Aesthetic Education Research

The relationship between aesthetic research and the area of curriculum consists of at least two [Page 13]aspects. The first, dating to the second half of the 20th century, is research into school curriculum that incorporates aesthetics through the arts, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of the general curriculum. The second aspect, dating to the 1990s, draws on aesthetic-based research methodology to study curriculum. Both aspects focus on the operational, day-to-day curriculum, and students' experiences of curriculum, using mostly but not exclusively qualitative methods.

The term aesthetics, coined in 1735 by Alexander Baumgarten to denote a theoretical and practical discipline aimed at the perfection of sensory cognition, derives from the Greek aisthanomai, perception by means of the senses. Aesthetics has since evolved to refer to the philosophy of art and the philosophy of aesthetic experience.

What forms of aesthetic education exist in the school curriculum? This question is particularly interesting given the multiple rationales of teaching the arts, from cultivating self-expression to inculcating cultural values, and given the historical and contemporary pressures for academic subjects and marginalization of the arts. Research on aesthetics in curriculum focuses on arts instruction and students' encounters with the arts, as well as on the general academic curriculum that possess aspects susceptible to aesthetic appreciation.

Long-standing questions on the educational (broadly interpreted) aspects of the arts and aesthetics were raised by philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. More recently, the work on aesthetics of philosophers John Dewey, Susanne Langer, Nelson Goodman, and Harry Broudy, among others, pointed to the interconnectedness of perception, thinking, and feeling. Questions concerning the type of cognition involved in the arts were intensified in the late 1950s and 1960s with increased attention to school disciplines, triggered by the Russian launch of Sputnik and the U.S. anxiety about being left behind in the technological cold war race. The arts were not exempt from the need to justify their inclusion in the curriculum in terms of their contribution to the total enterprise of education. In these discussions, Broudy acknowledged that each discipline has its own methods of investigation and that each domain develops an internal logic, modes of inquiry, and canons of evidence. His rationale for the arts as part of general education was based on aesthetic literacy as integral to life, based on aesthetic experience, and cultivated through arts appreciation, with scanning as a mode of inquiry.

The power of aesthetics in learning, teaching, and living, presenting diverse aesthetic dimensions to curriculum is the focus of George Willis and William Schubert's Reflections From the Heart of Educational Inquiry, including essays by Ted Aoki, Elliot Eisner, Maxine Greene, Madeleine Grumet, William Pinar, Susan Stinson, and Elizabeth Vallance, among others. In this volume, as in Dewey's earlier work, and increasingly in other literatures, the body is recognized as key to knowledge. The arts, unlike the traditional academic areas, are an arena in which the body is central to the engagement in the discipline. This makes dance, drama, music, and visual art education a particularly rich place to explore what embodiment means for curriculum and instruction. Philosopher Richard Shusterman proposes a systematic theory of philosophy as an art of living, conceived as a discipline of theory and practice with implications to curriculum, called somaes-thetics. Somaesthetics is concerned with educational aims and offers new perspectives and techniques with respect to learning.

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