Re-presencing: A Pedagogical Framework for Ritualized Engagement with Art Grounded in Deweyan Experience

In this article, I propose a new pedagogical framework, Re-presencing, grounded in Dewey’s philosophies of experience and education. Re-presencing is a ritualized practice of using an artwork (repeatedly over time) as a mirror for the self. It engages art as a threshold for directed reflection about the past, assessment of evolution and growth, and inquiry about the future. Re-presencing entails physical presence (proximity), embodied presence (reflection), and spiritual re-presence (transcendence) — our being present with an artwork, present to experience, and present for inquiry and exploration. In Deweyan terms, intentionally engaging with the tangible (the physical object) in pursuit of self-realization (growth) and the intangible (the transcendent); in turn, allowing the ideal as intuited and imagined in the aesthetic experience to inform and shape our future experience. Re-presencing opens up space for inquiry through intentionality, qualitative immediacy, meaning, expansive time horizons, and continuity. The aesthetic object enables us to lose ourselves in awe and wonder (qualitative immediacy), but importantly and somewhat paradoxically, to find ourselves, or more accurately, to form or create ourselves with, in, and through the experience. Through ritualized engagement (repeated encounters) we experience the fruits of Dewey’s theory of qualitative immediacy and principle of continuity — heightened vitality and deepened experience — becoming increasingly wide-awake to ourselves, to our world, and to the beyond