The Dean's Letter

January 2, 2025

Continuing, Hopeful Inquiry

Dear AAP community —

At the beginning of each new year, we reflect on the past and look forward. This annual fresh start also often invokes affirmations, resolutions, or newly raised questions. Over the last few years, in a world undergoing constant change, one of the most common questions to emerge has been: What now? A simple yet apt provocation that grounds us in the space of the present, where the question becomes not only a matter of what but how.

In his manifesto on education as a transformer of lives and worlds, writer, educator, and philosopher Paulo Freire writes, "Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." At AAP, this resonates deeply not only with what but how we teach, learn, and practice. As a community, we understand our pursuits (and our questions) as necessary, sustainable, and constant because they are fundamental to our collective humanity.

Our disciplines continue to ask, in Rebecca Solnit's words, "the grandest questions, about the most essential ingredients of existence: about time, space, perception, value, creation, identity, beauty," fundamentally, "about the act of making, about what it means, whom it is for, what happens in that engagement with materials and history and embodied imagination." From the age-old to the emergent, from the intractable to the idiosyncratic, from the fraught to the hopeful, we inhabit our questions just as they inhabit us. And we deepen both our understanding of, and our impact on the world.

For us, on the cusp of a new year, Freire's human processes of invention and re-invention are the how, the what, and crucially — the now.

Sincerely,
Meejin