International Journal of Education & the Arts

In this essay we write about joy and about magic. The stories we recount of our work in art, science and teaching are examples of magic: all are mysterious, transformative. We focus on magic because the word is provocative and we wish to provoke an exploration of a much neglected facet of teaching and of education, the uncontrolled and out-of-control, the qualities of teaching that cause joy.

Through several narratives of experience, and under the theme of "The Arts and Learning", the article presents lived processes of poetic emergence in French-speaking Switzerland and Francophone Northern Ontario. These processes suggest that it would be beneficial to transcend the usual structural options in instruction on the literary art object, given the integrative possibilities of action and of poetic action in particular. In order to integrate the dynamics of creation, instruction in schools could work from active, poststructuralist principles and become "didactive", that is pedagogically active along a trend that defines learning as the creation of entirely new knowledge, concepts and artefacts. Didactics, along the line of the European educational research, has long been neglected in the American literature. This is time to see its possibilities.

The incredible diversity of music in southern Africa causes many teachers to doubt their ability to teach in cultures other than their own. Those teachers who have formal music training often don't have a working knowledge of the local peoples' music and dances. In addition, there are very few published materials available, so where to begin? Because they feel uncertain about the music of another culture, teachers may turn towards "formula" lessons. There is, however, a danger of tokenism in such formulas. This can be avoided by learning more about the culture.
        In this article I identify some of the questions that can lead to a better understanding of music and dance in cultures other than one's own. Video and audio examples are provided that illustrate answers in Namibia. By asking the right questions, the characteristics of a particular musical culture can be exposed. However, understanding something about a culture does not necessarily equip one to teach it. Therefore the development of teaching-learning materials for schools is necessary. These normally include transcriptions of songs and dances. Based on my research on Namibian music and dance a possible transcription of both sound and movement is described.

This paper is a sequel to our playlet ("Performance as Rehearsal") that was performed as part of a larger presentation called "Passion Play" at a national-level educational research conference in 2000. We reflect here on our experience of scripting and performing our "two hander" and on the audience's reactions to it documented by means of a response/evaluation sheet. We begin with a dramatic dialogue to evoke our initial (even self-defeating) reactions to our playlet as script and as performance. We then feature the audience's reactions to the playlet. Finally, in a reflective narrative, we affirm our need as teacher educator researchers to perform our academic texts by using aesthetic techniques such as literary allusion and allegory, postmodern interruptive modes, and invitational prompts. We end with the script that we originally (first) created for the playlet.

This article outlines how an arts-based collaboration unfolded between a music educator and a drama educator in a tertiary institution. The particular context was their creation of a musical play for pre-school children entitled, "The Peter Piper Pickled Pepper Mystery." Written from both educators' perspectives, this commentary provides insights into their collaborative process from the scripting and composition through to the rehearsal and performance stages. Reflecting on their journey together, the researchers identify the main characteristics which they believe contributed to their perceptions of a successful collaboration.