The Journal of Aesthetic Education

Introduction

Teachers are a central factor in student learning in the classroom, but what impact does a teacher have on students' educational experiences in out-of-school settings, such as the museum? As schools become increasingly open to community resources and partnerships, the teacher's realm of influence reaches beyond the classroom to community and regional sites. While it is critical to understand how teacher planning, knowledge, and beliefs impact student learning in the classroom,¹ it is also important to investigate the influence of these factors on student learning in out-of-school settings. This is especially significant when the teacher is not a passive participant on a docent-led museum tour but rather an active designer of students' interactions with a museum's exhibits, as on a self-conducted tour. As in the classroom, it is useful for teachers to reflect on their values and practice while teaching in an informal learning environment, like a museum, so that they may fully support student learning in this context. In addition, as museums seek to define themselves as educational institutions relevant to the K–12 curriculum, it is important that museum educators understand how teachers play a mediating role between students and museum objects so that they can support teachers as they seek to include museum collections as sources for student learning.

In this article I will explore the role of the teacher as mediator in student interactions with works of art in a museum through the presentation of a case study of the influence of pedagogy and curriculum on students' experiences while visiting an art museum. I will discuss one case from a larger research project studying two art teachers who brought their middle school students on self-conducted tours of the city's major art museum.² [End Page 45] The single case discussed herein consists of an art teacher, Kate, and her sixth-grade class of twenty-eight students at a large urban public school; in this study the case is bounded temporally and pedagogically by a curricular unit focusing on contemporary sculpture.³ This article presents the findings for one of the research questions for the larger study: How do pedagogy, curriculum, and/or the museum environment mediate the student's understanding and experience? In particular, I will focus on how Kate's curricular choices, educational philosophy, and caring and responsive pedagogical practice influenced her sixth-grade students' experiences visiting the sculpture exhibition.

Theoretical Framework

This study is grounded in the aesthetic theories of John Dewey and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who assert the educational nature of aesthetic experience.⁴ Both philosophers describe aesthetic experience as a constructed event between the work of art and the viewer. An interpretive, meaning-making process is the central activity of this event, which occurs through perception. For Dewey, emotion is the "cementing force" that makes the experience memorable and productive and cultivates growth, which he considers central to education:⁵ "Education means the enterprise of supplying the conditions which insure growth."⁶ For Gadamer, the experience is dialogic, an ongoing interpretive exchange between the viewer and the work of art that results in a disclosure of meaning:

And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that the experience (Erfahrung) of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs the knowledge of nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from all conceptual knowledge—but still knowledge, i.e., conveying truth?⁷

The aesthetic theories of Dewey and Gadamer provide a framework for the kind of meaning-making process, or learning, that might occur during student interactions with works of art in a museum setting. Recognizing the potential influence of the teacher on these interactions through differing pedagogical approaches and curricular decisions, the study also draws on research in the teacher cognition paradigm, specifically, Clandinin's work on teachers' personal practical knowledge and McKean's work on teacher beliefs.⁸

Methodology

This study employed a naturalistic instrumental...