ABSTRACT
Social science researchers celebrate the capacity of the arts to engage them, and Prose uses Mister Monkey to show them that the meaning of what they compose or receive is layered and associative and informed by their lives. As arts researchers, often funded by foundations or school districts, social science researchers also accommodate, asking questions of arts practices that will reassure funders or accreditors that academic standards and progress are being met. In response, arts educators and researchers have promoted arts curricula as providing the expressivity, humanity, sensuality, and community desperately missing in schools haunted by assessments, dredged in technology, and starved for funding. The word aesthetics comes from the Greek word aisthetikos, meaning sentient, perceptible to the senses. And it is because art expresses embodied knowledge informed by sensation and perception that it can enrich the discursive systems that dominate knowledge and education.
