Appreciating the beauty of science ideas: Teaching for aesthetic understanding

Abstract

A large literature exists in which scientists describe their field as beautiful and the work they do as inspiring and passionate. Science teaching should strive to foster learning of substantive and powerful science ideas in ways that connect to the beauty inherent in those ideas. Our conception of learning science, that of learning for aesthetic understanding, achieves this goal by building on a framework of aesthetic experiences proposed by Dewey. This study is an articulation of the major components of aesthetic understanding, pedagogy designed to foster it, and the results of a pilot study designed to investigate its effectiveness. Responses to a survey and a semistructured interview are compared for students in two, fourth grade classrooms. The instructional goals were different in each classroom; one taught for the goal of aesthetic understanding, the second for the goal of conceptual understanding. Survey results indicate that the pedagogical moves were effective in scaffolding aesthetic understanding in treatment class students. More interesting, however, are student reports of the quality of the learning experience in the treatment class. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 87:574–587, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/sce.1054