Elijah Mirochnik Libri

For many years innovative educators have used the arts to enrich their students’ classroom lives. Teachers who have integrated drama, music, dance, poetry, fiction, and the visual arts within their classrooms have witnessed the numerous ways in which the arts motivate children to learn. But while the powerful influence that the arts have had on children has been well researched and documented, the effect that the arts have had on teachers has been overlooked.The essays within this volume are a collective celebration of the ways in which educators within numerous fields, and at all grade levels, have used the arts and creativity to sustain their passion for teaching. The editors of Passion and Pedagogy have selected essays that bring readers into classrooms where pioneering practices enable teachers to grow, to create personal identities, and to feel empowered through the construction of dynamic partnerships with their students. Dialogues that precede each chapter were designed to bring authors’ voices to a diverse set of writings that investigate new forms of creativity within the postmodern teacher’s repertoire, the development of reflective and artistic classroom curricula, and the inclusion of gender, identity and multiple ways of knowing within educational theory and practice.

The sharp contrasts in teachers’ metaphors for their relationships with students set the stage for a critical comparison of traditional, modern, and postmodern educational approaches. In Teaching in the First Person , three university undergraduate teachers’ metaphors for education emerge from their candid descriptions of interactions with their students. The rich vocabulary that the interviewed teachers used to portray their interactions with U.C. Berkeley undergraduate architecture students is woven into a larger examination of how assumptions that teachers hold about knowledge impact their treatment of students. The investigation of theory embedded within teachers’ narratives begins with a cogent historical overview of paradigm shifts within science, poetry, education, and philosophical theories of knowledge. A critique of harmful educational practices supported by the traditional «mind as machine» metaphor for knowledge invites educators to embrace the postmodern «bodily basis for knowing» as a viable alternative that radically redefines the teacher/student relationship.