Approach Teaching Aesthetic in a Course Setting
The ability to understand and appreciate art and multimodal texts is a key part of a student’s literacy development. It helps them create and compose more meaningful, effective multimodal texts, improve their abilities in diverse communication and be job-ready given that aesthetics play a critical role in many professions (ACARA, 2012). The need to teach aesthetics is reflected in the fact that it is included as a general capability in most curricula across the world. However, there is little research to date on how teachers approach the teaching of aesthetics in their classrooms.
Aesthetics is a complex and diverse area that encompasses various modalities and dimensions such as beauty, pleasure, emotion, taste and judgment. Moreover, there are many ways in which students use and create aesthetic courses – through visual arts, music, dance, literature and digital media, for example. Aesthetics is also a critical component of the design and creation of multimodal texts and it is important to understand how these different aspects of aesthetics come together in order to effectively produce textual forms that are engaging, appealing and meaningful (Lilliedahl, 2018).
There is a growing recognition that the teaching of aesthetics is vital for the teaching of multiple literacies including English, the creative arts, humanities and design and technology. However, it is not an explicit part of many teachers’ pedagogies (Barton & Le, 2003). This paper aims to explore how instructors approach teaching aesthetics in a course setting.
How Do Instructors Approach Teaching Aesthetic in a Course Setting?
To examine this, interviews and focus groups were conducted with high school students (n = 30), teachers (n = 7) and a range of industry and community informants who work in fields where aesthetics plays an important role such as chefs, graphic designers, landscape gardeners, marine biologists and sheet metal workers.
Teachers’ conceptions of the importance of teaching aesthetics differed depending on subject and teacher background. This was mainly due to the subject-specific nature of teacher identities and passions, which have been described as a ‘subject culture’ (Darby, 2010).
The analysis of the data showed that there were several themes that emerged that highlighted how important it is to incorporate an aesthetic dimension into a teaching approach. These themes were discussed in the context of Appraisal Theory, which includes three semantic dimensions of attitude: affect, judgement and appreciation. We opted to focus on appreciation as it is the most directly related to the teaching of aesthetics in our sample of teachers.
Aesthetic dimensions of teaching can be found across a number of subject areas, but are most prominent in subjects such as English and science. It is important that a framework is available that allows the examination of these aesthetic dimensions and how they interact with subject-specific teachers’ identities, passions and knowledge. This will allow for more targeted and appropriate professional learning to be offered to help teachers become more aware of their pedagogical practice when teaching these subjects. This can then lead to more effective and efficient teacher practice. The framework used in this study was inspired by Dewey’s concept of aesthetic understanding, which can be applied to a range of subject contexts.
