
linear models are more interesting, and generally fit nature better. All too often
a nonlinear system has been forced into a linear mould (a round peg into a square
hole!) in order to obtain an answer. The philosophy behind this approach seems
to be that a wrong answer, or the right answer to the wrong question, is better
than no answer at all. (p. 171)
This important distinction between linear and nonlinear models roughly
parallels Weaver’s distinction between complicated systems (which tend to
be mechanical, and hence predictable in general terms) and organized com-
plexity (which tends more toward the organic). Indeed, another name for
complexity science is nonlinear dynamics.
What’s important here is that science and mathematics have developed
tools that are valuable for understanding complex phenomena like learn-
ing and learners—and part of this development has been a shift in what is
meant by “understanding a phenomenon.” For a complex event, such un-
43
Toward a Pragmatics of Complex Transformation
BRENT DAVIS
derstanding is not about control and prediction, but about the capacities to
follow the ongoing evolutions of a form or agent and to make sense of its
emergent structures. Within these sorts of interpretive projects, mathemat-
ics and science have taken on a role that is different from what the original
rationalists and empiricists imagined. The aim now is more about the de-
velopment of useful descriptions and illustrations than about the produc-
tion of explanatory principles.
I’ve found it necessary to resist the temptation to provide hasty summa-
ries of such the descriptions and illustrations. Unfortunately, just like Dar-
winian processes and statistical methods when they were first introduced,
complexity science lends itself to misinterpretation and misappropriation
in the hands of persons working from a prior mindset. To appreciate com-
plexity, one must first learn to live with/in a few rather radical breaks with
accepted wisdom. One is the idea of “order for free,” whereby complex and
transcendent unities can arise in the co-specifying activities of seemingly
autonomous entities. Ants spontaneously self-organize into anthills, birds
into flocks, traders into markets, species into ecosystems, and so on. (This is
where complexivists tend to lose modernists, with their insistence on au-
tonomous, self-contained subjects.) And it all happens without leaders or
intentions. (This is where complexivists tend to part company with those
postmodernists who are committed to the metaphor of “power” as a prop-
erty of and motivator in the evolution of systems.)
Closely related to this dynamic of self-organization is the suggestion that
the human being might be better considered in terms of an agent that is
nested within several different sorts of grander social and/or cultural agents.
I am, simultaneously, a learning unity, a collective of learning unities, and a
subunit of many different learning unities—a suggestion that renders prob-
lematic both sides of such contemporary educational debates as teacher-
versus student-centered classrooms, nature versus nurture, individual ver-
sus social interests, and so on. Complexity science is a science of entangle-
ment, not of distinction-making. It is about participation, not specification.
An important caveat of this sort of discussion is that a complex phenom-
enon is irreducible. It transcends its parts, and so cannot be studied strictly
in terms of a compilation of those parts. It must be studied, that is, at the
level of its emergence. Classrooms aren’t just collections of students, schools
aren’t just collections of classrooms. As such, complexity science provides a
means to read across cognitive, social, situated, critical, cultural, and eco-
logical discourses—without collapsing them or their particular foci into
unitary or coherent phenomena. According to complexity science, such dis-
courses can be simultaneously appropriate to their object of study and in-
compatible with one another. We don’t need to agree to be correct.
44
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
Further to this point, one of the reasons that complexity science is useful
for reading across diverse discourses is that it explicitly embraces many of
the insights and sensibilities that arose over the past century in such fields
as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and pragmatism. This is a topic that I
develop in detail elsewhere (Davis, forthcoming) in an extended discussion
of the evolutions of Western conceptions of teaching away from discourses
that are rooted in metaphysics and toward interpretations that are grounded
in the physical. Consider, for example, the opening three lines of Lakoff and
Johnson’s (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, a text out of cognitive science that is
explicitly informed by complexity science:
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. (p. 3)
The first line hints at Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the second reminds
of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the third recalls Dewey’s pragmatism. What’s
more is that complexity science is not just interested in describing complex
phenomena. It joins with psychoanalysis as one of the few Western dis-
courses with an explicit interest in articulating what might be described as
a pragmatics of transformation. Complexivists, that is, are as much interested
in occasioning complexity and triggering transformations as they are in
studying existing instances of complexity. Two of the conditions that are
necessary have been deliberately incorporated into the structure of this in-
augural issue of the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Stud-
ies—namely, diversity among parts and the juxtaposition of that diversity
in ways that might trigger new individual and/or collective possibilities.
These same sorts of conditions can be deliberately woven into classrooms,
but almost never are. Education hasn’t paid much attention to this particu-
lar pragmatics of transformation—unlike business, economics, politics, eth-
ics, law, and several branches of medicine, including immunology and neu-
rology. I suspect that part of the reason for the slow uptake among educa-
tionalists has to do with the overwhelming commitment to linearity and
linear causality, inscribed in institutional structures, classroom resources,
developmentalist theories, curriculum intentions, and pedagogical meth-
ods. It may be that, until we are collectively willing to face the prospect that
the formal educational project is deeply problematic, complexity science
must be relegated to that class of educationally unbearable discourses that
includes (among its many honorable members) psychoanalysis,  pragma-
tism, and poststructuralism.
45
Toward a Pragmatics of Complex Transformation
BRENT DAVIS
Note
1 Weaver actually used the term “disorganized complexity” to refer to his second cat-
egory. “Complicated” is the preferred word at the moment for this class of phenomena.
See Waldrop (1992).
References
Davis, B. (forthcoming). Inventions of teaching: A genealogy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Davis, P. J., & Hersh, R. (1987). Descartes’ dream: The world according to mathematics. New
York: Houghton Mifflin.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its chal-
lenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.
Laplace, P.. (1795/1951). A philosophical essay on probabilities. New York: Dover.
Paulos, J. A. (1988). Innumeracy: Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. New York:
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Toward a Pragmatics of Complex Transformation

In Praise of Romance

JCAC Editor

   
Acknowledgements 
 
‘The Core of Art: Making Special’ appears as Chapter 4 in the book Homo Aestheticus: 
Where Art Came From and Why, first published in 1992 by Free Press, a division of 
Macmillan, Inc. The first paperback version was published in 1995 by The University of 
Washington Press, and is re-printed here with the kind permission of the publishers. 
 
The following individuals provided insightful reviews of the articles contained in this 
volume: 
 
Liora Bresler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Lynette Fast, Brock University 
Andrea Fairchild, Concordia University 
Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Queen’s University 
Betty Hanley, University of Victoria 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
Volume 1    Number  2   Fall 2003 
129 
  
 
 


Acknowledgements

Dissanayake
					, Ellen

 
 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
Volume 1    Number  2   Fall 2003 
7 
  
 
 
Retrospective on Homo Aestheticus  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ELLEN DISSANAYAKE 
University of Washington  
 
 
Although I’ve been asked to revisit Homo Aestheticus, my second book, I 
will begin by describing the laborious and uneven emergence of its 
predecessor, What Is Art For?, which was published four years earlier, in 
1988. I began writing it when I was a housewife in Sri Lanka, in the 
middle 1970s. I had some ideas and wanted to see where they would go. 
Writing was a way of finding out. 
 And write I did, over and over, over years and miles. I added to the 
book in 1977-78 in Oxford, where I had a six-month fellowship to do 
nothing but read in the Bodleian Library. Later versions ensued in 1978-
79 in Nigeria, and in Papua New Guinea between 1982-84. 
 Finding a publisher took more than five years. These were pre-email 
days, necessitating intercontinental airmail letters that took as long as 
three weeks each way to reach their destination. And publishers are not 
known for prompt replies. I found myself waiting as impatiently for the 
mailman each day as Radha and other women in Indian miniature 
paintings waited for their lover. 
 Most publishers whom I queried did not even want to see the book. 
One editor looked at the manuscript and asked me to cut it by about a 
third. I obliged, but she could not obtain strong enough 
recommendations from readers and, after eighteen months of hope and 
dread, turned it down. Devastated, I put the careworn pages away for a 
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
 
year and then rewrote it yet again, this time in Papua New Guinea. 
Finally, Naomi Pascal, the Editor-in-Chief at the University of 
Washington Press, took a chance and accepted a first book by an 
unknown and academically unaffiliated author. She phoned me with the 
good news on Hallowe’en 1985. Still, even after that, my production 
editor became ill and the book appeared only in April 1988, thirteen years 
after I first began to write it. 
 Some reviewers of What Is Art For? pointed out that most of the 
references were from the 1970s and earlier. There was good reason for 
that. Apart from the months in Oxford, I was dependent on what I could 
find in “Third World” university libraries (even though the anthropology 
collections at the University of Ibadan and the University of Papua New 
Guinea were superb and up to date). I had no colleagues from whom to 
learn about new research and ideas. In fact, none of my Sri Lankan 
friends or associates suspected that I was a closet academic, secretly 
writing a scholarly book. 
 Although What Is Art For? did surprisingly well for an academic 
book by a nobody (it has to date had five paperback printings), its yearly 
sales have now been surpassed by Homo Aestheticus, whose genesis and 
gestation were far different. During the 30 months that What is Art For? 
was in production, I had amassed material for a second book and had 
begun to write it. I was leading an academic life in the United States, 
teaching at the New School and attending anthropology seminars at New 
York University. I had an introduction to an editor at the Free Press, who 
not only accepted an unfinished manuscript but gave me a small 
advance.  Publication took only six months. 
 I feel very maternally fond of and protective about the begetting, 
birth, and personality of both books. If Homo Aestheticus benefited from 
my familiarity with contemporary scholarship, What is Art For? has the 
kind of freshness and enthusiasm of someone who is trying to formulate 
a new discourse on her own. Although my ideas continue to develop, I do 
not wish to apologize for anything in either book, as each is of its time 
and very much connected to my place in the world when I produced 
them. (Both, incidentally, were written and rewritten on manual portable 
typewriters). 
 There are terms in Homo Aestheticus that are problematic, but I have 
not found solutions to the problems. 
 First, the title. My working title had been Deep Art (“deep” in several 
senses: deep in evolutionary time, deep in our biological nature, deep as 
being of profound importance in human lives). But my editor said that 
title wouldn’t do. He wanted to call the book The Aesthetic Ape unless I 
could come up in three days with something he liked better. I desperately 
8 
 Retrospective 
 ELLEN DISSANAYAKE 
 
and unavailingly ransacked books of poetry and Bartlett’s Quotations. 
Finally, the night before the deadline, “Homo Aestheticus” came into my 
head. The editor liked it, and his boss, the director of the press, added the 
subtitle: “Where Art Comes From and Why.” 
 A few years later, Arthur Danto pointed out to me that “the aesthetic 
human” is not really what the book is about. It is concerned with humans 
as art makers, not appreciators of art’s aesthetic qualities. Had I known 
Latin better, I should have titled the book Homo Artifex, although some 
readers might not have thought it was about art at all (as they seem to do 
with “Aestheticus”) but perhaps about bones or sports equipment or 
rubber. Even though the title is, strictly speaking, inaccurate, very few of 
my readers apparently realize it. Only Danto has ever mentioned it. 
 Two other terms are ones I devised for the book and have not used 
since, “species-centric” (Chapter 1) and dromena (Chapter 4). With regard 
to the latter, I wanted to find a term that sounded more serious or 
academic than “doing something” or “something that is done,” and went 
again to a classical language, this time Greek. “Species-centric” was a 
term I coined, opposing it to self-centric or ethnocentric—-terms that 
judge others as different from (usually inferior to) oneself or people of 
one’s own kind. To me, it seemed a positive term, recognizing that all 
human beings belong to one species, and therefore we are all more alike 
than different. Since then, I’ve learned that animal rights advocates use 
the same term to mean the mental or moral elevation of one’s own 
species, implying that members of other species are inferior so that we 
can kill or eat or experiment on them with impunity. That is certainly not 
what I meant by the term. 
 The biggest terminology problem is, however, with the phrase 
“making special,” the subject of Chapter 3 and the chapter that has been 
reproduced in this volume of the Journal of the Canadian Association for 
Curriculum Studies.  I heartily wish that there were a better term. I have 
tried alternatives—”making the ordinary extraordinary,” “elaborating,” 
“artifying”—but none of these seems to communicate what I mean or 
why I think the concept is important. 
 Two oversimplifications of “making special” have dogged me from 
the beginning. The first is made by people (the “Softmindeds”) who love 
the term and uncritically apply it in a sentimental sort of way to almost 
anything. I think they trivialize it. The second group (the “Hardheadeds”) 
find the word “special” to be wishywashy, and they point out to me that 
with that word I am including the black and white striped uniforms of 
convicts, the yellow stars that were worn by Jews in Western Europe, and 
other such examples. “That’s not art,” they say. In Homo Aestheticus, I try 
to differentiate my use of the phrase from both the unrigorous application 
  9 
  
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 
 
to everything and the rigorous application of it to obvious non-art. In Art 
and Intimacy and subsequent articles, I “operationalize” the term as to 
what actions make something special. All this does no good. People go on 
loving or snidely dismissing the term for the same reason: its apparent 
wide applicability. 
 I don’t define art as “making special,” but in the simplest sense, I do 
think making special characterizes what artists of all kinds do. Even 
more, it describes a common trait that, in a Darwinian sense, is a 
noteworthy feature of human nature. My concern is to emphasize a 
simple observation that evolutionary biologists tend to overlook: that 
humans sometimes are not content to leave ordinary reality alone. Take 
skin, for instance: it is tattooed, pierced, painted. The same for ordinary 
hair: it is cut, combed, braided, feathered so that it will look different 
from its natural state. Other creatures do not do this. Then there are our 
Paleolithic ancestors who painted on cave walls and made them unlike 
ordinary cave walls. Instead of saying, trivially, “Gee, we need to  find an 
animal to kill today,” people whose subsistence relies on hunting perform 
ceremonies in which words are made different from ordinary language—
rhymed, inverted, repeated, and otherwise made unlike usual spoken 
utterances. Ditto with ordinary bodily movement and dance, with 
ordinary vocal prosody and song. 
 I think this penchant in humans needs to be noticed, first, and then 
explained. Why don’t we simply leave things as they are?  Archaeologists 
recognize that at some point in their evolution, humans began to make 
and use symbols. Symbolizing is considered to be a watershed in 
cognitive ability and “art” is often automatically considered to be a subset 
of symbolizing. 
 Yet, I think this is incorrect. Symbols in themselves need not be 
special, or artful, at all. Think of a symbolic mark scratched on a piece of 
paper, or on a blackboard. X marks a spot, and it is a cognitive 
achievement to place a hand-print on a wall, blow pigment around it, and 
make an image of a hand: “I was here!” 
 Handprints are generally considered to be “art,” but not because 
they are symbols. Paleolithic handprints are found in special (unusual) 
locations (deep underground) and are usually placed with regard to other 
marks on the wall. Another example is cicatrization, which in some parts 
of the world “symbolizes” adulthood. Although it should be enough just 
to slash the body any old way (pain is pain), the marks are invariably 
patterned. 
 Nearly all artists I talk to know what I mean by “making special.” It 
is what they do with materials and ideas (or tones, meters, movements, 
words, plots). I know artists who seem to make everything in their lives 
10 
 Retrospective 
 ELLEN DISSANAYAKE 
 
special or considered, even the way they address an envelope or arrange 
food on their plate. In some societies (Bali comes to mind), ordinary 
people make things special all the time. 
 I think it is important to realize that there is this unusual but 
elementary fact about humans: when they care about something they are 
generally inclined to make it special. This is not to identify it (like yellow 
stars) or to indicate that it is specific (like a ribbon over auditorium seats 
reserved for distinguished guests)—but to show that one cares about it: 
“This treatment surpasses what is common or usual, because it has 
emotional relevance to me.” I claim that it is an evolved feature of human 
psychology that when we care, we make special. Some may think of this 
activity as art. 
 It is helpful and important when we are thinking about the arts, or 
teaching or doing them, to realize that we are engaging in a human 
proclivity that has characterized our species for hundreds of thousands of 
generations. Making special is not being special, but is doing what 
humans naturally are inclined to do. If art seems unusual or rare today, it 
is because of many intertwined changes in the ways we live and in the 
ways we think about art.   
 
References 
 
Dissanayake, E. (1988). What is art for? Seattle, Washington: University of 
Washington Press. 
Dissanayake, E. (1992). Homo Aestheticus: Where art comes from and  
 why. New York: Free Press (Macmillan, Inc.) 
1
Dissanayake, E. (2000). Art and intimacy: How the arts began. Seattle, 
Washington: University of Washington Press. 
 
 
                     
1 First paperback edition printed in 1995 by the University of Washington Press, Seattle. 
 
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Retrospective on Homo Aestheticus

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