Toward an Aesthetic of Unfolding In/Sights through Curriculum

Abstract

In recent times, analytic reasoning and rationality rooted in detached cognitive ways of knowing have found new life in government created policies, laws and curricula. As someone witnessing this regressive move, I am fully conscious of a public desire to simplify the chaotic, structure the unordered, and deny the ambiguous. This harkening back to the Enlightenment is a search for certainty and predictability, standardization and conformity. Yet, there exists a countermovement encouraging diversity, transformation, and innovation. This transition from scientific domination toward the social sciences is a move toward understanding chaos and order paradoxically suspended in the dynamic tension found in complex organizations. Innovative organizations thrive in an environment appreciative of complexity. Cultivating an appreciative way of knowing is an act of cultivating an aesthetic way of knowing, an aesthetic that values sensory awareness, perceptual acuity, attunement, wonderment, novelty, and emergence. Perhaps more importantly, an aesthetic way of knowing appreciates the awkward spaces existing between chaos and order, complexity and simplicity, certainty and uncertainty, to name a few dialectical relationships. Just as with the dialectical relationship of theory and practice, both entities are valued