Rebecca Taylor

In this article, I call for a return to Plato's conception of “education of the soul” through a new pedagogical framework, Re-presencing, that engages the transformative capacities of aesthetic experience. Philosophically grounded in the work of William James, John Dewey, and Maxine Greene, Re-presencing is a ritualized practice of heightened consciousness and deep inquiry with an artwork (repeatedly over time) about the past, the present, and possible futures. In Re-presencing, we are present with an artwork (mindful awareness and attention to perception), present to experience (and the cognitive emotions therein), and present for inquiry (self-cultivation) and growth—forming and expanding the self with, in, and through aesthetic experience. Our longitudinal relationship with the work of art (through ritualized engagement) allows the object to become a historical marker of past experiences and a threshold of possibility as we become increasingly wide-awake to ourselves, the world around us, and the mystical and mysterious beyond.

In an educational landscape governed by acceleration and efficiency — concepts driven by measurable time (chronos) — this paper argues for recovering kairos: moments of heightened presence and transformative significance. Drawing on Dewey, Bergson, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Augustine, I develop a framework linking kairos to formative education through aesthetic experience. My argument is threefold. First, works of art are trans-temporal: vestiges of the past, encountered in the present, thresholds to future possibility. Second, this trans-temporality makes aesthetic encounters uniquely suited to induce kairotic moments. Third, such moments paradoxically require extended chronological engagement — what I call ‘fertile chronos.’ I offer Re-presencing, a pedagogical approach involving slow looking and ritualized return to artworks across expanded time horizons. A phenomenological study with emerging adults illustrates the framework: participants described existential reorientation, relational connection, and recovered vitality. Slow, ritualized aesthetic encounters are not luxuries but necessities for cultivating ethical, imaginative, and relational ways of being.

As artificial intelligence reshapes educational environments, it carries powerful epistemic assumptions—that knowledge is discrete, quantifiable, and best optimized through speed and scale. This paper examines a consequential semantic slippage at the heart of this transformation: the term "deep learning," which originated in Marton and Säljö's (1976) landmark distinction between surface-level and deep-level processing and was subsequently expanded by educational theorists to encompass sustained reflective inquiry, ethical attunement, and self-cultivation, now overwhelmingly signifies layered neural networks optimized for classification and prediction. Situating this shift within a broader pattern whereby engineering disciplines appropriate and narrow humanistic concepts through metaphor and simulation (Simon, 1996), I argue that the displacement of humanistic by computational "deep learning" in educational discourse is not a case of benign polysemy but a form of epistemic substitution with material consequences for what gets funded, measured, and valued in education. Drawing on Bergson's philosophy of duration and Barad's onto-epistemology, I contend that this substitution risks foreclosing dimensions of knowing—affective,embodied, relational, and temporally extended—that are irreducible to algorithmic logic and constitutive of the knower's being. I engage with recent scholarship on formative epistemic injustice (Smith, this volume), epistemic consolidation (Tanchuk, this volume), and the threat AI poses to intellectual character development (Pritchard, this volume) to show that the stakes of this displacement are at once personal and structural, ontological and political.Rather than rejecting AI, I advocate a both/and approach that cultivates AI literacy while preserving pedagogical practices—including contemplative pedagogy, slow reading, and ritualized aesthetic engagement—that resist algorithmic capture. I conclude by arguing for an educational ethos that reclaims "deep learning" for the formation of persons and that resists reducing education to informational throughput or behavioral optimization.

As museums confront the virtualization of cultural life, institutional discourse often succumbs to “virtual panic,” framing the future primarily around technological adaptation. Rather than treating this digital turn as a threat or a trend, this essay argues that the crisis presents an opportunity for the museum to reclaim its vital humanistic function as a counter-environment to the frictionless speed of contemporary life. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s critiques of societal acceleration, I theorize virtual panic as a misguided effort to render the gallery as seamless as a digital feed, which risks reproducing conditions of alienation. Grounded in my personal experience revisiting Picasso’s ‘Girl Before a Mirror’ (1932) across decades, I examine how the gallery acts as an attentional sanctuary, where artworks invite modes of attention that counter habits of distraction. The museum’s power lies in its productive friction: its ability to sustain slowness, ambiguity, and perceptual depth. Conceived as a sphere of resonance, in Rosa’s sense of the term, the museum emerges as a site for scaffolding self-reflective engagement with the past, present, and possible futures through meaningful encounters with works of art. In an age of simulation, museums remain indispensable by offering a rare space to encounter resistance and resonance.

This paper argues that the contemporary state of the arts in U.S. higher education is characterized by two structural dynamics that help explain the persistent vulnerability of non-revenue-generating programs: the Advocacy-Resource Trap, a self-reinforcing cycle in which understaffed units cannot generate the impact evidence needed to secure resources; and the Decentralization Paradox, wherein programming distributed across multiple units produces fragmentation rather than integration. Drawing on a national survey of 101 arts administrators and case studies from five institutions, we find a field in precarious flux: 45 of 82 respondents classified their institutions as "Evolving" today—nearly triple the number from a decade prior—while those classified as "Endangered" more than doubled. Yet qualitative data suggest that "Evolving" often masks defensive adaptation rather than healthy growth. A striking gap emerges between robust student demand (75% report high student interest) and fragile institutional commitment (only 14% characterize the arts as "Very Central" to mission). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these dynamics, and competition from STEM and AI priorities has intensified. We conclude with implications for administrators, university leadership, and funders seeking to ensure the long-term sustainability of the arts within the academy.

In this article, I propose a new pedagogical framework, Re-presencing, grounded in Dewey’s philosophies of experience and education. Re-presencing is a ritualized practice of using an artwork (repeatedly over time) as a mirror for the self. It engages art as a threshold for directed reflection about the past, assessment of evolution and growth, and inquiry about the future. Re-presencing entails physical presence (proximity), embodied presence (reflection), and spiritual re-presence (transcendence) — our being present with an artwork, present to experience, and present for inquiry and exploration. In Deweyan terms, intentionally engaging with the tangible (the physical object) in pursuit of self-realization (growth) and the intangible (the transcendent); in turn, allowing the ideal as intuited and imagined in the aesthetic experience to inform and shape our future experience. Re-presencing opens up space for inquiry through intentionality, qualitative immediacy, meaning, expansive time horizons, and continuity. The aesthetic object enables us to lose ourselves in awe and wonder (qualitative immediacy), but importantly and somewhat paradoxically, to find ourselves, or more accurately, to form or create ourselves with, in, and through the experience. Through ritualized engagement (repeated encounters) we experience the fruits of Dewey’s theory of qualitative immediacy and principle of continuity — heightened vitality and deepened experience — becoming increasingly wide-awake to ourselves, to our world, and to the beyond.