The Swing of the Pendulum

Book excerpt: Current educational policies, particularly in the United States, have swung so far in the direction of overtly politicized and decontextualized testing, that we are losing opportunities to support the imaginative and expressive capacities of a generation of children and adolescents with implications for our individual and collective health. Enter arts education and the healing arts as urgently needed remedies for this imbalance, to swing the pendulum of educational practices back to a place of balance and wholeness. Informed by an arts-based sensibility, this book explores how imaginative, creative, and artistic experiences can heal, and why we urgently need them at the heart of our educational discourses and practices. These chapters invite teachers, teacher educators, and therapeutic professionals to reclaim imaginative, arts-based experiences as central to the human conditions that they serve. The narratives and case studies included here are of interest for any arts-based qualitative research course as an example of narrative inquiry, and in arts and general education programs for their pedagogical implications. “As Blake invited us to find the world in a grain of sand and showed us how poetry could materialize this, so too these storytellers discover and shape their personal meanings in ceramic pots, paintings, poems, drama, and poetry. While the stories told here are deeply ingrained interior journeys, all reflect ways of observing and embracing the world of others, of becoming wise, becoming self, and becoming skilled practitioners of meaning making. By naming and framing they suggest that clarity becomes possible and personal freedom achieved.” – Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia (from the Foreword) “This anthology offers a substantial number of narratives that represent seeking wholeness, sustenance, and renewal. In many cases, the authors provide a tribute to those who have impacted their lives in profound ways. This is an important contribution to both art education and literary education in the world of scholarly research.” – Laurel H. Campbell, Purdue University