Aesthetics, Empathy and Education

White (integrated studies in education, McGill U., Canada) and Costantino (art education, U. of Georgia) provide teachers and graduate students in education with 10 essays on the connection between aesthetics, empathy, and education, offering various philosophical opinions and educational practices related to aesthetics and empathy. Education scholars from the US, Canada, and UK (most who specialize in arts education) describe research methodology from various perspectives, including courses that focus on observation, contextualization, and inquiry; the principles of art-based research using narrative; and narrative inquiry and auto-ethnography. They then consider the self as the research project, examined through dance, evocative art criticism, and poetry; underlying assumptions about education and empathy, with discussion of the connection between empathy, knowing, and being, and relations between aesthetics and ethics and the nature of empathy in that relationship; and classroom practices for environmental and visual arts education. There is no index. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Boyd White (PhD, Concordia University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Dr. White is the author of numerous journal articles, and has chapters in various texts, among them ReVisions: Readings in Canadian Art Teacher Education (3rd ed.), Starting with… (3rd ed.) and What Works: Innovative Strategies for Teaching Art. Recently, he has published two books: Aesthetics Primer (2009, Peter Lang) and Essays on Aesthetic Education for the 21st Century, co-edited with Tracie Costantino (2010).
Tracie Costantino (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Associate Professor of Art Education at the University of Georgia. In addition to numerous published articles and book chapters, her recent work related to the transformative potential of aesthetic experience was published in the book she co-edited with Boyd White, Essays on Aesthetic Education for the 21st Century (2010).