CHAPTER 5: Aestheticizing a Course on Educational Psychology

This chapter seeks to describe one professor’s attempt to aestheticize a traditional educational psychology course and to demonstrate the efficacy of such aestheticizing through theoretical presentations and illustrative examples of the author’s own practice. It is not a demand for a wholesale shift in the teaching of educational psychology; rather, it urges course instructors and program planners to consider aesthetic consciousness as an important component of human knowing, one that is often ignored of late. Although aesthetics has been a significant topic of consideration for important thinkers in educational psychology and related fields, for instance, Dewey, Bruner, and Vygotsky, the term aesthetics is not indexed in the index of the last two handbooks of educational psychology, nor is it indexed in any of the nine educational psychology textbooks that have collected in my office. Thus, in considering the how and why of aestheticizing a course in educational psychology, it is useful to return to the roots of the field.