Self and Wisdom in Arts-Based Contemplative Inquiry in Education

By foregrounding a first-person perspective, this text enacts and explores self-reflection as a mode of inquiry in educational research and highlights the centrality of the individual researcher in the construction of knowledge. Engaging in particular with the work of Thomas Merton through a dialogical approach to his writings, Self and Wisdom in Arts-Based Contemplative Inquiry in Education offers rich examples of personal engagement with text and art to illustrate the pervasive influence of the personal in reflective, narrative, and aesthetic forms of inquiry. Chapters consider methodological and philosophical implications of self-study and contemplative research in educational contexts, and show how dialogic approaches can enrich empirical forms of inquiry, and inform pedagogical practice. In its embrace of a contemplative voice within an academic treatise, the text offers a rich example of arts-based contemplative inquiry. This unique text will be of interest to postgraduate scholars, researchers, and academics working in the fields of educational philosophy, arts-based and qualitative research methodologies and Merton studies.

Giovanni Rossini completed his PhD at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is a philosopher and independent scholar whose research interests span the fields of holistic and contemplative studies in education.

1. Narrative Beginnings: The Seeds of Inquiry - The Imperative of Story and the Aesthetical within: Arts-Based Contemplative Inquiry 2. Meditations on Merton's Paradox: Narrative, Aesthetics and the Emergence of the Wisdom Image 3. The Journey of the "Perpetual Researcher:" Of Emerging Questions on the Relation of Wisdom and Art 4. The Friendship of Texts: Beyond a Referential Relation with Texts onto the Dialogical in Inquiry 5. A Methodology of One: The Personal versus the Sociological in Inquiry - On the Paradoxical Character of Arts-Based Contemplative Methodology 6. Landscape Images as Teachers of Wisdom: A Prolegomenon for Classroom Practice 7. Looking onto Myself to See Others: Concluding Reflections on the Imperative of the Personal in Contemplative Inquiry