Emerging Practice for New Teachers: Creating Possibilities for “Aesthetic” Readings

This article explores how exposure to aesthetic education approaches can help novice teachers reconsider their literature instruction in an age of mandated curricula and increased pressures to“teach to the test.” The guiding questions were as follows: What similarities exist between transacting with a text on the page and aesthetically engaging with other works of art, and could thesetheories and practices be brought into ELA classrooms? Through freewrites, reflective papers, and a final self-assessment, students documented both their initial resistances and their evolvingunderstandings of aesthetic education. We discovered that involving English education students in aesthetic experiences affected the ways many began to reimagine their classrooms, literacy/literature instruction, and education in general.