Lifelong Learning, the Arts and Community Cultural Engagement in the Contemporary University: International Perspectives

Imaginatively educate. Theatrically investigate. Visually animate. Creatively resonate. Lifelong learning, the arts, and community cultural engagement in the contemporary university maps the work of adult educators, teachers, researchers and graduate students from North America, Europe and Africa who use the arts in their university classroom teaching, their research and in service. Written specifically for graduate students, educators working in higher education, communities, schools, and practitioners who want to learn how to integrate the arts in to their practice, this volume outlines a number of aesthetic pedagogical practices that aim to critically and creativity communicate, teach, make meaning, uncover, and involve.The book contextualises in past and current debates the place and role of the arts in society, adult education, higher education and knowledge creation. It follows key thematic threads and tensions overlaying the field and puts forward some critical questions to help strengthen arts-based adult education, research and service in university and community. Experiences from Denmark, Canada, South Africa, United States, Ireland, England and Scotland weave together adult education and aesthetic theories and provide examples of visual and performing arts practices to re-see, re-make, re-represent, re-learn and re-discover the potential of the human aesthetic dimension in learning and research to contest racism, social exclusion and marginalisation, and workplace stress, to build graduate student research capacity, to cross disciplinary boundaries and to challenge the systemic rational framework of higher education teaching and research.