The Editors:

Gene Diaz, Associate Dean of the Graduate School of the Arts and Social Sciences at Lesley University, received her Ph.D. in curriculum at the University of New Orleans.

Martha Barry McKenna, Provost of Lesley University, received her Ed.D. in music, the arts and humanities from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she was a student of Maxine Greene.

The artist/educators in this book invite you to come with them on a journey of discovery into the meaning of teaching for aesthetic experience. With learning as their art, they create educational encounters with passion and feeling, and leave their students with vivid impressions, growth, and change. Each author engages in aesthetic experience from an individual perspective – as poet, dancer, visual artist, or musician – and each of them engages as an educator who brings art into his or her classroom, no matter what the subject. Inspired by the words of philosopher Maxine Greene, the contributors transform the theoretical into the practical, urging students to look to the arts and nature for simple beauty, and awaken their minds to new possibilities of creative learning.