ABSTRACT
In the study presented here, I distinguish aesthetics as one form of experience, not because I want to show that drawing such a boundary can be made with great precision against other aspects of experience, but to demonstrate in what ways aesthetic experience is tied to learning of science. In this chapter I make an exposition of some of Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s ideas on aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment to give an idea of how they understood the connection between aesthetics and learning. My intention is not to explain these philosophers’ ideas in their own right, but to build from what I make of them. By relating their ideas to a theory of learning as discourse change and to a practical epistemology analysis (Wickman, 2004; Wickman & Östman, 2002b), and also to sociocultural theories of learning, a framework for examining the role of the aesthetic experiences in science education is developed in this chapter. This framework is used in part II of this book to analyze talk in science class to demonstrate what such an approach can help us understand regarding the role of aesthetics in learning a subject like science.
