Teaching Aesthetics and Aesthetic Teaching: Toward a Deweyan Perspective

by David A. Granger


The educational writings of John Dewey continue to be invoked by scholars in education on a regular basis and in relation to a wide variety of issues, from social learning theory and situated cognition to constructivism and wholelanguage literacy instruction. More recently, this scholarship has begun to expand to include books and essays that look to tie Dewey's aesthetics to his work in education in a substantive way. Notably, this is not something that Dewey attempted himself, since his major work in aesthetics, Art as Experience, was not published until he was seventy-five, and he seemingly had neither the time nor means at that point in his life to develop this link to his satisfaction. In addition, many educators are only familiar with Dewey's more explicitly educational writings, most of which came earlier in his career and tend to speak more of the merits of science than of art. As a result, scholars in education have only recently begun to examine the possible significance of Dewey's aesthetics for the practices of teaching and learning.