John Baldacchino
Professor John Baldacchino is Professor of Arts Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was Executive Director of The Division of the Arts (aka Arts Institute) between 2016-2019. He specializes in art, education and philosophy.
Prior to UW-Madison he served as Chair of Arts Education at the University of Dundee, in Scotland (2013-2016); as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Arts Pedagogy at Falmouth University, England (2011-2013); as Associate Professor of Art and Art Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York (2004-11); as Reader (Associate Prof.) in Critical Theory & Contextual Studies at Gray's School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Scotland (2000-2004) and as Lecturer (Assistant Prof.) of Arts Education and Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, England (1993-2000).
He is the author of 14 books, which include Post-Marxist Marxism (1996/2018), Easels of Utopia (1998/2018), Avant-Nostalgia (2002); Education Beyond Education (2009); Makings of the Sea (2010); Art’s Way Out (2012), Mediterranean Art Education (With Raphael Vella, 2013), Democracy Without Confession (with Kenneth Wain, 2013), John Dewey (2013), My Teaching, My Philosophy: Kenneth Wain (with Simone Galea and Duncan Mercieca, 2014), Art as Unlearning (Routledge 2019), Sejjieħ il-Ħsieb (2020), and Educing Ivan Illich (2020). In 2019 he edited Philosophies and Histories, being volume 1 of the Wiley-Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Art & Design Education. He is currently writing two new volumes: Lessons of Belonging and Giambattista Vico, both projected for 2021.
Prior to UW-Madison he served as Chair of Arts Education at the University of Dundee, in Scotland (2013-2016); as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Arts Pedagogy at Falmouth University, England (2011-2013); as Associate Professor of Art and Art Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York (2004-11); as Reader (Associate Prof.) in Critical Theory & Contextual Studies at Gray's School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Scotland (2000-2004) and as Lecturer (Assistant Prof.) of Arts Education and Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick, England (1993-2000).
He is the author of 14 books, which include Post-Marxist Marxism (1996/2018), Easels of Utopia (1998/2018), Avant-Nostalgia (2002); Education Beyond Education (2009); Makings of the Sea (2010); Art’s Way Out (2012), Mediterranean Art Education (With Raphael Vella, 2013), Democracy Without Confession (with Kenneth Wain, 2013), John Dewey (2013), My Teaching, My Philosophy: Kenneth Wain (with Simone Galea and Duncan Mercieca, 2014), Art as Unlearning (Routledge 2019), Sejjieħ il-Ħsieb (2020), and Educing Ivan Illich (2020). In 2019 he edited Philosophies and Histories, being volume 1 of the Wiley-Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Art & Design Education. He is currently writing two new volumes: Lessons of Belonging and Giambattista Vico, both projected for 2021.
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Books by John Baldacchino
Hawn Baldacchino jorbot il-ħelsien ma’ kif inqisu lil xulxin f’dak li persuni jaraw f’ħaddieħor. F’din ir-reċiproċità nagħrfu l-limitu li jġegħelna nfittxu possibbiltajiet li jmorru lil hinn mill-istat immedjat tal-eżistenza hekk kif nesprimu r-realtajiet tagħna fl-ideat, l-aspirazzjonijiet u t-twemmin fid-diversità kollha tagħhom. B’dan il-mod nirrealizzaw li, kif tgħid Hannah Arendt, aħna differenti għax ilkoll l-istess.
Part I: HISTORIES: By histories of art and design education it is broadly assumed that identifiable practices and forms of teaching and learning can be located within time spans that give them specific forms and identities. Such histories, in their plurality, reflect a number of recognizable themes by which as a discipline, art education gains specific relevance. The contexts for these histories remain plural inasmuch as they are broadly defined by the events that prompted them, and by which they were shaped by art and design practices as they became located in an educational and/or schooled existence.
Part II: PHILOSOPHIES: Philosophies of art and design education could imply a plurality of questions, concepts and practices that emerged through a series of aesthetic, discursive and critical conversations within art and design education. The relationship between art practice and art education may or may not be considered as a problematic construct in and of itself, in that it continues to expand along an open-ended horizon of possibilities. While the possibilities of art and design practice appear as being infinite, the educational parameters by which they are expressed in an educational and/or schooled existence remain loosely articulated.
«In this fluent, limpid, and scholarly work, Baldacchino examines, inter alia, the problem of empathy in relation to art as an event (or series of events), drawing upon a wide and rich range of sources to inform what in effect is his manifesto. With a profound understanding of its philosophical basis, Baldacchino unfolds his argument in an internally consistent and elegantly structured way. This is not a book to be ‘dipped into’, to do so would miss the development of Baldacchino’s philosophical position; like an art work itself, Art’s Way Out has coherent structure, and a complex, interrelation between form and content, reflecting an artist’s concern for getting things right.»
-- Richard Hickman, Cambridge University
«Although art has a limitless capacity to take on myriad responsibilities, according to Baldacchino we also need to consider a ‘way out’ because only then will we understand how art goes beyond the “boundaries of possibility.” As he explains, “our way into reason also comes from an ability to move outside the limits that reasons sets”. This is the ‘exit pedagogy’ that he advocates. And here exit does not mean to leave, but rather to reach beyond, to extend and explore outside the borders we impose on learning, teaching, schooling and most forms of cultural agency. The need to embrace the capacity of art to cycle beyond the contingencies we impose on it also helps to clarify the limits of inclusive arguments for deploying art education for various individual, institutional, and socio-political ends: art as self expression, art as interdisciplinary method, art as culture industry, art as political culture, art as social justice and so on. This image invokes for me part of the legacy of Maxine Greene that Baldacchino revealed in his earlier text, Education Beyond Education (2009), when he explored her thesis of the social imagination, which is best, achieved when teaching becomes ‘reaching.’ What Art’s Way Out gives us is an exit strategy from the deadening tendency to ignore the enduring capacity of art to give life to learning, teaching and the very culture of our being.»
-- Graeme Sullivan, Penn State University
Engaging with 20th century Mediterranean visual and performing arts, literature and music, this book invites the reader to consider how everyday aesthetics inhabit and define the Mediterranean as a common cultural horizon founded on difference. The author entertains no illusions on how this region is ‘shared’ between its peoples and their histories. Instead, he urges the reader to attend to what Albert Camus identifies as “the light” which Mediterranean men and women “have been able to keep.” Yet one must never forget that Camus’s statement is further qualified with a warning: “just as the Mediterranean sun is the same for all men, the effort of men’s intelligence should be a common inheritance and not a source of conflicts and murders.”
«The first book of a trilogy that explores Mediterranean aesthetics, Maltese born author, John Baldacchino begins his ‘Odyssey’ with as much richness, complexity and depth as the expansiveness and sublimity of Theo Angelopoulo’s film Ulysses’s Gaze. He turns to the Sea to begin weaving the geopolitical specificity of the Mediterranean imagination. In a series of poetic chapters, Baldacchino deftly charts a journey that willingly faces doubt as to the vistas he presents, but always returns home so that he can begin anew. Baldacchino starts his quest by tracing a horizon against which a host of artists, poets, and writers are drawn upon, all the while keeping the significance of the Sea at play as he takes the reader to home shores so that the second volume can begin to appear on a new horizon. The book is an important achievement in Mediterranean geopolitical aesthetics. We await its sequels.
—jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta
A fascinating and related aspect of Baldacchino’s book is gradually recognised as the reader progresses through the text and realises that the book is itself an embodiment of this epic journey, carrying him or her from one land to another, connecting one discipline to several others, and leaping into the sea during different decades of the twentieth century. As he or she traverses a complex interdisciplinary series of fields, the reader will find that this journey is not an easy one, but then again, a smoother reading would probably serve only to undermine the idea of a horizon that is replete with uncertainties.
The hybridity, richness, and indeed, the doubts that permeate any serious engagement with the Mediterranean are not only palpable in the author’s scholarly insights and in the complex moves that the book performs, but especially in the fact that this book is actually only the first of a trilogy of texts on Mediterranean aesthetics that Baldacchino is working on.
—Raphael Vella, University of Malta
"As the 'subject' of this text, I wish to testify to its fairness and, yes, to its thoughtfulness. Because of John Baldacchino's scholarly acquaintance with traditions that might infuse and clarify the complexities of education, I think he has shed new light on provinces of meaning I have chosen to inhabit throughout my academic life."
-- Maxine Greene
There are at least two reasons why John Baldacchino is superbly equipped to offer this interpretive perspective of Maxine Greene’s philosophy. First, like Maxine, herself Baldacchino is well read in the continental philosophies of the Frankfurt School including such writers as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer. He is well versed in the existential philosophies of Albert Camus , Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all writers of central importance in Greene’s thought as well. Had this appraisal been prepared by a North American, say an adherent of one of the analytic philosophies, it is doubtful that a critical reading of Greene would have occurred, let alone a sympathetic one.
Second, unlike the tight linearity of the analytical school Baldacchino’s own writing might best be described as having a painterly quality. His logic unfolds like that of a web, with multiple connections so that a discussion of oppositions such as theory vs practice , past vs present, or truth vs falsehood does not lead the reader to a single conclusion but to an ever widening inter-connected web -- to an array of meanings, in much the same way that Greene makes connections between works of art as possible worlds in the imagination.
—Arthur Efland, Ohio State University
Reading philosophy in any meaningful way is never easy; reading commentary of philosophy is often even more difficult, but John Baldacchino skilfully renders Maxine Greene’s work accessible and opens up avenues of ideas that are worthwhile and relevant, such as the central notion that educators should look at education from a perspective beyond the classroom.
—Richard Hickman, Cambridge University
Baldacchino richly engages Greene’s prose. In a particularly successful way he enacts his methodology of trying to dialogue with her work rather than to ventriloquate her voice through his own. The book features a great deal of Greene’s language, showing her thinking out loud, so to speak, about educational questions, questions of meaning and purpose, political and aesthetic concerns, and a good deal more. I think any serious reader of Greene’s work will find Baldacchino’s interpretation of her overall oeuvre, pivoting around the diptych of self and the imaginary, to be enlightening and educative. His sustained dialogue with her encourages the reader to return to Greene’s texts and to look again both at their core claims and at the form in which they are expressed. Any serious reader new to Greene’s work will find Baldacchino’s book a helpful guide and resource – a good companion, so to speak.
—David T Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University
Baldacchino makes a couple of choices that prove brilliant in the end. First, in the spirit of Maxine Greene, he chooses to write, in effect, in dialogue with Maxine. He is seeing alongside her, reacting, reflecting, and choosing. This becomes, then, an invitation to readers to do their own seeing, to do philosophy themselves, to enter and contribute their own reflective praxis. (...) Second, Baldacchino focuses on the deeper connections in Greene's work around the self and the imaginary. He illuminates what he sees as the central and profoundly readical idea of freedom--pushing against the impasses and the imposed horizons we encounter in the everyday landscapes of our lived lives, and becoming students, then, of the possible through the imagined, the imaginary.
—William Ayers, University of Chicago
In Education Beyond Education, John Baldacchino examines the paradigm of education and learning that Maxine Greene offers us. It is a much needed work and a valuable contribution to philosophy of education. Professor Baldacchino presents the intricacy and depth that Maxine Greene has to offer, challenging the reader to delve into the complexity that Maxine Greene has written about. Anyone looking for an introduction to the works of Maxine Greene will profit from this insightful book.
—Anthony DeFalco, Long Island University
Papers by John Baldacchino
Hawn Baldacchino jorbot il-ħelsien ma’ kif inqisu lil xulxin f’dak li persuni jaraw f’ħaddieħor. F’din ir-reċiproċità nagħrfu l-limitu li jġegħelna nfittxu possibbiltajiet li jmorru lil hinn mill-istat immedjat tal-eżistenza hekk kif nesprimu r-realtajiet tagħna fl-ideat, l-aspirazzjonijiet u t-twemmin fid-diversità kollha tagħhom. B’dan il-mod nirrealizzaw li, kif tgħid Hannah Arendt, aħna differenti għax ilkoll l-istess.
Part I: HISTORIES: By histories of art and design education it is broadly assumed that identifiable practices and forms of teaching and learning can be located within time spans that give them specific forms and identities. Such histories, in their plurality, reflect a number of recognizable themes by which as a discipline, art education gains specific relevance. The contexts for these histories remain plural inasmuch as they are broadly defined by the events that prompted them, and by which they were shaped by art and design practices as they became located in an educational and/or schooled existence.
Part II: PHILOSOPHIES: Philosophies of art and design education could imply a plurality of questions, concepts and practices that emerged through a series of aesthetic, discursive and critical conversations within art and design education. The relationship between art practice and art education may or may not be considered as a problematic construct in and of itself, in that it continues to expand along an open-ended horizon of possibilities. While the possibilities of art and design practice appear as being infinite, the educational parameters by which they are expressed in an educational and/or schooled existence remain loosely articulated.
«In this fluent, limpid, and scholarly work, Baldacchino examines, inter alia, the problem of empathy in relation to art as an event (or series of events), drawing upon a wide and rich range of sources to inform what in effect is his manifesto. With a profound understanding of its philosophical basis, Baldacchino unfolds his argument in an internally consistent and elegantly structured way. This is not a book to be ‘dipped into’, to do so would miss the development of Baldacchino’s philosophical position; like an art work itself, Art’s Way Out has coherent structure, and a complex, interrelation between form and content, reflecting an artist’s concern for getting things right.»
-- Richard Hickman, Cambridge University
«Although art has a limitless capacity to take on myriad responsibilities, according to Baldacchino we also need to consider a ‘way out’ because only then will we understand how art goes beyond the “boundaries of possibility.” As he explains, “our way into reason also comes from an ability to move outside the limits that reasons sets”. This is the ‘exit pedagogy’ that he advocates. And here exit does not mean to leave, but rather to reach beyond, to extend and explore outside the borders we impose on learning, teaching, schooling and most forms of cultural agency. The need to embrace the capacity of art to cycle beyond the contingencies we impose on it also helps to clarify the limits of inclusive arguments for deploying art education for various individual, institutional, and socio-political ends: art as self expression, art as interdisciplinary method, art as culture industry, art as political culture, art as social justice and so on. This image invokes for me part of the legacy of Maxine Greene that Baldacchino revealed in his earlier text, Education Beyond Education (2009), when he explored her thesis of the social imagination, which is best, achieved when teaching becomes ‘reaching.’ What Art’s Way Out gives us is an exit strategy from the deadening tendency to ignore the enduring capacity of art to give life to learning, teaching and the very culture of our being.»
-- Graeme Sullivan, Penn State University
Engaging with 20th century Mediterranean visual and performing arts, literature and music, this book invites the reader to consider how everyday aesthetics inhabit and define the Mediterranean as a common cultural horizon founded on difference. The author entertains no illusions on how this region is ‘shared’ between its peoples and their histories. Instead, he urges the reader to attend to what Albert Camus identifies as “the light” which Mediterranean men and women “have been able to keep.” Yet one must never forget that Camus’s statement is further qualified with a warning: “just as the Mediterranean sun is the same for all men, the effort of men’s intelligence should be a common inheritance and not a source of conflicts and murders.”
«The first book of a trilogy that explores Mediterranean aesthetics, Maltese born author, John Baldacchino begins his ‘Odyssey’ with as much richness, complexity and depth as the expansiveness and sublimity of Theo Angelopoulo’s film Ulysses’s Gaze. He turns to the Sea to begin weaving the geopolitical specificity of the Mediterranean imagination. In a series of poetic chapters, Baldacchino deftly charts a journey that willingly faces doubt as to the vistas he presents, but always returns home so that he can begin anew. Baldacchino starts his quest by tracing a horizon against which a host of artists, poets, and writers are drawn upon, all the while keeping the significance of the Sea at play as he takes the reader to home shores so that the second volume can begin to appear on a new horizon. The book is an important achievement in Mediterranean geopolitical aesthetics. We await its sequels.
—jan jagodzinski, University of Alberta
A fascinating and related aspect of Baldacchino’s book is gradually recognised as the reader progresses through the text and realises that the book is itself an embodiment of this epic journey, carrying him or her from one land to another, connecting one discipline to several others, and leaping into the sea during different decades of the twentieth century. As he or she traverses a complex interdisciplinary series of fields, the reader will find that this journey is not an easy one, but then again, a smoother reading would probably serve only to undermine the idea of a horizon that is replete with uncertainties.
The hybridity, richness, and indeed, the doubts that permeate any serious engagement with the Mediterranean are not only palpable in the author’s scholarly insights and in the complex moves that the book performs, but especially in the fact that this book is actually only the first of a trilogy of texts on Mediterranean aesthetics that Baldacchino is working on.
—Raphael Vella, University of Malta
"As the 'subject' of this text, I wish to testify to its fairness and, yes, to its thoughtfulness. Because of John Baldacchino's scholarly acquaintance with traditions that might infuse and clarify the complexities of education, I think he has shed new light on provinces of meaning I have chosen to inhabit throughout my academic life."
-- Maxine Greene
There are at least two reasons why John Baldacchino is superbly equipped to offer this interpretive perspective of Maxine Greene’s philosophy. First, like Maxine, herself Baldacchino is well read in the continental philosophies of the Frankfurt School including such writers as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer. He is well versed in the existential philosophies of Albert Camus , Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, all writers of central importance in Greene’s thought as well. Had this appraisal been prepared by a North American, say an adherent of one of the analytic philosophies, it is doubtful that a critical reading of Greene would have occurred, let alone a sympathetic one.
Second, unlike the tight linearity of the analytical school Baldacchino’s own writing might best be described as having a painterly quality. His logic unfolds like that of a web, with multiple connections so that a discussion of oppositions such as theory vs practice , past vs present, or truth vs falsehood does not lead the reader to a single conclusion but to an ever widening inter-connected web -- to an array of meanings, in much the same way that Greene makes connections between works of art as possible worlds in the imagination.
—Arthur Efland, Ohio State University
Reading philosophy in any meaningful way is never easy; reading commentary of philosophy is often even more difficult, but John Baldacchino skilfully renders Maxine Greene’s work accessible and opens up avenues of ideas that are worthwhile and relevant, such as the central notion that educators should look at education from a perspective beyond the classroom.
—Richard Hickman, Cambridge University
Baldacchino richly engages Greene’s prose. In a particularly successful way he enacts his methodology of trying to dialogue with her work rather than to ventriloquate her voice through his own. The book features a great deal of Greene’s language, showing her thinking out loud, so to speak, about educational questions, questions of meaning and purpose, political and aesthetic concerns, and a good deal more. I think any serious reader of Greene’s work will find Baldacchino’s interpretation of her overall oeuvre, pivoting around the diptych of self and the imaginary, to be enlightening and educative. His sustained dialogue with her encourages the reader to return to Greene’s texts and to look again both at their core claims and at the form in which they are expressed. Any serious reader new to Greene’s work will find Baldacchino’s book a helpful guide and resource – a good companion, so to speak.
—David T Hansen, Teachers College, Columbia University
Baldacchino makes a couple of choices that prove brilliant in the end. First, in the spirit of Maxine Greene, he chooses to write, in effect, in dialogue with Maxine. He is seeing alongside her, reacting, reflecting, and choosing. This becomes, then, an invitation to readers to do their own seeing, to do philosophy themselves, to enter and contribute their own reflective praxis. (...) Second, Baldacchino focuses on the deeper connections in Greene's work around the self and the imaginary. He illuminates what he sees as the central and profoundly readical idea of freedom--pushing against the impasses and the imposed horizons we encounter in the everyday landscapes of our lived lives, and becoming students, then, of the possible through the imagined, the imaginary.
—William Ayers, University of Chicago
In Education Beyond Education, John Baldacchino examines the paradigm of education and learning that Maxine Greene offers us. It is a much needed work and a valuable contribution to philosophy of education. Professor Baldacchino presents the intricacy and depth that Maxine Greene has to offer, challenging the reader to delve into the complexity that Maxine Greene has written about. Anyone looking for an introduction to the works of Maxine Greene will profit from this insightful book.
—Anthony DeFalco, Long Island University
Dewey’s argument for education is predicated on how, as free and intelligent beings, we have the power to develop dispositions. However, in a context where democracy is neutered by anti-politics, reading Dewey now comes with an urgent need to revisit his argument for an experiential and experimental approach towards the world. Revisiting Horkheimer’s critique of Dewey, which reveals two opposed notions of instrumentalism, this article argues that unless Dewey is reassessed from the non-identitarian character of his pragmatism, his philosophy of education risks being lost to an alignment with social constructivism. This exposes the Deweyan approach to what Maxine Greene calls a disjunction in the culture between everydayness and reason, where the “integrations” that Dewey achieved with his concentration on experience vanish. Historically framed, this paper draws on Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin’s discussion of a democracy that is more akin to a “burning house” than an associated form of living.