Aesthetic enquiry gives children the tools in the form of critical and creative thinking – for articulating and interrogating their experiences of the arts, including their own pictures, artefacts and compositions. The constant interplay between looking or listening, creating and talking reinforces the connections between children’s creative and logical, non verbal and verbal, right brain and left brain capabilities and also catering for different learning styles.
Aesthetic enquiry as a version of philosophical enquiry.
The starting point or stimulus of an aesthetic enquiry is not a piece of philosophical text but a work or piece of art: or excerpts of music, painting, photographs, sculpture, craftwork, a design, a dance or a mime. Aesthetic enquiry can also admit and investigate objects or genres that do not fall into conventional aesthetic categories e.g. advertisements, ‘found objects’, instruments, children’s work etc.
A work of art also has multiple meaning, including the artist’s embodied meaning(s). Because of its non-verbal nature, discussions about works of art are acts of translation. The deciphering of their meaning depends not only on the ability to think philosophically and to express these thoughts coherently, but also on the understanding of the cultural conventions that the works of art refer to.
A work of art as stimulus cannot simply be used as a springboard for discussion and then jettisoned; it requires repeated revisiting in order for new and deeper layers of meaning to be discovered. This repeated interrogation results in thorough acquaintance with the work of art….. For children of different abilities and interests to have various works of art firmly lodged in their minds is an enriching experience, like knowing lots of poems or songs by heart. These thoroughly learnt works of art can become part of children’s thinking repertoire as reference points and resources. They can start influencing aesthetic choices. In enquiring into a work of art children are encouraged to consider their own aesthetic preferences, and other children’s, and are encouraged to express what they think in relation to their own cultural context and also to interrogate their own and others’ contexts for deeper understanding.
Aesthetic enquiry is different from conventional discussions about the arts. Discussion about music or musical experience in conventional music lessons tends to be restricted to either impressionistic, metaphorical stuff of no great depth (‘ the music reminds e of a walk in the snowy forest’) or thoroughly technical analysis according to the ‘elements of music’ listed in the National Curriculum Music document e.g. structure, dynamics, texture, timbre, duration. The list is based on criteria created for theoretical purposes and not for helping youngsters make sense of their musical experience.
Aesthetic enquiry has the potential to bridge the gap between these two modes of engagement; the purely metaphorical and the purely technical, by encouraging children to create a language for describing and interrogating musical experience. This language is usually largely impressionistic at the beginning but, with the development of the community of enquiry , it admits more and more musical concepts. Children construct these concepts in order to describe musical experience ever more precisely. Once they have grasped the musical concepts they seem to have no difficulty adopting the technical terms that label them. The exchanges between children in a mature community of enquiry are not dissimilar to the deliberations of a music or art critic who knowledgeably combines the impressionistic and metaphorical with technical description.
In summary aesthetic enquiry encompasses much more that the usual appraising activities in music and art lessons. It opens up the philosophical dimensions of artistic experience by:
scrutinising the assumptions underlying the assessment of any object as a work of art;
exploring the foundations of aesthetic understanding, cultural conventions, habits, learning, taste and investigating not only the product, the work of art, but also the processes of artistic creation.
Extract from : Creativity in music and art Sara Liptai
Unlocking Creativity: Teaching across the curriculum Edited by Robert Fisher & Mart Williams
