International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Williams, R. (2017). Being with and being there: Our enactment of wide-awakeness. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 18(21). Retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v18n21/.

Maxine Greene championed that teachers and students can discover openings providing space for the development of wide-awakeness through art and aesthetic education. Wide-awakeness is a heightened sense of consciousness encouraging critical awareness and deep engagement with one’s world. As individuals come alive in this way, their open-minded exploration is fueled by their development of personal agency and self-worth through their pursuit of presentness and possibility. Through a case study of the college art education course, Pedagogy as Art Practice, I sought to gain a better understanding of what ways the teacher and students’ engendered wide-awakeness, how the structure of the course supported this development, and how this impacted the participants. With this paper I narrate the story of how the participants’ being with and being there, or their relational and intellectual engagement, facilitated their enactment of wide-awakeness.