John Dewey's concept of aesthetic experience: Benefits and application for moral education

Jiwon Kim, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation study has three major questions: What is aesthetic experience and why is it important in moral education? How does aesthetic experience contribute to moral education? And how can we realize aesthetic moral education in our educational practices and lives? As a result, first, this research found that integrating various ways of knowing in terms of mind, body, and emotions, moral education through aesthetic experience can enhance the connection between moral judgment and moral actions, and thereby it is an alternative and powerful approach to moral education. Second, this study elucidated that through the major characteristics such as qualitative immediacy, imaginativeness, and embodiment, aesthetic experience influences moral education in terms of empathetic moral perception, aesthetic moral reasoning, and moral action. Lastly, by examining an exemplary case of living drawing, this study confirmed that there is a positive relation between aesthetic experience and moral education. Consequently, it suggested two ways to foster aesthetic experience in moral and general education: aesthetic teaching, teachers, and educational environments, and certain methods of cultivating abilities to have aesthetic experience. Current virtue-centered or moral education using art as just inspiration is clearly deficient and it must be complemented by a largely aesthetic and qualitative perspective. To seize such an educative experience for moral education, we need first to correct only the cognitive perspective of reason into Dewey's integrated, constructive, and embodied view of it. Thereby, learning can be restored to aesthetic experience which integrates mind, body, and emotion. In addition, according to Dewey's continuity theme, moral education materials and students’ ordinary affairs need to be closely connected to each other. More attention to emotions, imagination, and embodied reasoning by educators will increase the possibility of this alternative and powerful moral education. This dissertation research contributes to solving the problem of contemporary character education in forging a connection between moral reasoning and moral actions.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Rud, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Ethics|Aesthetics|Education philosophy

COinS