Wherever we are in society, we are surrounded by the Arts. This text has been designed by artists, and the words you read are just visual artworks representing the oral storytelling foundation of all societies. Its layout was designed by artists, using multiple media forms. You are reading it in an environment where the soundscape will hopefully allow you to concentrate. Your body is probably positioned to minimise discomfort and maximise efficiency, while communicating your current state of thought to all those around you (whether consciously or not). Surrounding you may be posters, objects, noises, people interacting with facial expressions, probably some communicating via Facebook, Instagram or other social media using increasingly advanced technologies. The Arts power our lives, yet too often we power down children as they enter formal education (preschool and upwards), stifle their natural forms of communication and interaction, and slowly destroy their ability to be creative and to think diversely.

This chapter explores the value of the arts in the lives of very young children in early childhood education settings. It is hard to imagine a more joyful or rich opportunity for connection, expression and learning in early childhood than the arts. Humanity has always created art in a range of forms for a range of purposes and the youngest children are innately attracted to engage in music, dance, drama, and visual arts experiences.

While not always faithful to the professional field of developmental psychology, Howard Gardner treasures the concept of development – which was introduced to him through the writings of Heinz Werner, and was embodied by his first teachers, Jerome Bruner, Erik Erikson, and Jean Piaget. As soon as he joined Project Zero, a research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gardner proposed that “participation in the arts” is a viable end-state for a developmental perspective; with Ellen Winner and other colleagues, he sought to lay out a “developmental psychology of the arts.” Drawing on various disciplines, Gardner then introduced the concept for which he is best known –multiple intelligences.  Ironically, “multiple intelligences” does not describe his own mind particularly well. Like most scholars and writers, he traffics in linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences.  Instead, his approach is better described as an effort to synthesize bodies of information in a way that is illuminating and that raises new questions, that he and his colleagues can ponder and pursue.

In this chapter, the authors write about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and its relationship with ECEfS. They argue that these fields are connected through their common, underpinning inquiry-based approaches to learning and teaching. They illustrate these connections through two stories from the field. They take these connections even further, however, and show how STEM and ECEfS can be enriched by adding an ‘A’ into STEM, to become STEAM. The ‘A’ stands for the ‘arts’, which can broadly include the humanities and social sciences. By expanding STEM into STEAM, richer, fuller learning experiences can be generated that offer stronger interdisciplinary connections to the ways in which the world really works, where empathy, creativity and curiosity are fostered and given multiple opportunities to be expressed. They show how a STEAM approach focusing on the creative arts can be used to reflect on artworks, for example, and how it can enrich a study of frogs and frog habitats. The authors also introduce a practical guide to assist early childhood educators to choose appropriate pedagogies when using inquiry-based learning. This is the IKOPE planning model – interest, knowledge, organisation, practice, empower – a series of iterative steps that build on children’s interests, supporting the creativity, problem-solving and communication of their STEAM learning.

Chapter 5 turns the spotlight on the rather overlooked treatise Exhortation to the Study of Medicine. It argues that in this work Galen constructs or conjures up images of young readers, intending it to act as an educational manual in moral intensification for prospective medical students. It hence demonstrates how Galen’s concern for his reader’s acculturation might explain the appropriation of advice and the selection of relevant material from a long-established protreptic tradition. In discussing Galen’s moralising methods and the pedagogical elements of the essay, this Chapter also draws links between Galenic and Plutarchan moralism, dealt with in detail for the first time, and thereby arguing that Galen’s moral writings need to be construed in the light of Imperial-period practical ethics. That proposition receives further support from the special features of Galen’s protreptic discourse discussed in this Chapter, especially practicability and effectiveness resulting from the author’s philosophical leanings (e.g. his Platonic-Aristotelian background) and medical expertise (the mechanics of the body and his emulation of Hippocrates in the second part of the essay).

This chapter examines the different aspects of enslaved Africans’ humanity that writers of neo-slave narratives felt was limiting, dehumanizing, or incomplete. To do this, this chapter also investigates the changing trends in the study of the sociology and history of enslaved Africans, speeches by Ossie Davis, and the writings of Octavia Butler, Angela Davis, and Toni Morrison – all of which contributed to ideas about black humanity. This chapter turns the kaleidoscope of neo-slave narrative by looking at a narrower, yet significant, angle of political life, form, and style of being Black and human, in the context of trends in mass consumption that gave shape to the landscape of this fiction about slavery.

This section consists of four selections from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian that serve as an introduction to the classical understanding of rhetoric. What is rhetoric? Is it an art or a mode of knowledge? What is its value? What are its elements or parts?

Thinking encompasses a very wide range of phenomena. Chapter 6 first comes back to a study focused on the pleasure of thinking itself. Pleasure is then examined in three modes of thinking: sense-making, reasoning, and daydreaming. Second, as acts of thinking are always situated in specific activities and anchored in various domains of experience, the chapter distinguishes various domains of knowledge: all are complex semiotic systems, culturally mediated, which can be more or less culturally shared and formalised. Third, the chapter examines trajectories of thinking in many systems of knowledge, formal or informal; starting with daily modes of thinking and their pleasures, it examines the pleasures of thinking in professional thinkers before exploring a specific form of sense-making connected to personal experiences. Altogether, this chapter shows that trajectories of thinking are dynamic and that they intermesh elements from a diversity of knowledge systems, moving along various modalities of pleasure.

A comparison of disciplines is helpful for teaching creativity to identify similarities and differences in the creative process. A challenge for all disciplines is to create a balance between teaching higher-level abilities, such as creativity, and the lower-level technical skills required by the discipline. But there are also differences among disciplines. Scientific training emphasizes avoiding mistakes so it is more risk-aversive than training in the arts in which taking risks is often encouraged. Research on science and mathematics learning includes evaluating the effects of exposing preservice elementary teachers to multiple representations, measuring scientific creativity in elementary school students, identifying competencies for scientific reasoning in junior high school, and designing instruction on complex systems at all levels in the curriculum. TRIZ, an acronym for the Russian phrase ‘theory of inventive problem solving’, has influenced the design and evaluation of curricula for engineering students.

Sexual intimacy in couple relationships in the Black community has been under siege since the arrival of enslaved Africans in the United States and has interfered with heterosexual Black men and women creating and preserving healthy sexually intimate bonds. This chapter explores sociopolitical factors, including gender roles, and power dynamics that affect sexual intimacy among heterosexual Black couples. Culturally specific factors that can promote resilience are highlighted with a view toward increasing the understanding of Black heterosexual relationships as emotionally supportive spaces, with an emphasis of intentional intimacy as acts of social justice. Creative interventions for use in clinical practice are offered to assist in expanding sexual intimacy with Black couples.