This book explores art practice and learning as processes that break new ground, through which new perceptions of self and world emerge. These learning encounters drive students beyond the security of established patterns of learning into new and modified modes of thinking, feeling, seeing, and making.

Introduction.- Chapter 1. Restoring Pedagogic Work to the Incipience and Immanence of Learning: Disobedient Pedagogies.- Chapter 2. Spinoza and the Challenge of Building a Life.- Chapter 3. The Force of Art and Learning: Building a Life.- Chapter 4. Whitehead’s Adventure.- Chapter 5. Ethics and Politics in Pedagogic Work.- Chapter 6. Becoming in the Middle.- Chapter 7. The Force of Art.- Chapter 8. Pedagogy and Events of Disobedience.- Chapter 9. Pedagogic Work: An Ethics of Building a Life. 

This book explores art practice and learning as processes that break new ground, through which new perceptions of self and world emerge. Examining art practice in educational settings where emphasis is placed upon a pragmatics of the ‘suddenly possible’, Atkinson looks at the issues of ethics, aesthetics, and politics of learning and teaching. These learning encounters drive students beyond the security of established patterns of learning into new and modified modes of thinking, feeling, seeing, and making. 

“In his latest book, Art, Disobedience, and Ethics: The Adventure of Pedagogy, Dennis Atkinson raises the fundamental issues of learning and pedagogy. His questioning of the way in which we understand basic educational processes has been a feature of his work for many years now, and I welcome his latest intervention at this difficult time for the arts in education. Atkinson’s method is to explicate an existing philosophy, often one that is not directly concerned with education, and then apply it to art and educational practices in order to refresh our thinking about what we might otherwise think of as commonplace. For me its major contribution, and therefore its chief value, lies in its skilful and scholarly arguments for the profoundly disruptive power and potential of real learning, whilst yet insisting upon its highly unpredictable and contingent nature.” (Jeff Adams, Professor of Education at the University of Chester, England, and Principal Editor of iJADE)

First book to employ the philosophical writing of Alfred North Whitehead in this field to examine processes of learning and pedagogical work Focuses upon real learning and pedagogical work and their relational and intensive processes of 'becoming' Presents the notion of disobedience in relation to pedagogic work, art practice and ethics