David Gersten at NYS Writers Institute
October 16th, 2018
New York State Writers Institute, NY, United States
On October 16th SUNY Albany celebrated the 25th anniversary of the College of Arts and Sciences. Arts Letters & Numbers director David Gersten was invited to offer a keynote address entitled ‘Developing New Ways of Knowing: Education, Art, Space and Place,'
In this talk David addressed transformation and education, drawing on a wide spectrum of areas of inquire and ‘ways of knowing’, including, evolutionary biology, geography, language, communication, the visual arts, theater, film, the cognitive sciences and living systems. He addressed interdisciplinary studies within the Arts, Humanities and Sciences, from a number of perspectives, sharing projects and collaborations from Arts Letters & Numbers specifically looking at the interdependence of education and the spaces of education. Asking the question ‘where do we know what we know?’ and speaking to the relationship between ‘embodied experience’ and ‘embodied knowledge’ the talk developed the idea that “What we ‘know’ is constructed not only within us, or the exterior world, but in-fact emerges between the world and our experience of it. This vision opens up the possibility of education as a communicative exchange between individuals, their social environments, their knowledge environments, and their spatial environments.