Beyond a Pragmatic Account of the Aesthetic in Science Education

Abstract

This paper argues that pragmatist philosophies and theories of science, education and art have dominated our understanding of aesthetics in science education in ways that overshadow other important and pertinent aspects of aesthetic experience. For all its strengths, a pragmatist account of science education and aesthetics remains vulnerable to a kind of instrumentalism that reduces the objects, practices and persons in science education to mere beings: the source and subject of a reductive objectification of experience. This paper proposes a counter-balancing perspective that both respects and also adds to that offered by pragmatism. It does so with reference to Heidegger’s ontological difference: the one side of which is concerned with pragmatic, scientific, reflective thinking and the other with a meditative and phenomenological way of thinking that draws out our unmediated experiences of the world. Moreover, it argues that the latter is accessible in science classrooms by approaching objects and practices as works of art.