Reviews

“The Quest for Meaning: Narratives of Teaching, Learning and the Arts is a work of art in itself… Mary Beattie, together with her co-authors show us that embedding the Arts in our learning, teaching and researching is not an option: it is an imperative.” —Robyn Ewing, Professor of Teacher Education and the Arts, University of Sydney, Australia


“This book is an important contribution to arts-based research and narrative inquiry and will be welcomed by those working in these fields. It describes a multilayered experience that allows students to share their own stories in creative and engaging ways. The stories told in this book are inspiring and should encourage readers to creatively reflect on their own stories.” —John (Jack) Miller, University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada, author of The Holistic Curriculum and Education and the Soul


“The Quest for Meaning: Teaching, Learning and the Arts demonstrates the potential of narrative inquiry to help researchers, teachers, and teacher educators make important connections between teaching, learning, and research. A powerful theme throughout is that of risk-taking, beginning with Mary Beattie herself as she writes with her students. The model of fine arts graduate teacher education presented here makes an important contribution to educational research.” —Helen Christiansen, Professor Emerita, Faculty of Education, University of Regina, Canada


“Professor Mary Beattie has achieved a rare feat for an academic author. She has written a book that is both enormously instructive and elegantly composed. While her erudition, her devotion to the arts, imagination and creativity, her phenomenological/ existential outlook, her graceful style of writing, may be reminiscent of the great Maxine Greene, Beattie has crafted a text that is unique. Her ownership of the work is apparent as she moves through and out of her own life story into an articulation of a form of pedagogy that is suffused with meaning. But early on the reader understands that the book is in fact a gift that he or she now owns, one that may inspire toward a heightened form of teaching through and with the arts and narrative. It is a gift to be both used and savoured.” —Tom Barone, Professor of Education, Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education Arizona State University, Tempe