The Arts, Education, and Social Change

The Editors: Mary Clare Powell is Professor and Director of the Creative Arts in Learning Division at Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her Ed.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dr. Powell is author of This Way Daybreak Comes: Women's Values and the Future, and The Widow, as well as two books of poetry - Things Owls Ate and Academic Scat.
Vivien Marcow Speiser is Professor and Director of International and Collaborative Programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in psychology and the arts from the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. Dr. Marcow Speiser uses the arts as a way of communicating across borders and across cultures in her teaching across the United States and internationally. She is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC), a National Certified Counselor (NCC), and a registered dance therapist (ADTR).

«In this book, educators describe their journeys with the arts and provide a glowing and clear-eyed testimony to the uniqueness of the teaching experience. As we travel from Bedford Hills Women's Prison to a small town in Thailand and then return to more familiar learning communities, it is apparent that aesthetic experiences enable both students and teachers to gain new access to their emotional and cognitive selves. Readers of The Arts, Education, and Social Change will not only sink taps into their own artfulness but recognize the ways in which the arts can provide a deeper understanding of glaring social issues. Despite the current climate of standardization, these chapters in their beautiful honesty offer many moments of consolation.» (Karel Rose, Professor of Education, Brooklyn College, CUNY Graduate Center)
«'The Arts, Education and Social Change' celebrates the unique power of the arts to communicate, understand and transform our most complex personal problems and aspirations. This wonderful selection of essays - ranging from dancing our dreams of a better community to furthering cultural pride through storytelling, to transforming conflict through art - vividly demonstrates how artistic activity has always offered the most inspiring, personal, and reliable ways of expressing our different viewpoints. Our deep diversity is conveyed in this book, showing the resilient drive to create that unites us all.» (Shaun McNiff, Professor, Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Author of 'Creating with Others: The Practice of Imagination in Life')