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Education, mental health and the arts all share a concern for human beings and for how they live their lives. Living one’s life, and living it well, has always been a challenge – life never simply happens. But what the particular challenges are, differs from time to time, from location to location, and even from individual to individual.
In both education and mental health there is a strong pressure to think of being human as a technical problem that in some way can be ‘fixed’ by powerful, research-based interventions. Also arts are quickly turned into an instrument for fixing problems. While such fixing may be possible, and may appear to be quite successful from one perspective, it clearly runs the risk of turning students and clients into objects – things to be acted upon, rather than human beings to encounter and act with.
This book stages conversations between art, education, and mental health around the question of what it means to be human today. Moving beyond the suggestion that this requires ‘strong’ educational or therapeutic interventions or can be resolved by means of individual expression, the chapters explore new possibilities for 'the arrival of I’.
ʻBeing Human Today is a highly innovative exploration of the common human experience of becoming an I, joining the world, and recognizing the I of others – not only once, but in a constantly evolving process. The reader is guided through different rooms, as in an art exhibition, featuring authors, and artists, from different disciplines giving words to each other successively, as in a conversation. In this way, readers from any discipline are guaranteed to see what it is to be human today in a new perspective.ʼ
ENTRANCE
1 A Catalogue of an Exhibition That Didn’t Take Place
Gert Biesta, Lisbet Skregelid and Tore Dag Bøe
2 How to be a Self, Today
Gert Biesta
ROOM 1
ARTWORK BY KURT JOHANNESEN
3 The Art of Running and Being (or Just Running and Being?)
Lisbet Skregelid
4 Mental Health Work: A Disastrous, Superficial, Weak Practice Out of Order
Tore Dag Bøe
5 ‘Sit Down and Listen – Stand Up and Talk’: Classroom Life as Lived Experience
Dag Nome
ROOM 2
ARTWORK BY HELEN ERIKSEN
6 In Search of New Beginnings: On Poetry and Hope
Sigurd Tenningen
7 Being Helpful: An Autoethnographic Account of Trying and Its Companions
Rolf Sundet
8 What Might Keep a Teacher Going? Reflections on Meaning and Persistence in the Life of Teachers
Aslaug Kristiansen
ROOM 3
ARTWORK BY JO RAVN ABUSLAND
9 Touched by the Sight of Hands Touching Yarn Touching Hands
Monica Klungland
10 Otherwise in Life: Thoughts on a Minimalist Psychotherapy
Bård Bertelsen
11 When I Teach
Gert Biesta
EXIT
12 CODA
The Authors