Per Anderhag
Cecilia Caiman
Per-Olof Wickman
Steph Ainsworth- 1Department of Teaching and Learning, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2Education and Administration, Stockholm, Sweden
- 3School of Teacher Education and Professional Development, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom
Editorial on the Research Topic
Disciplinary aesthetics: the role of taste and affect for teaching and learning specific school subjects
Aesthetics concerns, on the one hand, people's feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and, on the other hand, the objects these feelings are directed to, that is, what people find beautiful or ugly (Wickman, 2006). Traditionally aesthetics and affect have been treated as separate from cognition and only rarely has it been studied how they are intertwined when learning a specific content (Wickman et al., 2021). However, recent situated and socio-culturally oriented research has begun to elucidate how aesthetics plays a key role for selection of content, what route learning takes in the classroom and for students' opportunities to develop an interest or taste for a specific school subject (e.g., Sinclair, 2006; Ainsworth and Bell, 2020; Wickman et al., 2021). This Research Topic compiles contributions from researchers examining these topics further.
Aesthetic judgments are not just reports of inner feelings but also concern outer objects and so constitutes an evaluation of what is the case (Dewey, 1934). What beauty there is in educational settings such as mathematical inquiry (Sinclair, 2009), data modeling (Ferguson et al., 2021), writing a literary text (Gilbert, 2016), learning grammar (Ainsworth and Bell, 2020), cooking (Berg et al., 2019), a ball game (Maivorsdotter and Lundvall, 2009), or when art meets science (Hannigan et al., 2021) is a question of taste and is socially constituted, negotiated, and learnt (Bourdieu, 1984). Distinctions of taste make evident preferences of language and representations, procedures and actions, and ways-to-be as a person. Aesthetics is a question of what and whose content is included and excluded from a school subject (Anderhag et al., 2015). The goal of this Research Topic is to explore these little examined topics extensively and to widen the understanding of what may characterize a school-subject-specific aesthetics and what role it may have when teaching and learning different school subjects, separately or as integrated.
The Research Topic is grounded in the notion of disciplinary aesthetics (Wickman et al., 2021), that is, school-subject-specific aesthetics. It focuses on the overarching questions of what may characterize such an aesthetics and what role this may have for teaching and learning in different school subjects. Contributions to the field do not merely examine specific school subjects, such as mathematics and history, but also studies on intersections between school subjects, as for example art and science (Caiman and Jakobson, 2019).
Ainsworth and Bell suggest that explicit grammar learning may evoke aesthetic experience as existing tacit knowledge of language is transformed into declarative knowledge, generating aesthetic-epistemic feelings of fittingness. Albuquerque and Moore suggest that additional language teaching and learning might be enhanced by framing it as “coartistry,” a site for “aesthetic, plurilingual/pluriliterate action, and interaction.” Andrée et al. explore learning in programming, demonstrating the importance of aesthetic judgments for orienting student learning toward the movement of the programmed object and the ways to be as a programmer. Berg et al. show how aesthetic values in teaching home and consumer studies play a key role and are constituted as culinary, production, and bodily aesthetics, relating to, for example, presentation of meals, preprocessing of food and bodily consequences of eating, respectively. Ferguson and White draw on a socio-semiotic pragmatist perspective to explore the synergy between science education aesthetics and climate change aesthetics, advocating for a transformative aesthetics of climate change education. Gåfvels explores the aesthetics involved in teaching and learning floristry, providing examples of aesthetic judgements being constructed in interaction, informed by sensory knowing and communicated through embodied actions. Hannigan et al. present a mixed methodology approach to examine the role of aesthetic experiences and art for learning in marine science when children engage in a series of fieldtrips, workshops and lessons on a marine environment. Karavakou et al. present a theoretical model for analyzing students' aesthetically driven mathematical meaning making, using empirical findings to discuss the prospect of an aesthetically oriented curriculum reform. Nemirovsky et al. draw on Rancière's approach to aesthetics and politics and a case study of a conversation between weavers, anthropologists, and mathematics educators on the nature of knots to discuss the implications of aesthetical entanglements for mathematics learning. Prain et al. adopt Peirce's semiotic theory of signs examining disciplinary aesthetics as enjoyment and appreciation learning within and across the two subjects drama and science. They show how students' taste for both subjects is constituted through signs and signs systems.
The contributions within this Research Topic make both empirical and theoretical contributions to the emerging field of disciplinary aesthetics. Together they provide exploratory responses to the hitherto understudied questions:
• What are the objects (language, procedures, and persons) that are aesthetically included or excluded as part of teaching and learning the subject?
• How can such distinctions be seen to be taught and learned as content of the subject?
Substantively, the studies provide an exploration of how the aesthetic dimensions of each of the academic subjects might be characterized, exemplifying the aesthetic experiences that may arise from engaging with particular kinds of subject content in particular ways. Methodologically, the contributions showcase a range of methods that might be used to capture such aesthetic experiences and the particular aspects of knowledge and/or learning that have the potential to evoke them. These articles provide a flexible suite of methodological and theoretical tools, which might be used in future research to broaden the field of disciplinary aesthetics to include further academic disciplines. They also yield a number of important implications for educators, including suggestions for how teachers might harness the aesthetic dimensions of particular subjects to maximize learning and engagement in the classroom. More broadly, the Research Topic argues for the role of aesthetics in education to be taken seriously, and signposts potentially fruitful avenues for future research.
Author contributions
PA: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. CC: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. P-OW: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. SA: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher's note
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References
Ainsworth, S., and Bell, H. (2020). Affective knowledge versus affective pedagogy: the cases of native grammar learning. Cambr. J. Educ. 50, 597–614. doi: 10.1080/0305764X.2020.1751072
Anderhag, P., Wickman, P. O., and Hamza, K. M. (2015). Signs of taste for science: a methodology for studying the constitution of interest in the science classroom. Cult. Stud. Sci. Educ. 10, 339–368. doi: 10.1007/s11422-014-9641-9
Berg, G., Elmståhl, H., Mattsson Sydner, Y., and Lundqvist, E. (2019). Aesthetic judgments and meaning-making during cooking in Home and Consumer Studies. Educare 2, 30–57. doi: 10.24834/educare.2019.2.3
Caiman, C., and Jakobson, B. (2019). The role of art practice in elementary school science. Sci. Educ. 28, 153–175. doi: 10.1007/s11191-019-00036-2
Ferguson, J. P., Tytler, R., and White, P. (2021). The role of aesthetics in the teaching and learning of data modelling. Int. J. Sci. Educ. 2021:1875514. doi: 10.1080/09500693.2021.1875514
Gilbert, F. (2016). Aesthetic learning, creative writing and English teaching. Chang. Engl. 23, 257–268. doi: 10.1080/1358684X.2016.1203616
Hannigan, S., Wickman, P. O., Ferguson, J. P., Prain, V., and Tytler, R. (2021). The role of aesthetics in learning science in an art-science lesson. Int. J. Sci. Educ. 2021:1909773. doi: 10.1080/09500693.2021.1909773
Maivorsdotter, N., and Lundvall, S. (2009). Aesthetic experience as an aspect of embodied learning: stories from physical education student teachers. Sport Educ. Soc. 14, 265–279. doi: 10.1080/13573320903037622
Sinclair, N. (2006). Mathematics and Beauty: Aesthetics Approaches to Teaching Children. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Sinclair, N. (2009). Aesthetics as a liberating force in mathematics education? ZDM Math. Educ. 41, 45–60. doi: 10.1007/s11858-008-0132-x
Wickman, P. O. (2006). Aesthetic Experience in Science Education: Learning and Meaning-Making as Situated Talk and Action. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Keywords: methodology, interest, aesthetics, learning, school subjects
Citation: Anderhag P, Caiman C, Wickman P-O and Ainsworth S (2024) Editorial: Disciplinary aesthetics: the role of taste and affect for teaching and learning specific school subjects. Front. Educ. 9:1396318. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1396318
Received: 05 March 2024; Accepted: 12 March 2024;
Published: 27 March 2024.
Edited and reviewed by: Stefinee Pinnegar, Brigham Young University, United States
Copyright © 2024 Anderhag, Caiman, Wickman and Ainsworth. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Per Anderhag, per.anderhag@su.se