The Possibilities of Play in the Classroom

This book reveals the nature, possibilities, and power of aesthetic play in teaching, learning, and researching at a middle school (Creative Arts Centre, Milton Williams School, Calgary, Alberta, Canada), which chooses to value the creating process across the entire school curriculum. Questions surface recursively throughout the book: What does it mean for teachers and students to experience and learn aesthetically? How is the aesthetic embodied in teachers' discourses and discursive patterns as well as in students' approaches to learning and in their work? What are the effects of learning through integration of the aesthetic into the school curriculum as a whole? The artistic form of collage acts as a literary device to address these questions from multiple perspectives.

Auteur

The Author: Margaret Macintyre Latta is a former classroom teacher who returned to graduate studies compelled by John Dewey's (1938) assertion that within the aesthetic is a worthwhile approach and direction for teaching and learning. Having completed her Ph.D. at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, she is now Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research and publications focus on according aesthetic play primary consideration within education.

Résumé
«Margaret Macintyre Latta has written a remarkable book, both creative and useful. It is original in its format, fashioned as a kind of postmodern literary collage out of fragments of discourse, and in the insights it provides into both the research process and the relationships between the aesthetic and the educational. This work performs a great service to the field of education, offering a set of ideas and images related to good teaching that transcend the setting in which the author-researcher worked. Macintyre Latta's work is liberating. It frees the reader to imagine new approaches to the educational research process and new forms for conveying the nature of the experiences that occur within the research journey.» (Tom Barone, Professor, Arizona State University)