Letters to a New Teacher: A Curriculum of Embodied Aesthetic Awareness

In the following letters to a new teacher, a university mentor shares her reflexive notions of how she lives as a teacher researcher. (1) September 21 Dear Chris, I hope this letter finds you well. I'm glad we've been partnered. I enjoyed our phone conversation. As agreed, I'll send an introductory letter and then three reflections. We can discuss them as we go along. If you write a response journal to each and add anything else that you want to talk about, we'll very easily meet the mentorship program guidelines. That's what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleeplessly accessible, over centuries. (Amis, 2000, p. 268) I've been thinking a lot about the outlooks, qualities, and skills I consider important and useful for teachers, and of those, which ones might be most useful at the beginning of a career. Often what's perceived as important for the new teacher is not what is important from a veteran's point of view, nor from a researcher's for that matter, so I hope that you will find some resonance with my letters now, or even sometime later in your teaching career. Sometimes reading the same text at a different time or in a different context creates a substantially dissimilar text. Timing and context really do influence so much in our lives. Of course, knowing strategies for respectful classroom management and knowing "what to teach" are critical to all teachers, especially new ones, but these two issues particularly, often simply require time and experience in context so I'm going to focus on something I call An Embodied Aesthetic Curriculum. I would like to share my ruminations on how the body can inform experiences of teaching and learning when the divarication of mind and body are reunited. Ideally, it would be best if I could understand the context in which you teach and model particular learning/teaching strategies you're interested in, or team-teach a series of lessons with you then talk about them. Despite my distance, I'm still hopeful that our reflexive writings to one another will help us grow as teachers. To deepen transformative teaching and learning practices I encourage teachers to develop an embodied aesthetic wholeness. I imagine holistic teaching as fluid, coloured transparent layers dynamically moving under and over one another. Light (context) illuminates certain layers at particular times and at other times, the richness is created by the fusion of layered colours. I suggest the following: 1. increase receptivity and openness to learning 2. foster skills of relationality 3. model wholeness-in-process in explicit reflexive texts I agree with Brent Kilbourn who asserts that: Common accounts of teaching frequently lack significant details about its nature, including details about subject-matter and about the process of teaching. Bled of these details, teaching can appear too simple in the eyes of parents and students; more significantly, it can appear too simple in the eyes of beginning teachers. (1998, p. xi) So we can talk casually about things but I'll also include research references which might help you look up something that interests you. Feel free to use the references to write your monthly reflection papers. Even now, after teaching for many years, I still find that keeping a journal and discussing pedagogical issues with colleagues or friends very revealing. Background The tradition of formal schools has severed the body from the mind, thereby inhibiting holistic teaching and learning which potentially limits the development of imagination and wonder, and restrains the advancement of knowledge and understanding (Gallop, 1988; jagodzinski, 1992). According to jan jagodzinski, the bifurcation of mind and body in the arts occurred during the rule of Louis XIV in the eighteenth century. …