Constructing aesthetic experience through biology learning from Dewey’s perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT John Dewey’s aesthetics subverts and transcends traditional aesthetics. He applied his empiricism philosophy into the field of aesthetics and re-established the significance of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience comes from daily experience; hence it is not fundamentally different from students’ biological learning experience. Based on students’ life experience, aesthetic education advances to the climax in biology teaching in a compact and continuous way. In this process, the students’ emotions combine practice and intellect into an indivisible whole, forming an experience. The way of learning by doing and the support of necessary techniques make the students’ inner impulsion interact with the outer resistance, so that an experience is strengthened and concentrated into aesthetic experience. However, there still exists a research blank in aesthetic education in biology from Dewey’s perspective. As the early exploration, this case study aims to answer ‘Is it possible for students in secondary schools to construct aesthetic experience through biology learning?’ Thus, we designed a bio-macro-photography activity as the learning environment, and analysed the characteristics of life-nature, coherence, unity, and interactivity stemmed from the two participants’ experience in phenomenological sense, the result of which indicates that students’ biological learning experience is aesthetic experience at the same time.