ABSTRACT
This chapter considers ways that arts-based pedagogy can provide insight into teaching and learning more broadly. A critical aesthetic practice at Tobin began with art as story. This was a way of expanding text and ways of knowing in the English classroom through a range of stories in many art forms. Rich legacies of a critical aesthetic practice can be found across all locations and intersections of marginalization. As a range of arts and aesthetic experience brought mutability and uncertainty to the forefront of teaching and learning, theorizing became an approach to sense-making that accommodated that uncertainty. The arts and aesthetic experience cultivated an ongoing “relational aesthetic” that provided avenues for both agency and critique. Cultivating a critical aesthetic practice both relied upon and nurtured “inquiry as stance”. A critical aesthetic practice entailed inquiry as the overarching goal that connected the arts and literacy within a shared purpose.
