An Introduction to Everyday Aesthetics in Education

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An Introduction to Everyday Aesthetics in Education Guillermo Marini1  Accepted: 12 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to introduce everyday aesthetics in education. First, it presents everyday aesthetics as a subdiscipline within philosophical aesthetics, that revisits sensory perception as the backdrop of all experience, claims ordinary life is a proper venue for aesthetic inquiry, and problematizes the impact aesthetic preferences have on habitual decisions. Second, the paper argues that among the diverse matters students learn in school, they learn—explicitly or implicitly—what and how to perceive, as well as the pedagogical purposes of daily perception. School models the relationships that students will develop between what they perceive, what they think about it, and how they act accordingly. Next, the paper elaborates on the notions of “school aesthetic matrixes” and “space and place in school”. School aesthetic matrixes refer to perceptual patterns that allow characterizing relationships between daily perception and the pedagogical project of a school. They manifest through expressions such as prison school, home school, mall school, etc. Space and place in school allude to concomitant experiences, of corporeal basis, that allow describing how we inhabit the world. What distinguishes them is the approach each one gives to the senses and the body. The paper concludes by calling attention to the comprehension and role of perception in education, urging to mind the aesthetic-pedagogical character that students develop throughout 12  years of schooling. Ultimately, the key relationships we develop with ourselves, others, and the world, entail a basic perceptual dimension that can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present in life. Keywords  Sensory perception · Everyday aesthetics · School aesthetic matrixes · Space and place in school · Pedagogical experience

Introductory Context The origins of everyday aesthetics as a sub-discipline within philosophical aesthetics can be traced back to John Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience. Particularly as he aims to “restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art, and the everyday events, doings and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute * Guillermo Marini [email protected] 1



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experience” (1980, p. 3). In Dewey’s perspective, the “aesthetic” or “experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying” (p. 47) is the common basis through which daily events could reveal their artistic qualities, and works of arts manifest their public meaning; in contrast to the “humdrum” that would render experience “anesthetic” (p. 40). A different source of inspiration comes from Joseph Kupfer’s Experience as Art: Aesthetics in Everyday Life (1983). Rather than contradicting Dewey’s continuity between works of art and everyday eve