The Creative Practioner as Scholar and Educator

To make art is to celebrate Life so that each moment is an invitation to awareness that answers the call of BEING. The artist is a co-creator of the universe, sharing with the Great Creator the most powerful force known, the energy of the imagination and its gifts to the world as potential for joy, light and love.
The Celebration of Art and Consciousness, Ken Beittle, 1991

When we think of education we must begin to recognize the holistic power of influence: that we are truely facilitating the emancipation of other's becoming..
There is a Zen saying that states, “living processes and words about them are not the same and should not be treated as equal in worth (Holmes & Horiioka, p. 89). This insight captures a fundamental distinction between the perspective of the arts educator and the experience of the arts practioner. While arts pedagogy and curricula is informed by philosophy, history, criticism, aesthetics, and socio-cultural issues, it remains void of human meaning and reality unless it is grounded in pragmatic, living experience. The creative process utilizes faculties of the person which often go untouched in a culture which traditionally has valued the scientific, the rational, and the material. In the postmodern and contemporary world, the mind, body and spirit of the whole person must begin to be valued, enriched, and cultivated to evolve the human community. Self-inquiry brings a phenomenological emphasis to the voice of the practioner utilizing art-based research as its epistemological method of investigation. Such ways of knowing participate in deeper phenomena of human experience which drawn upon the inner life to make sense of existential, spiritual, and emotional aspects of life. It is my hope that art education programs recognize the power of creative process in developing life philosophy, and that arts based self-inquiry would reunite the heart of creativity into academic rigor. In doing so the quality and effectiveness of teacher development will be greatly enhanced.

Blocks, Leaks and Limitations

I suppose in every journey there are road blocks. I have been stalled in front of one for about three weeks. I know I must become committed to working towards its dissolvement. Yet, this block is not a small or ordinary one like those meant to simply strengthen us in life. No, this one has lasted the past fifteen years. In this inquiry, I am realizing it is a block about identity and potential, lodged there from past experiences with loss and abandonment, and the socialization of restricted permission, inadequacy, and self-doubt. More accurately this block is a combination of little woundings that occurred early on in life. Such wounding, even more accurately, exist as energy leaks, depleting vital life force and potential to live out life purposes. Though emotional, it is also psychosomatic and manifests itself in depression, inertia, and recurring belief systems and lived patterns. These blocks, wounding, and energy leaks limits our fullest capacities to thrive, serve, and give to the world. The process of deep self Inquiry is a shamanic journey, in that its facilitates the retrieval of the soul, a return to our Ground, Keirkegaard would say. The ONLY way these blocks can be healed, not just merely cured, is by practicing Presence, facing, and opening to our deepest fears, and receiving what is, what is really true in our experience. It is a process of remembering. My task is to remember these truths daily and moment by moment. As I do, the blocks are moving, and my winter will transform into spring, and the Spring to Summer and the Summer to Harvest.