To glimpse beauty and awaken meaning: Scholarly learning as aesthetic experience

Journal of Aesthetic Education

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 68-88

  Neumann, Anna ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249423795     PISSN: 00218510     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jae.2005.0021     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (38)

1. For further discussion of these claims in reference to aesthetic experience, and in the context of the study herein reported, see Anna Neumann, "Passionate Talk about Passionate Thought: The View from Professors at Early Midcareer" (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, April 1999)
2. For discussion of related struggles, see Anna Neumann, Professors' Learning and. Scholarly Identity Development in the Early Post-Tenure Career (Final report submitted to the Major Grants Program of the Spencer Foundation, 2003)
3. Anna Neumann, Riva Kadar, and Aimee LaPointe Terosky, "'I Get by with a Little Help from My Friends': Exploring Recently Tenured University Professors' Experiences of Colleagueship" (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, April 2004)
4. Anna Neumann and Aimee LaPointe Terosky, "Toward Images of Reciprocity in Faculty Service: Insights from a Study of the Early PostTenure Career" (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 2003)
5. and Anna Neumann, Aimee LaPointe Terosky, and Julie Schell, "Agents of Learning: Strategies for Assuming Agency, for Learning, in Tenured Faculty Careers," in Enhancing Understanding of Faculty Roles and Work-lives, ed. Susan J. Bracken, Diane Dean, and Jean Allen, Women's Caucus of the American Association for Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, forthcoming)
6. See Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999)
7. also James Axtell, The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999)
8. The leap from a scholar's emotional involvement within research to the general public's appreciation of scholarly learning is large. This is not to say that all scholarship is emotional or that all scholarship that is emotionally anchored is worthy of public appreciation. T suggest, rather, that there is value in scholarship that bears both social merit (hence, public appreciation) and personal meaning to the researcher, but that too often, in policy-level conversations, personal meaning is overlooked. In this and other writings, I lay the groundwork for an argument that learning (for example, as represented within research), and especially strivings for beauty within learning, may propel scholars toward deepened thought. It would be wise to incorporate such strivings within research that is also publicly useful. I suggest here that to communicate the value of their work as aesthetic endeavor to a public that increasingly demands instrumental action and results is a long-term project requiring careful orchestration. It probably needs to begin as reflective conversation among colleagues about several academic realities that, though lived and assumed, typically go undiscussed: the meanings of academic careers, needs for learning, desires for involvement in "passionate thought," personal commitments to good work. For extended discussion of the public worth of scholarship and scholars' responsibilities, see David Damrosch, We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)
9. See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and. the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996)
10. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal. Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990)
11. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, eds., Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
12. I use these writings to conceptualize passionate thought in scholarship in Neumann, "Passionate Talk about Passionate Thought."
13. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1999),'24-25
14. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934)
15. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 28-31
16. Russell Iacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (NewYork: Basic Books, 1987)
17. See, for example, Susan Krieger, Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991)
18. Shulamit Reinharz, On Becoming a Social Scientist: From Survey Research and Participant Observation to Experiential. Analysis (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1979)
19. Linda R. Winfield, "Multiple Dimensions of Reality: Recollections of an African American Woman Scholar," in Learning from Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education, ed. Anna Neumann and Penelope L. Peterson (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997)
20. For discussion of desires for self-expression through scholarship and its personal meanings, see Krieger, Social Science and the Self
21. and Anna Neumann and Penelope L. Peterson, Learning from Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997)
22. For discussion of personal meaning relative to vocation, see David T. Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher's Creed (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001)
23. For elaboration on normative controls in the context of an ethnographic case study, see Gideon Kunda, Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)
24. For analysis of the tension between the two in the context of the early post-tenure career, though with attention to organizational and normative controls, see Anna Neumann, Between the Work I Love and the Work I Do: Creating Professors and Scholars in the Early Post-Tenure Career, Occasional Paper #57 (Ann Arbor: Uni-versity of Michigan, Center for the Education of Women, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, 1999)
25. For a review of educational and social sciences research on the faculty as profession and on professorial work as embodied in a "faculty role," see Robert T. Blackburn and Jan H. Lawrence, Faculty at Work: Motivation, Expectation, Satisfaction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
26. Examples of writings on scholarly learning as personal endeavor include Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer (Boston: Beacon, 1996)
27. Ruth Behar, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon, 1993)
28. Dorinne K. Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
29. and Neumann and Peterson, eds. Learning from Our Lives
30. A classic study of the disciplinary organization of the research university is included in Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, 2d ed. (Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 2001)
31. For a complete report of the study, see Neumann, Professors' Learning and Scholarly Identity Development in the Early Post-Tenure Career
32. I describe these themes in more detail in Anna Neumann, Learning Lives: The Personal Sources and Meanings of Scholarship, A. Study of Contemporary Scholars' Learning and Development through Early Midlife (forthcoming)
33. For discussion of the tenure review as a professional rite of passage, see William G. Tierney and Estela M. Bensimon, Promotion and Tenure: Community and. Socialization in Academe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)
34. For review of changes in professors' service responsibilities through the early posttenure career, see Neumann and Terosky,"Toward Images of Reciprocity in Faculty Service."
35. Neumann, Terosky, and Schell, "Agents of Learning."
36. Research on human development suggests that at midlife individuals may assume a double vision of sorts, exploring their identities in the present in light of memories of self in the past. Some initiate, at this point, narratives of identity associated with the meaning making of advanced life. For further discussion of the psychological basis of this claim, see Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: Guilford, 1993)
37. Bernice L. Neugarten and Nancy Datan, "The Middle Years," in The Meanings of Age, Selected Papers of Bernice L. Neugarten, ed. Dale A. Neugarten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 135-59
38. originally published in American Handbook of Psychiatry, ed. S. Arieti, 2d ed., vol. 1, The Foundations of Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 592-608. My studies of scholars at or near midlife lead me to propose the following: The midlife narrative-making efforts of persons in scholarly careers may involve construction of a present-day scholarly identity in light of one's memory of one's self as a scholar and of one's scholarship in the past. Within this narrative making, a scholar may recraft her or his scholarly agenda at midlife, for example, by changing topics of study, how he or she studies them, or how she relates to others through them. It is unclear how the midlife creation of a scholarly identity relates to the creation of a more personal identity, yet I suspect that the two are intertwined