Aesthetic Practice and the Critical Faculty: Examining the Educational Conditions of Aesthetic Experience

The project Aesthetic Practice and the Critical Faculty aims for a novel and timely understanding of the importance arts education has for training students to become critical and responsible agents. Within a phenomenological setting, it will examine the ways in which ten 14-year-old-students with different educational backgrounds respond to aesthetic situations and to what extent they are ready for learning by them. The investigation will focus on the question of how the quantity and quality of aesthetic practice affect the capability of students to engage with a situation aesthetically, their aesthetic attitudes and their conception of aesthetic agency. Finally, it will investigate the students readiness to perceive and to think of a situation critically, viz. of relating their own perspective to the situation given to other possible views towards it and, potentially, adopting these views. Based upon a thorough philosophical investigation combined with an exemplary and explorative empirical study, the current project will develop a nuanced account of the critical potential of aesthetic practice that considers the actual educational conditions of aesthetic experience.

My research project focused on the question of in which ways and to what extent young people engage with images critically. One of the basic assumptions of my project was that a critical rapport with images was crucial for everybody, especially in a time when we are more and more flooded by images in the analogue and digital worlds we are living in. Therefore, I conducted this project with a scientific interest on the one hand and with a pedagogical- practical interest on the other hand. The latter is linked to the educational possibilities of strengthening the ability of dealing with images critically: How can people learn to relate to images critically? What aspects of criticality can be actively trained and in which ways can they be trained? What are the institutional, methodological and thematic conditions for acquiring a critical attitude in young people? Before being able to find out more about these possibilities, however, it was necessary to fully understand what critical can mean when it comes to dealing with images. Criticality in this context was framed as a careful, thorough, differentiated, determined and reflected way of engaging with images in looking at them, discussing them, bodily relating to them, working with them, using them. Taken this way, criticality was freed from a generally accepted understanding which regards a critic as a judge who expresses their personal liking or disliking. Rather, the focus is on an actual and deep engage ment with images that goes beyond a rash expression of inclination. In my project, I was specifically interested in how young people who are so-called digital natives and who are normally confronted with countless images in everyday life engage with images and to what extent their engagement shows features of criticality. In order to explore the ways in which young people act critically with regard to images 14-years-old students were invited to deal with three images in a group of 10 to 12 within a workshop situation. The five workshops were audio-recorded and observed. Critically dealing with images turned out to be not at all restricted to talking about images and judging them. Rather, criticality was often expressed on a bodily level. Verbal expressions showed a strong tendency to be adopted by others within the group of students. Since adopting an expression from another person does not indicate thorough and deep engagement, I found little features of criticality on a verbal level. Accordingly, one centr al result of the project was the insight that young people not only need to be given more possibilities to train their criticality (in schools), but also that critical engagement needs to be regarded as more than verbal forms of expressions, by students, but also by teachers.