Learning Here and Now: Aesthetic-Educational Happenings at Black Mountain College
Christopher Higgins

5.30-7 pm

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81813506541
Meeting ID: 818 1350 6541

Compared to the founding of the Chicago Lab School, John Dewey’s involvement in the experimental Black Mountain College is seldom discussed. Yet Black Mountain embodied two of Dewey’s central claims: (1) that education is “the continuous reconstruction of experience”; and (2) that aesthetic experience is educative (and vice versa). To make sense of either idea requires thinking them together, and this is exactly what revisiting BMC affords. Taking a seat with John Cage and Merce Cunningham at what is now thought of as the first happening, we join a community in search of what Dewey called “[t]he moving present.”

Chris Higgins is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Formative Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, where he directs the program in Transformative Educational Studies and co-directs the Formative Leadership Education Project. Higgins has written on dialogue and the teacher-student relationship, ignorance and open-mindedness, imagination and aesthetic education, liberal learning and vocational formation, and education as a public good. He is the author of a number of articles and two books: The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT, in press).

Two papers are attached. The lecture will focus on “Learning Here and Now.” This is the final section of a long essay from Undeclared. For those who want more context, a chapter drawn from this essay, “Renewing the Educational Imagination at Black Mountain College,” is also attached.

For further inquiries: Yuxin Su (yuxin.su.16@ucl.ac.uk).

Please note that this seminar series is run by academics on an entirely voluntary and unpaid basis, on top of existing teaching and other work commitments. While we endeavour to make these events as inclusive and welcoming as possible, we cannot undertake any extra work regarding the presentation, dissemination or planning of the talks or make adjustments to the existing programme.