ABSTRACT
Gaia Del Negro responds to calls in transformative learning for a more integrated theory and inclusive educative practice. The chapter presents an aesthetic-reflexive approach that draws on psychoanalysis, to explore how humans interact with objects, both material and symbolic. The argument is that engagement with the arts can help learners to integrate more and less intentional modes of reflection, fostering imagination and unknowing. Drawing on a case study of an education professional, she introduces ideas of the relationship with knowledge, aesthetic experience, reflexivity, and transitional phenomena. The discussion, in part auto/biographical, offers a complex theoretical understanding of transformation as an epistemological and self-making process, and about how aesthetic engagement connects thinking with experience. The chapter will provide educators, researchers, and artists alike with fresh thinking to further investigate how different ways of knowing may foster learning for transformation.
