2025 Theses Doctoral

Integrating Aesthetic Education and Art Education: Developing Aesthetic Sensiblities through Six Art Lessons

Gomez, Carmen

This dissertation explores how aesthetic education might more fully coalesce with art education to foster students’ aesthetic sensibility, personal expression, and reflective awareness. Too often, art instruction in schools is shaped by rigid, adult-determined outcomes that prioritize technique and product over perception and meaning. Such models fragment the experience of artmaking, undervaluing the subtle, sensory, and emotional dimensions that allow students to respond to their environment and to themselves.

This study argues for a more holistic, experience-driven approach to art education—one that centers not only on what students make but how they see, feel, and interpret the world around them.The research took the form of six art lessons designed to support the development of aesthetic sensibility through open-ended exploration, sensory noticing, and guided dialogue. Each lesson invited students to work with diverse materials while engaging with themes such as transformation, memory, and personal meaning. Rather than emphasizing technical mastery, the lessons foregrounded curiosity, experimentation, and reflection as key modes of aesthetic inquiry.

Findings suggest that when students are invited to attend to their inner responses and explore ideas through art, they develop a stronger sense of agency, confidence, and imaginative freedom. Their engagement deepens when lessons prioritize perception, not perfection.

Ultimately, this research contributes to a growing call for art education practices that recognize students as whole human beings—perceivers, thinkers, and meaning-makers. It advocates for an expanded view of learning in which art is not merely a skill to master but a way of engaging with the world—integrating self, others, and environment through perception, dialogue, and the process of making.