Embodying the aesthetic in everyday life: exploring the metacognitive process of creating functional objects through narrative inquiry

This thesis is an Alternative Culminating Experience for a Master of Arts in Education: Curriculum and Instruction with an Elective Emphasis on Arts in Education. It follows Pathway I: Artist as Educator. This project focuses on the author's journey as a budding artisan of weaving and ceramics and as a devotee of poetry. Over the course of the year, the author created a journal using her exploration into these crafts as a platform to explore the convergence of ideas from disciplines thought of as divergent: Zen and Buddhist ideas of life and aesthetics, systems theory of interrelationships, cognitive science's ideas of embodied knowledge, and ideas from the philosophers of art and education. All was researched, reflected on, and discussed in the journals along with documentation of the processes of designing and creating the objects. The author reviewed and incorporated many of the ideas touched on during her undergraduate degree in architecture. (Architectural education depends on meta-cognitive and heuristic pedagogy, architectural theory parallels many of the ideas of craft.) As related in Chapter 5 of this thesis, the author found at the crux of the relationships of these varied disciplines, a new direction for our educational institutions through the integration of v embodied narrative inquiry. The objects produced during this thesis were shared with the public through an interactive installation at the culmination of the master's program.