Available Formats
New Materialisms and Embodied Encounters in Education: Curiositys Vital Potential
By (Author) Cala Coats
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic
11th January 2024
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
370.1
Hardback
194
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
This open access book develops a theory of 'vital curiosity' as a transdisciplinary force that activates ecological flows of connection across pedagogical spaces, disciplinary bodies, curricular structures, and institutional ontologies. Educational approaches and values are currently being rethought in light of global economic and environmental crises, posing fundamental questions about desire, access, responsibility, ethics, and relationality in teaching and learning. Cala Coats explores curiositys vital force as a critical learning disposition and creative process that activates movement and attraction through aesthetic disruptions and embodied connections, propelled through affective ruptures and durational commitments toward affirmative complexity. Chapters follow questions and connections that emerge from embodied encounters in schools, homes, public spaces, and the natural environment, illuminating residual patterns of colonization and commodification across bodies, territories, and knowledge. While this book is rooted in questions of schooling and education, it serves as a proposition to realize curiositys vital energy as an affirmative ethico-aesthetic force in any context. Drawing on new materialist and posthuman theories, the book puts forward an image of educational life, as it extends from curiosity, as a radical pedagogical practice. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
Cala Coats is Assistant Professor of Art Education in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, USA.