Ethical Dialogue in Art Education: Immanence, Aesthetics, and Appearances in the Middle Ground

Main Article Content

Matthew Isherwood

Abstract

This article examines how art education can cultivate relational forms of dialogue at a time when educational policy increasingly privileges individualising, outcomes-driven approaches. Using Dora García’s Exhausted Books as an example, the article explores how art objects create an aesthetic domain where resistance, plurality, and relational meaning-making emerge. I conclude that recognising these aesthetic conditions is an essential quality of art education and essential for sustaining practices that support ethical sociability and dialogic engagement with the world. The article outlines a framework for educators seeking to cultivate openness, dissensus, and ethically grounded dialogue in contemporary learning environments.

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How to Cite
Isherwood, M. (2026). Ethical Dialogue in Art Education: Immanence, Aesthetics, and Appearances in the Middle Ground . The Canadian Review of Art Education, 52(1), 157–172. https://doi.org/10.26443/crae.v52i1.2509
Section
Articles
Author Biography

Matthew Isherwood, The University of Exeter

Matthew Isherwood is currently a Lecturer in Creativity and Arts Education at the University of Exeter. His research brings aesthetics and arts education into productive conversation, exploring how aesthetic experiences cultivate attentiveness, sensibility, and relational engagement with the world. His work draws on the educational philosophy of Maxine Greene, particularly her idea that aesthetic education helps us become more awake to everyday experience, more open to difference, and more attentive to possibilities that might otherwise remain unseen. This informs his broader interest in education as a process of cultivating creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and reflective awareness in the arts. His current research and creative practice bring together aesthetic education, arts-based inquiry, dialogue, and transdisciplinary learning to explore how encounters with art, others, and everyday environments can cultivate sensibilities that encourage different ways of noticing, understanding, and engaging with an increasingly complex world.

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