Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic theory in curriculum studies brings a world that is interesting, surprising, frightening, [Page 17]or beautiful together with students who meet that world through sensation, thought, and emotion. The world does not come to us hermetically contained in rational categories. Our thoughts and understandings of the world are thoroughly intertwined with the sensory experiences of our bodies, feelings, and emotions, as well as our habits of perception and applications of logic and analysis. Creative thought that generates new knowledge, as well as art, is drawn to the very edges of these categories that sort and organize our lives. Because philosophies of education, stretching from classical idealism through medieval scholasticism and the Enlightenment, celebrated the rationality of disembodied intellect, aesthetic theory in curriculum addresses the false distinctions of mind/body, thought, and feeling inherited from these eras.

Aesthetics played an important role in the thinking of progressive educators in the early 20th century. In Art as Experience, John Dewey portrayed the experience of aesthetic pleasure as the resolution of a situation that presents tension or resistance, recognizing harmony and beauty as expressions of that pleasure. Dewey and his colleagues at Teachers' College, William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg, recognized the importance of exploration, imagination, and participation in play and art to meaningful learning. By mid-century, though, these curriculum approaches were sequestered in early childhood education or in specialized schools such as the Waldorf Schools of Rudolf Steiner.

Contemporary curriculum theorists have elaborated on Dewey's location of aesthetic experience in the everyday lives of students and teachers. Elliot Eisner has studied the synthesis of feeling and thought in both art instruction and the evaluation of curriculum, welcoming the solutions and surprises that emerge in the processes of art-making. Recognizing teaching as artful, Eisner brought the categories and sensibilities of art criticism to the art of teaching. Following postmodern suspicions of convention and totalizing generalizations, aesthetic theory has generated new ways of studying educational experience, extended into research and scholarship in education. Scholars have turned to narrative, celebrating fiction's capacity to express desire and to theater where movement, improvisation, and the use of space and sound express ideas often muted in the rhetoric and method of social science inquiry.

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences added visual, bodily kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal orientations to the linguistic and logical/mathematical skills that dominate school curricula. This theory of cognition is consistent with Dewey's understanding that to learn something is to fully participate in life, engaging all of one's faculties. Maxine Greene's work brings an existentialist edge to Dewey's emphasis on tension and resolution in aesthetic experience in her focus on freedom and on the intentionality and vitality that art works bring to the expression of alternative visions and imagination. Kieran Egan's focus on imagination leads him to challenge the hierarchies that dominate theories of child development. He points to the richness and complexity of children's imaginations and argues for arts curricula that will sustain and augment their capacities for play and fantasy instead of abandoning them to pursue only discursive and logical modes of thinking and expression. Challenging the obliteration of the body in curriculum and theories of instruction, feminist curriculum scholars have also turned to aesthetics to integrate sensuous experience into curriculum. In Wendy Atwell Vasey's study of language arts, Paula Salvio's study of Anne Sexton's pedagogy, and Stephanie Springgay's study of body knowledge in the curriculum, the arts are identified as sustaining intimacy, bringing a rich and complex expression of experience to curriculum. Arts integration projects take up this approach as the arts are intertwined with instruction in the academic disciplines. Integration becomes a theme even in arts instruction focused exclusively on the arts as educators debate the proper relationship between the making of art and the study of its history and critique.

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