Aesthetic inquiry in visual arts education of 6th graders within the framework of Maxine Greene’s aesthetic view on education: An action research

This study is an aesthetic inquiry, as part of a visual arts class, from the standpoint of Maxine Greene's aesthetic perspective in education. By adopting Maxine Greene's perspective, affective learning comes to the fore along with cognitive learning, and accentuates multiple realities through the imagination through the research experiences of the artist, in the process of aesthetic inquiry. The purpose of this study is to reveal the improvement in students’ interpretation processes from different perspectives through aesthetic inquiry in visual arts classes. The study uses action research design, one of the qualitative research designs. It covers a 14-week course at a public middle school. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data and the research findings were presented. According to the findings, It could be argued that the students reached a broader perspective by reflecting what they discerned in the course processes, the connections they established in relation to their knowledge, feelings and experiences, the differences in their ideas and the developments they observed in themselves from their personal perspectives. The students displayed empathy by seeing different ideas together in the course processes and gained new understandings from multiple perspectives. Under the teacher’s guidance, the students develop a clear perspective of what they can do in works of self-expression and artistic practice by asking questions on what they were curious about, and explaining the reasons for their ideas.