Many believe that an important purpose of arts education is to develop students’ capacity to see things from an aesthetic perspective. This includes learning to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the world around them, learning to make qualitative discernments and judgments, and learning to actively shape their own aesthetic environments. This theme is consistent with those of prominent arts education theorists (e.g., Dobbs, 1998, 2004; Eisner, 2004; Greene, 2000; Reimer, 2003; Smith, 2004, 2006; Smith & Simpson, 1991).
It might be argued that aesthetic awareness is simply a special kind of artistic skill and should thus be included in the foregoing “artistic skills and techniques” category.
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But the people we spoke with emphasized its special importance, as do many theorists, and we thus consider it as a distinct category. There is a pleasant symmetry to reporting our fi ndings in this section, because arts educators’ rationale for the importance of developing students’ aesthetic awareness is closely linked to the reason that we chose the phrase “the qualities of quality” as the banner for this research project. As noted elsewhere in this report, there are two meanings to “quality” – a characteristic or feature of something, and a judgment of excellence. This double discernment – seeing features, and seeing excellence – is how many of the educators we spoke with characterized aesthetic awareness. Developing students’ aesthetic awareness helps them “see” the world more fully and in more detail, and thus be able to make more nuanced judgments about value.
Linking the two meanings of quality, Elliot Eisner recalls his experiences as a very young man working in a shoe store where he learned to discern varying levels of quality. “I began to notice differences between the shoes and how the heels were stacked, what the quality of the leather was like, the construction, whether it had a steel shank in it, etcetera, etcetera. And what I found was the closer I paid attention to the qualities of the shoes or the shirts or the pants, the more I saw, the more I noticed, and the more satisfaction I received from those that were of very high quality. So this was a learning process that I was in charge of. I learned that you could look in order to see and that was a real revelation to me and something that made it possible for me to do that anytime I wanted to.” In his writings, Eisner (2002) also argues that arts education teaches us to frame the world from an aesthetic perspective.
Developing discerning aesthetic awareness can lead to the understanding of relationships. Karen Fields at Opening Minds through the Arts (OMA) refers to it as “activating discernment” and sees aesthetic discrimination as an important outcome of participation and observation in the arts. During our site visit to OMA we sat in on a class that embodies this purpose. In a class that integrated language arts and opera, students were learning about different values associated with words (for example the difference between “happy” and “elated”) and two
professional opera singers were using facial expression, body language, and opera to demonstrate these differences, challenging the students to decide which word better described the character’s feeling in a particular passage from Schumann’s Death and the Maiden.
Lissa Soep of Youth Radio aims for high production values in the work she does with youth, and she empha- sizes the link between the pursuit of aesthetic excellence and intrinsic motivation. Working alongside profession- als on projects that involve a high level of aesthetic and professional standards sustains student engagement. It “creates a lot of energy behind the work and elevates the standards of the work that is generated.” At the Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) in New York, executive director Scott Noppe-Brandon discussed the importance of using high quality material as a departure point for an aesthet- ic experience: “The reason to start with high quality of works of art is that there are multiple layers of complexity that are built in so that study repays itself.” Engaging with quality art work, students at LCI can then build multiple “capacities” such as noticing deeply, asking questions, making connection, seeing patterns, creating meaning, refl ecting, and assessing.
Like Eisner, independent scholar Laura Chapman recognizes that aesthetic awareness extends beyond for- mal arts learning experiences. “In the traditional venues for encountering ‘high quality,’ such as museums or gal- leries, concert halls, theaters, it is easy to forget how ex- periences in these sanctuaries are enriched or inhibited by impressions from a larger surround of mass-produced cultural fare, mass-circulated imagery, so many aestheti- cally designed environments. I think it is a mistake to think that ‘high quality’ is only and inevitably at a dis- tance from everyday experiences.” Chapman would like arts education to help students discern the aesthetic qual- ities of the informal environments that surround them, understand their messages and cultural infl uence, and feel empowered to judge and shape them. “If you walk by the cosmetic counter, you have the opportunity to see some- one’s ‘lessons’ about the aesthetics of self-presentation for women. There are different lessons in other ‘departments’ whether it is children’s clothing or home goods.”
ception of aesthetic excellence that is dominated by one cultural perspective, a perspective echoed throughout the literature on the importance of bringing folk arts into arts education (Bowman, 1993-2003, 2006; Bowman & Zeit- lin, 1993; Cleveland, 2000; Green, 2001; Hamer, 2000; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1983; Mesa-Baines, 1990; Mu- seum of American Folk Art, 1998), and the importance of considering learning in “outsider art” (Rubin, 2004; Sellen & Johanson, 1999).
Recalling her early efforts to study folklore, Con- gdon recounts that several universities “thought it was lower, it wasn’t really aesthetic, and people were saying we have to bring the students up to us and what we know. But it was really important to me to start looking at the aesthetics of different cultural groups and the functions of arts in different cultural groups and how people within these different communities see what art is supposed to do and how it communicates their own values instead of only trying to say these are the great works that you need to understand in order to become a cultured individual.”
Just as cultivating aesthetic appreciation needn’t be rooted in an objective defi nition of aesthetic value that privileges the values of certain cultures over others, ex- cellence in arts education need not be “one recipe for all.” Rather, in both cases, making discerning judgments about excellence depends on a fi ne-grained understanding of the relationship between the purposes of something, its varied features, and the context in which it is used and valued.
4. Arts practices should provide ways of pursuing un-