Hermeneutics, aesthetics, and the quest for answerability: a dialogic possibility for reconceptualizing the interpretive process in curriculum studies Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • This study reviews six traditional approaches to hermeneutics and presents a dialogic understanding of hermeneutics. It concludes with specific applications of hermeneutics to curriculum development practices in schools with a focus on inter-subjectivity. While 20th-century access to post-structural notions of subjectivity through aesthetic experience began to engender a language of possibility rather than a language of certitude for hermeneutic inquiry in curriculum studies, it nevertheless did not fully account for interpretation as a productive and collaborative act in the inter-subjective sense of being for the other. This study explores the dialogic emergence of this language of possibility through a review of historical and contemporary approaches to hermeneutics, and subsequently proposes an alternative understanding of hermeneutics and aesthetics to offer a reconceptualized vision of the interpretive process for curriculum studies.

published proceedings

  • JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES

author list (cited authors)

  • Slattery, P., Krasny, K. A., & O'Malley, M. P.

citation count

  • 17

complete list of authors

  • Slattery, Patrick||Krasny, Karen A||O'Malley, Michael Patrick

publication date

  • January 2007