| The purpose of this study was to shed a light on various approaches to aesthetic education for young children at the early childhood level, which have often been omitted in the discourse of education. This study selected three early childhood schools that use the Bank Street, Reggio, or Waldorf approach, and investigated the educators' perceptions of aesthetic education and their ways of implementing it in real classroom settings. Non-participatory observation of arts and classroom activities in one 4/5 year-old classroom at each school and open-ended interviews with the educators were conducted. The data sources included documents, observations (field notes and audiotapes), classroom artifacts, and formal and informal interviews with directors, classroom teachers, and art teachers.;The overall findings reveal that educators at each school have a variety of perceptions of aesthetic education, consisting of some common images of aesthetics, aesthetic education, and aesthetic experience, but leading to very different implementations based on the educators' different images of the child---as a social being, intellectual being, or spiritual being---and particular aims of arts/aesthetic education. These different images of the child and aims of arts/aesthetic education were deeply rooted in each school's unique philosophic and pedagogical underpinnings based on Dewey, Vygotsky, or Steiner and were loosely linked to the aesthetic theories that emphasize different aspects of art and aesthetics.;Despite this complexity, the findings suggest an expanded view of aesthetic education covering a large area, including visual art, music, movement, story, poem, and play, and a variety of images in social and natural contexts, and conclusively imply an emerging aesthetic paradigm at the early childhood level. This emerging aesthetic paradigm suggests a coherent framework for reconsidering arts and aesthetic education, as well as a core for the entire curriculum and a way of integrating children's cognitive, linguistic, emotional, and aesthetic development into a whole. Finally, each school's unique interpretation and implementation of aesthetics in an educational context provides early childhood educators with numerous practical suggestions to embark on a comprehensive aesthetic education, while leaving open some interesting issues in terms of theory and practice and inquiries for future research. |
