The Accidental Necessity of Aesthetic Leadership

The Accidental Necessity of Aesthetic Leadership

Prior to the pandemic, we, as arts educators, enacted our own iterations of arts-based pedagogies within the safe and inclusive environments of our physical classrooms. Arts
education, as we understood it and as we experienced it, was a shared, embodied practice grounded in action and collaboration. This approach was abruptly disrupted by the silent Zoom rooms and static online spaces that characterised the sudden shift to remote learning during the pandemic. In response to this problem, we formed a cross-disciplinary research team to explore both the challenges and possibilities of sustaining creative, collaborative learning in virtual contexts. This presentation traces our ‘accidental’ turn toward aesthetic leadership and presents key insights from our five-year engagement with the critical question: How can arts education be translated online while remaining authentic?
In the first part of this paper, we identify what aesthetic education means to us. We then reflect on our early experimentation with educational technologies, as we sought to identify, implement, and evaluate digital tools that could facilitate an authentic and commensurate arts learning experience for online students. We demonstrate how platforms like Padlet can support aesthetic education through community building, multimodal expression, and collaborative feedback. We discuss how this project – a short-term response to the pandemic – gradually evolved into a longitudinal study of how arts instructors can enrich arts education within the
volatile and constantly shifting higher education landscape.
In the second part of the paper, we map our embrace of aesthetics education and our development of an aesthetics leadership approach—one that synthesises the cognitive,
affective, and relational dimensions of leading and one that is deeply informed by artistic practices and processes. Drawing on the work of Hans Hansen, Arja Ropo, and Erika Sauer (2007), we propose our own iteration of aesthetic leadership as uniquely equipped to not only sustain authentic arts education, but to help stabilise the precarious position of the arts within the contemporary university. We argue that undertaking creative action only during times of stress, or in an attempt to mitigate crisis, does not have the same resonance in the arts, where educators and practitioners have long used non-traditional means to address wicked problems.
Drawing from this, we comment on the potential future of aesthetic education. Sparked, then, by accidental necessity, this paper, and the project it draws from, captures
unexpected and generative insights into aesthetic pedagogy and leadership. The paper looks both inward, at our individual practices and processes, and outward, to the students and colleagues who were shaped by, and helped shape, this ongoing transformation.
References
Hansen H, Ropo A and Sauer A (2007) Aesthetic Leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 18(6):
544–560.