Aesthetic Codes in Context: An Exploration in Two Preschool Classrooms

In dealing with the problem of the relative status of aesthetic knowledge in the general school curriculum, curriculum theorists have tended to cast their interests and concerns in prescriptive formulae.' Most of the attention has been focused, for example, on making a case for art knowledge belonging in the curriculum and on showing why it does. These claims usually turn on the benefits that students and others might derive from studying literature, art, music, and so on. These benefits are said to include such things as a more productive use of leisure, exposure to the social ideals embodied in art, internalization of a different mode of understanding the world, appreciation of a different kind of value experience, and even development of basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic.2 For a number of years now, we have been suggesting that this traditional tendency has been overstressed and should at least be balanced by a more descriptive approach to the problem.8 In working toward such an approach, we designed a small-scale study that would explore the treatment of aesthetic knowledge in actual classrooms. Since we were interested specifically in the role of aesthetic knowledge