The Roles of Aesthetic Experience in Elementary School Science

摘要

The role of aesthetic experiences for learning was examined in elementary schoolscience. Numerous authors have argued for a science education also involving aestheticexperiences, but few have examined what this means empirically. Recordings of children'stalk with each other and with the teacher during hands-on activities in nine different scienceunits were made. How the children and teachers used aesthetic judgements and how thesejudgements were part of aesthetic experiences of the science assignments were analysed.For the analysis a pragmatist perspective was used, especially drawing on Dewey and thelater Wittgenstein. The results showed how aesthetic judgements occurred in moments ofanticipation and moments when the science activities were brought to fulfilment. In thisway children used aesthetic judgements normatively about what belonged in science classand what to include and exclude. In this way aesthetic judgements were an important part oflearning how to proceed in science class. In using aesthetic judgements the children alsotalked about their own place in science class and whether they belonged there or not. In thisway aesthetic experience is tightly related to learning science as participation. Learningscience also meant learning a special kind of aesthetics, that is, learning how to distinguishthe science context from other contexts. The fact that children liked or disliked somethingoutside school did not necessarily mean that it was experienced aesthetically in the sameway in school, but needed to be re-learnt. What these results mean for science education isdiscussed at length. The connection between aesthetics and learning to observe is alsobriefly discussed.