Aesthetic Inquiry in Education: Community, Transcendence, and the Meaning of Pedagogy

Abstract

What does it mean to understand education as an art, to conceive inquiry in education aesthetically, or to assess pedagogy artistically? Answers to these queries are often grounded in Deweyan instrumentalism, neo-Marxist critical theory, or postmodern skepticism that tend to fall prey to the paradoxes of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism.1 This essay offers an alternative, communitarian account of education as an art and a neo-Kantian approach to aesthetic inquiry in education that avoids these difficulties. I begin by examining the emergence of aesthetic inquiry in education in the context of the larger qualitative revolution in educational research. The struggle to justify the qualitative turn in educational thought was initially framed in terms of two influential doctrines: that cognition and affect on the one hand, and truth, beauty, and goodness on the other, can be clearly distinguished from one another. Qualitative methods were conceived as an alternative research paradigm - a new epistemology - in keeping with Thomas Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.2 Qualitative research, on this account, is a cognitive endeavor aimed at discovering a form of knowledge no less valid and reliable than that produced by quantitative methodologies. This way of framing the discussion led to the dichotomizing of positivist and postpositivist epistemologies, one embracing absolutism, objectivism, and rationalism, the other relativism, subjectivism, and romanticism.3 This approach succeeded in pointing to some serious flaws in the prevailing positivist account of social research, yet it left qualitative inquiry dependent on versions of epistemological relativism and subjectivism that philosophers of knowledge have shown to be self-contradictory and incoherent.4