Exploring Aesthetic Alternatives

        Pedagogy that stifles student expression works against a liberal education's liberating aim, and by leveraging children’s innate creative capacities, teachers can incorporate an aesthetic approach to deepen engagement, meaning, and learning. By augmenting the existing curricula with innovative opportunities for engagement and expression and diversifying and multiplying contact points of content, teachers can employ a multi-sensory approach to their delivery to connect with students of various learning styles. This multi-modal approach to content delivery and response values student choice and voice and creates a more authentic engagement with the content. Teaching that doesn’t include an aesthetic component deprives students of their natural tendency to develop and articulate their understanding of the world in their style and language. 

        Embracing the aesthetic approach, I recently transformed a dull, unimaginative, and wholly behaviorist approach to math instruction, i.e., a predictable sequence of direct instruction, teacher modeling, guided practice, independent work, and exit ticket submission. Instead of abandoning the behaviorist model altogether, for it is an essential instructional framework,  I infused it with opportunities to engage with the content through different senses to add depth and dimensionality to what had hitherto been an abstract concept divorced from their lives, and the breakthroughs in conceptual understanding were almost instantaneous. Specifically, we’re learning about fractions, and one of my students who’s yet to solidify their number sense enough to abstractly reason about quantities struggles without substantial support, and used, brightly colored, plastic manipulatives weren’t getting us anywhere either. Hitting a wall because I was racking my brain to think of a creative way to make the concrete more concrete, I remembered that this student had proudly presented their beautifully sculpted and colorfully glazed art project, and it occurred to me that this might be the medium to reach them. After procuring some clay from the art teacher, I approached simple fraction instruction the same way I had done with the plastic fraction sets, but with the clay, something stuck, and a connection was made that was previously absent. They plunged their fingers into the clay, manipulating, partitioning, composing, and decomposing fractions as intuitively and capably as the other students with their pencils and papers.

        The aesthetic approach enables access to content that a traditional curriculum denies by presenting an artistic medium to enter the concept. However, the onus is on the teacher to devise creative pathways for divergent thinkers and feelers to access and engage with the content meaningfully, which is a challenging task. It would behoove all educators to infuse their lessons with opportunities for artistic expression because its languages are universal and transcendent and can transport students far beyond the sometimes-stifling walls of public school. 

Source: McConnell, C., Conrad, B., & Uhrmacher, P. B. (2020). Lesson Planning with purpose: Five approaches to curriculum design. Teachers College Press.