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A RHETORIC OF AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT

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5/08 K lPrq/Acc8Pres/ClRC/Dtltcélhn; Indd

A RHETORIC OF AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT
FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
BY

Aimée Knight

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Rhetoric and Writing

2009

ABSTRACT

A RHETORIC OF AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT
FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES

By

Aimée Knight
In this qualitative research study I examined how people produced and
consumed media aesthetically. I deﬁned aesthetics as: how people make and
experience meaning through their sensory-based perception (from the ancient
Greek). Employing the methods of discourse analysis and discourse-based
interviews, I traced the ways students experienced the aesthetic. My ﬁndings
include a matrix, which frames nine diverse potentialities for meaning making and
meaning taking in the acts of production and consumption. This matrix provides a
useful, audience-centered navigational aid which can aid in the critique and
creation of new media compositions. lmportantly, this framework Supports a
theory for engaged learning in digital environments, where students produce and
consume media convergent texts that combine multiple modalities, including

sound, image, and user-interaction.

Copyright by
Aimée Knight
2009

DEDICATION
I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Donna VanSteenhouse and Bruce
Knight, PhD who have encouraged and supported me throughout the entire

doctoral program. Thank you.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my committee members who were so generous with their
expertise and time. A special thanks to Dr. Danielle DeVoss, my committee chair
for her enthusiasm and her virtually instantaneous feedback throughout this
process. Thank you to Jeffrey Grabill for his invaluable guidance regarding
methodology. Thank you Dr. Ellen Cushman, Dr. Danielle DeVoss, Dr. Kathleen
Geissler, Dr. Jeffrey Grabill, and Dr. Colleen Tremonte for comprising my
committee.

I would like to acknowledge and thank my study participants who made
this empirical research on aesthetic experience possible. Their thoughtful
responses made the completion of this research an enjoyable experience.

Finally I would like to thank Ron Creager for keeping me sane, providing
distractions when needed, ﬁxing things, pouring the wine, and listening patiently

to countless aesthetic theories. Thank you for being there.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ..................................................................................................... viii

List of Figures ...................................................................................................... ix

CHAPTER 1

New Directions for Composition Studies ............................................................. 1
Making Meaning ....................................................................................... 3
Inquiry Into The Aesthetic ......................................................................... 6
A New Study, a New Aesthetic ............................................................... 11

CHAPTER 2
Locating the Aesthetic ............................................ 17
Things Known and Things Perceived ..................................................... 20
Other Ways of Knowing .......................................................................... 22
Reinvesting the Aesthetic With Meaning ................................................ 26
Building a Genuinely Useful Aesthetic Theory ........................................ 27

CHAPTER 3

Emerging Rhetoric ............................................................................................ 31
Lenses .................................................................................................... 32
The Setting ............................................................................................. 34
Participants, Sampling, and Case Development .................................... 37
Methods .................................................................................................. 39
The Data Analysis Strategy .................................................................... 42
Coding .................................................................................................... 47
The Matrix: an Emerging Rhetoric .......................................................... 50

CHAPTER 4

The Message on Multiple Levels: Lilly’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement ....... 55
On Project 1 ........................................................................................... 57
On Aesthetic Experience ........................................................................ 62
On Wallowing ............................................................ 64

CHAPTER 5

How We Perceive Things: Jack’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement ................. 68
On Project 1 ........................................................................................... 69
On Aesthetic Experience................................... ..................................... 74
On Representation ................................................................................. 75

CHAPTER 6

vi

Making Real Connections: Emerson’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement ......... 80

On Project 1 ........................................................................................... 82
On Aesthetic Experience ........................................................................ 85
Preparation for Teaching ........................................................................ 89

CHAPTER 7

The Perceptual Materials of Reality: Pi’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement ..... 92
On Project 1 ........................................................................................... 95
On Aesthetic Experience ........................................................................ 97
On Education ........................................................................................ 101

CHAPTER 8

A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Engagement .............................................................. 104
Key Concepts of Aesthetic Engagement .............................................. 105
An Embodied Process .......................................................................... 110

CHAPTER 9

Aesthetic Spaces of Composition .................................................................... 113
Directions for Future Research ............................................................ 117

APPENDIX 1

A Difﬁcult Day .................................................................................................. 1 19
The Aesthetic Toolbox .......................................................................... 121
Thinking Inside a Box ........................................................................... 124

WORKS CITED ............................................................................................... 126

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Hierarchy of the Senses .................................................................... 20
Table 3.1 Study Participants ............................................................................. 39
Table 3.2 Matrix ................................................................................................ 51
Table 8.1 A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Engagement ............................................... 104

viii

List of Figures

Figure 3.1 Locating aesthetic engagement ....................................................... 33
Figure 3.2 Locating emergence ......................................................................... 43
Figure 3.3 Locating convergence ...................................................................... 46
Figure 4.1 Lilly’s album pictures ........................................................................ 59
Figure 5.1 Photo of ivy ...................................................................................... 72
Figure 5.2 Photo of a tree .................................................................................. 73
Figure 5.3 Jack’s website .................................................................................. 76
Figure 5.4 “Spore” ............................................................................................. 78
Figure 6.1 Apollo 17 photograph ....................................................................... 81
Figure 6.2 Photograph of loons ......................................................................... 87
Figure 6.3 Photograph of bridge ........................................................................ 88
Figure 7.1 Screen capture from Devil May Cry 3 ............................................. 94
Figure 7.2 Legend of Mana character ............................................................... 98
Figure 7.3 An example of a detailed background from Legend of Mana ........... 99
Figure 7.4 Botanical drawing by Maria Merian (1627-1717) ............................ 102
Figure 10.1 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending A Staircase (1912) ............. 120
Figure 10.2 The Online Aesthetic Toolbox ...................................................... 124

ix

Chapter 1

New Directions for Composition Studies

In many ways what students “do” in school is changing. Consuming and
producing is fast becoming the new reading and writing. That is to say that
reading is now about consuming—viewing, reading, and interacting with and
through a variety of mediums. Writing is increasingly about producing—
composing, designing, and authoring with multiple media. Acknowledging these
changing performances of communication, ﬁlmmaker George Lucas asks:

”Don’t you think that, in the coming decade, students need to be taught to

read and write cinematic language, the language of the screen, the

language of sound and image, just as they are now taught to read and
write text? Othenrvise, won’t they be as illiterate as you or I would have
been if, on leaving college, we were unable to read and write an essay?

(Daley 15).

These changes point to a shift, where being literate has less to do with the
written letter and more to do with being knowledgeable in textual, visual, digital,
and web-based contexts.

Recognition of this change is prevalent in new media and rhetoric and
composition scholarship. In fact, many current studies begin with phrases similar
to these:

- “writing is changing and the look and functioning of texts are changing”

(Wysocki, “Writing New Media” vii).

- “...it is justiﬁable to speak of a revolution in the landscape of
communication” (Kress, “Gains and Losses” 9).

- “we are witnessing the emergence of a new cultural metalanguage,
something that will be at least as signiﬁcant as the printed word and
cinema before it” (Manovich 93).

Recent scholarship heralds this change; students increasingly engage with
multimodal platforms. By multimodal, I mean platforms that move between
different modes of interaction, from visual, to voice, to touch. Not only do
composers regularly employ multiple modes of representation they also
“choreograph audio, video, still images, text, and more” (DeVoss and Webb 79).
This means that the media students produce and consume on a daily basis are
increasingly combining and converging.

_ A popular activity in recent scholarship is to ask what constitutes new
media (see Brooke & Grusin, 2000; Manovich, 2002; Wysocki et. al., 2004). I call
myself a new media scholar because I am interested in the ways we create
knowledge through media (new and old) and how the combination of text, audio,
image, animation, video, and interactive content forms are changing our
communicative practices. I particularly like Anne Wysocki’s approach to new
media in Writing New Media where she says that texts are made by composers
who are aware of the texts' materiality; the various materialities of a text
contribute to how it is read and understood. Interestingly, Wysocki doesn’t deﬁne
new media in terms of digitality and neither do I. This is because emphasis on

the digital—on the technological—can sometimes cover up the human aspects of

texts.1 This is not to say that new media is or should be located within a “text.”
Media, whether new or old, is still the plural of medium. And a medium is still an
agency or means of doing something and a means by which communication is
expressed. Consequently, media (or mediums) are not static objects that function
independently of how they made and in what contexts. Media are always being
made, always changing. The study of media (both new and old) can contribute to
the design of helpful products for knowledge making, and can help others

communicate more effectively and persuasively.

Making meaning

Living in an era where technological advances are shaping the ways we
communicate, we need a better understanding of our engagement with media in
order to render more transparent the ways in which we create knowledge—or
take and make meaning. The New London Group’s Multiliteracies: Literacy
Learning and the Design of Social Futures has become a touchstone for
composition studies, supporting inquiry into meaning making with multiple
modalities. Within this publication, the New London Group offers the notion of
”available designs” (20). Their conception of available designs formulates the
”Resources of Design:” what communicators can observe in use around them as
they prepare to design new communications” (26). The now familiar modes of
communication that can work together to create meaning consist of the linguistic,

audio, spatial, gestural, visual, and multimodal. According to new media scholar

 

1 This project is an example of why this is important How do humans make meaning through
their aesthetic experience? I wanted to make visible the kinds of ways people experience the
aesthetic—not solely in the digital realm, but in actual everyday experience.

Ellen Cushman, the New London Group’s theory of multimodal literacies works to
value multiple modes of meaning making, the power of which rests in its
multidisciplinary perspective of meaning making and its inclusion and equal
weighting of various sign technologies. In this theory of multiliteracies, the letter,
print, and word are valued equally in relation to other forms of meaning making
that include images, motion, graphics, and sound (Cushman 115).

Works such as Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of
Contemporary Communication extend the original work of the New London
Group to argue that today “meaning is made in many different ways, always in
the different modes and media which are co-present in a communicational
ensemble” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 110). The key point here is that meaning is
made in a multiplicity of modes and media and meaning occurs at different
places within these. Kress and Van Leeuwen stress that in every mode of the
multimodal, there is communicative “work” being done, with all the available
representational forms—and such work is always meaningful. Theories of
multimodality are widely embraced by composition scholars, as they readily
acknowledge that media convergence produces deep “changes in the forms and
functions of cultural and bodily engagement with the world, and on the forms and
shapes of knowledge” (Kress “Literacy in the New Media Age” 1). Kress believes
that as we see communication increasingly relying on multiple modes of
interaction, new spaces and new strategies will be needed.

Correspondingly, many studies demonstrate the need for a more complete

way to understand visual communication and the relationship of the visual to

meaning making. Rhetorician Carol Lipson contends that the changes that are
taking place in our increasingly complex, data-rich, data demanding lives
“demand a mode of creating meaning that can convey the depth and detail and
complexity of our world” and visual language offers that opportunity” (Hooks and
Kendrick 113). Diana George also discusses the signiﬁcance of the visual in the
writing classroom. George claims that due to the history of composition studies,
we have limited the possibilities for the visual in the teaching of writing, due to the
ﬁeld of composition’s traditional ties to the written word. George readily
acknowledges, however, that many our students do not have the same binding
ties: “For students who have grown up in a technology saturated and image-rich
culture, questions of communication and composition absolutely will include the
visual, not as attendant to the verbal but as complex communication intricately
related to the world around them” (George 32). However, understanding these
new practices presents a serious challenge. Charles Kostelnick and Michael
Hassett explain that although we live in an “information age’ inundated with visual
language (e.g. charts, texts, graphs, illustrations, icons, screens) the structure of
that language evades scholars. The problem, can be summarized as follows:
”We inhabit a world that relies increasingly on visual language to function, yet the
structure of that language remains surprisingly opaque” (Kostelnick 1). This
implies that although we rely on communication with and through the visual in our
everyday lives, we do not fully comprehend how it “works.”

While scholars (see Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Jewitt, Carey, and

Kress, 2003; Kress, 2005; Wysocki, 2005; Cushman, 2006) believe that new

theories of meaning are taking shape—there is still much to understand
regarding the possibilities of new media. Reﬂecting on some examples of
interesting student work Diana George deduces that current composition
scholarship and pedagogy has only “tapped the surface of possibilities” (George
12). It is clear that our understanding of meaning making needs to be reworked,
in step with our changing times. Part of what is at stake here, as we move toward
more visual and interactive means of communication is in understanding how
students create meaning through media. This includes new media that is newly
created, which employ multiple sources of information and representation, but
also ‘old’ forms of media that we can’t help but see newly, from our evolving

positions and perceptions.

Inquiry into the aesthetic

Recently, some scholars have turned to the concept of the aesthetic as a
way to understand the meaning making potentialities of media. In “Show, Not
Tell: The Value of New Media Scholarship” Cheryl Ball offers a definition of new
media as “texts that juxtapose semiotic modes in new and aesthetically pleasing
ways and, in doing so, break away from print traditions so that written text is not
the primary rhetorical means” (Ball 405). Ball justiﬁes this deﬁnition by explaining
that “New media scholarship has a necessary aesthetic component because of
its designed, multimodal elements, and because these multiple modes can be
read in conjunction with written text to form the text’s meaning” (404). Ball argues
that new media combines layers of multimodal meaning making strategies, and

that an understanding of the texts’ aesthetic qualities is one possible way to

appreciate and further our understanding of how we take and make meaning.
Ball claims that “It is the combination of understanding the use of aesthetic
elements within intellectual meaning making strategies that will best help readers
interpret scholarly new media texts” (411). But exactly how are we to understand
‘the use of aesthetic elements within intellectual meaning making strategies'?
Ball never clearly deﬁnes what an aesthetic element is here, but she does note
that it (the aesthetic) is necessary to “understand how video, audio, and other
elements can work with or enact an argument” (413).

Ball is right to suggest that the aesthetic is increasingly relevant for new
composition studies. How people make meaning aesthetically is an important
consideration in the construction of more integrative multimodal theories and
pedagogies. If the recent special issues of Computers and Composition on new
media and sound are any indication, this inquiry is already paSt due. For a case
in point, consider Cheryl Ball’s and Ryan Moeller’s recent work in Computers and
Composition Online in the print to screen special issue on media convergence. In
this work, Ball and Moeller implore the ﬁeld to rethink aesthetics and rhetoric in a
Web 2.0 world. Yet again, it is very difﬁcult to begin to rethink aesthetics when
the authors offer up no working deﬁnition of what the aesthetic is or what it could
be. The authors claim they are building “the new media bridge between rhetoric
and aesthetics, between the scholarly and the creative, between low art culture
and high art culture, and between academic texts and popular texts. (Ball and
Moeller). With this bridge, the authors are ”not talking about an outmoded,

disinterested aesthetic of the past, but something new. Something useful.

Something that could aid in both the critique and the creation of new media.
However, I believe most readers would be hesitant—indeed would be hard put—
to articulate what exactly is meant by ‘aesthetic’ in this piece. If the ﬁeld of
rhetoric and composition is going to establish “the potential role new media can
play in converging English studies,” as the authors claim, a clearer understanding
of the aesthetic is essential.

Anne Wysocki’s work also points to the importance of aesthetic elements
in multimodal designs. In the articles “lmpossibly Distinct” and “Seriously Visible,”
Wysocki moves beyond text and image by analyzing the interactive and aesthetic
features of several multimedia CD-ROMs, showing how each CD creates
meaning through its multimodal design. In these articles, Wysocki argues that we
need to rethink or expand the conceptual categories that we are currently using
to better understand (and teach) the multimodal aspects of texts. Wysocki
questions why we still hold onto so many common assumptions regarding the
teaching and understanding of visual elements. She argues that when dealing
with the visual, form is not always separate from content, word is not always
separate from image, and information is not always separate from design. When
we choose to separate these elements, we seriously diminish our returns.

Both Ball and Wysocki extend the theories of multimodal discourse by
supporting inquiry into the rhetorical and aesthetical aspects of media. Although
both Ball and Wysocki claim that the aesthetic does important communicative
work, it is not abundantly clear in either’s work whether the aesthetic dimension

is complimentary to or distinct from the various modes under analysis, i.e., the

visual modes of meaning (images, page layouts, screen formats), the aural
modes of meaning (music, sound), and the gestural modes of meaning (body
language, sensuality), etc. In other words, is there a separate aesthetic mode of
meaning making? Or does the aesthetic dimension lie within each of the various
modes of communication (the visual, aural, etc)?

Asking difﬁcult questions of the aesthetic and its possibilities is a timely
and important endeavor. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich asks “Is
it necessary for the concept of the aesthetic to assume representation? Does art
necessarily involve a ﬁnite object?” (164). Manovich argues that new
communication practices have the potential to drastically change the “paradigm
of the aesthetic object.” He observes that the aesthetic object as “self contained,
limited in space and/or time, is fundamental to all modern thinking about
aesthetics” (163). The aesthetic is traditionally located in a ﬁnite object (such as
a literary text which assumes a reader reading). However, today, making such an
assumption or appropriation of “text” is rather unproductive. There are more
generative possibilities open for aesthetic consideration, and according to
Manovich, we should be considering them. He asks:

”Can telecommunication between users by itself be the subject of an

aesthetic? Similarly, can the user’s search for information be understood

aesthetically? In short, if a user accessing information and a user

telecommunicating with other(s) are as common in computer culture as a

user interacting with a representation, can we expand out aesthetic

theories to include these two new situations? (164).

Such an understanding could help bridge the gap between the formal aspects of
media and the more social and cultural aspects of how media aesthetically
engage the reader, the writer, and the world.

Wysocki’s work opens an expanded space for the aesthetic, a space that
not only informs the functional and technical aspects of design, but also one that
has critical and social traction. She envisions a useful theory of meaning making
that goes beyond the technical and functional aspects of texts. For instance, she
argues that visual compositions are inherently rhetorical—that is, they cover a
series of design choices that have much broader consequences and articulations
than formal principles of design suggest. She recommends that "we don't teach
students formal vocabulary and principles for visual analysis and production
unless we also consider the visual aspects of texts through the lenses of
speciﬁcally gendered (and so on) material lives” (Wysocki 149).

Kress also argues that theories are needed which go beyond technical
and functional considerations to address the social and cultural importance of the
design of communication: “we need the notion of design, which says: In this
social and cultural environment, with these demands for these materials, for that
audience, with these resources, and given these interests of mine, what is the
design that meets these requirements?” (Kress 20).

These authors demonstrate the need for an increased understanding of
the social and cultural contexts in which the design of communication functions.
This area of scholarship is and will continue to grow from one which dealt

primarily with formal aspects, including the technical look and functioning of

10

media, to a phenomenon with much more human consequence. A new aesthetic
theory can help to engage in the formal aspects of design, but, just as
importantly, it can expand issues concerning social and cultural aspects of
representation and mmmuniwtion. As Manovich suggests, locating the aesthetic
in a ﬁnite object, in a ﬁxed text, is just that—ﬁnite and limiting. Instead, a
productive course of action is to ask: How are we to understand the aesthetic as

a mode of meaning making?

A new study, a new aesthetic

Allusions to the aesthetic already appear in a variety of contexts relevant
to new composition practices, including: multimedia literacy, multimodality,
rhetoric, interface design, such as GUls (Graphical User Interfaces) and
rhetorical interfaces, the lntemet, Computer Generated Imaging (CGI)
technologies, infosthetics (the visual representation of information), design of
communication, the teaching of composition, new media art, online gaming,
electronic music, cinema and digital cinema. However, these are merely
allusions. The concept of the "aesthetic," is not yet clearly deﬁned or extensively
researched in the ﬁeld of composition studies. Yet, a clear conception of the
aesthetic can be promising for deepening our understanding (and our teaching)
of new composition practices.

The aesthetic should not be overlooked as merely a visual or surface level
component in these practices. Nor should the concept of the aesthetic remain
ﬁxed within the narrow realm of beauty or the philosophy of art. Rather, due to

the array of potential applications, it is necessary to imagine a wide-ranging

11

conception of the aesthetic. Such a useful conception would push against “ﬁxed”
and “limiting” deﬁnitions, in order to accommodate a more inclusive view of new
composition practices. This would be a ﬂexible concept that could encompass a
range of potentially “aesthetic” concerns, including issues of beauty and
pleasure, taste and appreciation, form and content, art and craft, process and
product. This more accommodating notion would conceive of the aesthetic, not
as something set apart as a special order, but as a mode of human experience.
Such an understanding would help to address the role of the aesthetic in
meaning making and student teaming. It would also present an opportunity for
work in composition studies to examine the aesthetic in the context of digital
literacy. Gunther Kress stresses the need to better understand and promote
processes of student teaming, for today, which in his view, include:
“transforrnative engagement in the world, transformation constantly of the self in
that engagement, transformation of the resources for representation outwardly
and inwardly" (“Gains and Losses” 21). In Kress’s view, we are all agents
designing meaning out of our ‘engagement with the wortd’—our lived
experience—and it is going to be necessary to pursue lines of inquiry from which
we can learn about the possibilities such engagement offers. Kress contends that
we should equip ourselves with the “necessary aesthetic and ethical navigational
aids” to prepare ourselves for this kind of inquiry (21 ). While Kress doesn’t
expand on what the necessary aesthetic and ethical aids look like, it is clear that
they will break with convention to examine and establish new forms of knowledge

and meaning making for our changing times.

12

The study at hand seeks to develop such a navigational aid. In this study, I
looked rhetorically at students’ meaning making practices—speciﬁcally, the
meanings they made through their aesthetic experience. I did this in order to 1)
offer a detailed explanation of students’ aesthetic experience (in one group of
students in one point in time); 2) to contribute to the theoretical understanding of
the aesthetic as a mode of experience relevant to composition studies and 3) to
develop a better understanding of the aesthetic in the context of teaching and
learning.

In chapter two, “Locating the Aesthetic,” l trace the work of aesthetic
philosophers who worked to shift the focus of the aesthetic away from experience
in order to attend to historical, cultural, or ideological positions. While the last 200
years of Western thought has championed the idea that the aesthetic is to be
explained by and helps to explain other things (for example, to explain matters of
beauty, art, judgment, taste, and class), I argue that this tradition has created a
limiting conception of what the aesthetic is and how it is actually experienced. I
offer an alternative model to contemporary Western aesthetics that is
experience-centered, based on the ancient Greek notion of aisthetikos—‘relating
to perception by the senses’ (from the Greek aistheta— ‘perceptible things’ and
from aisthesthai—‘to perceive’).

In chapter three, “Emerging Rhetoric,” I return to the notion of aisthetikos in
order to develop a working-theory, which locates the aesthetic directly as an
observable phenomenon based in perception. Thus, the aesthetic, in my study, is

not located in an object of perception, but in the performance of perception—the

13

act of perceiving. I apply this working-theory to a case study of students’
accounts of aesthetic experience in the context of an Arts and Humanities
course. Speciﬁcally, my study is built around four individual cases and
investigates the meanings students associate with their aesthetic engagement
(i.e., how meaning is made through the senses) in the acts of production and
consumption through the methods of ﬁeld observation, discourse-analysis, and
discourse-based interviews.

Chapters four through seven represent the multiple cases of aesthetic
engagement. Within these chapters I create a conceptual portrait for each study
participant and describe how each one makes meaning through their
engagement with the aesthetic. These narrative chapters put participant voices in
context and work to reveal the various ways in which local meanings are made.
Each portrait chapter shares a comparable structure. They begin by showing who
the student is, both in and outside of the course. Next, the pomaits move on to
discuss a creative project from the course in some detail. Following the
discussion of the creative project comes a section that highlights a meaningful
aesthetic experience for the student. For some this experience was consumption
oriented, and for others it was production oriented. For example, Chapter 4, “The
Message on Multiple Levels: Lilly’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement,” describes
Lilly's account of a particular sunset. Chapter 5, “How We Perceive Things:
Jack’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement” details a trip to Niagara Falls. Chapter
6, “Making Real Connections: Emerson’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement,”

describes the act of taking pictures. Chapter 7, “The Perceptual Materials of

14

f

Reality: Pi’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement,” focuses on the experience of
playing video games. The ﬁnal section of each portrait discloses further
anecdotal information revealed during the discourse-based interview process.
bringing certain aspects of students’ aesthetic engagement to light.

In chapter eight, “A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Engagement,” I read across the
student portraits to ground my ﬁndings in a range of cases. Using a multiple-case
strategy I generalize from one case to the next on the basis of the underlying
theory. Here, I deal directly with my study’s ﬁndings. Across these cases of
student engagement, it is clear to me that students use the aesthetic in similar
ways. For example, students use the aesthetic in a variety of ways to make new
knowledge, including acts of interpretation, analysis and appreciation.

Chapter nine, “Aesthetic Spaces of Composition,” describes the
pedagogical implications for understanding the aesthetic as a perception-based,
knowledge-making practice. Given my ﬁndings, the aesthetic can be marshaled
in a range of situations to support student learning. The aesthetic can provide a
practical yet theoretical ‘navigational aid’ to help students in composition studies
understand the diverse potentialities for meaning making and meaning taking in
the acts of production and consumption. When students focus on how people
make knowledge through the act of perception, they learn multiple strategies to
better interact, make meaning, and otherwise communicate. Signiﬁcantly, this
particular and embodied approach to meaning making supports learning in digital
environments, where students are increasingly asked to produce and consume

media convergent texts that combine multiple modalities, including sound, image,

15

and user-interaction. Attention to the aesthetic enables the design of more

effective products and practices that better engage audiences and users.

16

Chapter Two

Locating the Aesthetic

The ﬁrst step in researching students’ aesthetic experience must be to
examine the concept itself, to render a useful deﬁnition to employ within the
scope of my study. This is not necessarily a straightforward task, as the story of
the aesthetic also involves the struggle to establish the source and status of
knowledge itself. Western philosophically speaking, ways of knowing the
aesthetic commonly fall into two general (but often entangled) categories. One
way has to do with a priori knowledge—knowledge that is related to reasoning or
theoretical deduction. The other way of knowing is inductive, related to or derived
from experience, posterion‘ knowledge. I demonstrate the tension between these
two aesthetic ways of knowing by considering a number of landmark studies of
the aesthetic. Starting with the ancient Greeks, I consider the axiom that what
counts as knowledge determines what the aesthetic is—and also limits what it
can be.

It is generally accepted that the ancient Greeks supplied the original
notion of the aesthetic, from the verb aisthanomai (I perceive) & the noun
aisthetike (sense perception) ’I perceive with my senses.‘ Thus, the Greek
. aesthetic, originally encompassed perception through the senses. Interestingly
however, the Greeks were not concerned with the knowledge gained from
sensory perception outright; they were also interested in codifying that
knowledge into a hierarchy of the senses.

To illustrate, Aristotle, building on the work of his teacher Plato, postulated

17

that sight was the most important sense and provided the most information about
the world. As his Metaphysics begins:
All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we
take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for
themselves; and above all others the sense of sight . . . The reason is that
this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many
differences between things” (Barnes 1552).
In addition to the sense of sight, the sense of hearing was also privileged, due to
its capacity to draw attention away from the body of the perceiving subject. Sight
and hearing, thus, were considered sites of prized objective information because
they revealed knowledge external to the body, observable and veriﬁable by
others. The lower senses, smell, taste and touch, were deemed lower because
they could only be experienced subjectively, within the body. Carolyn Korsmeyer
explains this preferencing in her Making Sense of Taste:
The information delivered by sight and hearing, especially sight, lends
itself to reﬂection and abstraction that yields knowledge of universals. (It is
the intellectual activity of knowing that permits this generalization, not the
sense experience itself, which only gives one acquaintance with
particulars). Because attention is directed outward rather than toward the
particular state of the body, the mind is disposed to generalize about its
objects. They may be counted and assigned number; their qualities may

be summarized in categories such as color and shape. Because the truths

18

arrived at concern the extemal world, the language developed to refer

them is common, shared (Korsmeyer 25).

Notably, the ancient Greeks believed knowledge offered by the lower senses,
was lesser knowledge bewuse it was “particular, speciﬁc, pertaining to the here
and now” (25). The bodily senses provided inferior knowledge of the world
precisely because they were empirical—the knowledge they yielded was based
on subjective observation and experience. Sight and hearing, in contrast, offered
a priori knowledge, knowledge about the external world prized for its universal,
shared character.

The works of Plato, especially The Republic (360 AD) Book VI (The
Allegory of the Cave) and Book X establish the foundation for this ordering.
According to Plato, the world we perceive through the senses is illusory and
deceptive. Knowledge gained though the senses only represents “appearances
of truth”, which is not reality. According to Plato, this order depends on an a pn’on’
realm of separately existing Forms, organized beneath the Form of Good. The
realm of Forms is not accessible through the senses—only through philosophical
discussion and thought, based on reason. A priori knowledge, consequently, is
considered by the Greeks to contribute the most to knowledge and meaning
making. Furthermore, sight and hearing are an important part of this knowledge
base, since these “external” senses are associated with reasoning and
theoretical deduction. Table 2.1 shows the dichotomy between the ancient Greek

conception of higher and lower order senses.

19

Table 2.1 Hierarchy of the Senses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Higher Order Senses Lower Order Senses

Sight, Hearing Taste, Smell, Touch

A priori knowledge Posterion' knowledge

Theoretical Empirical

Logical Experiential

Universal Particular

Mind Body I;

 

 

 

 

Things known and things perceived

Centuries later, this “sense hierarchy” was addressed by the German
philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (by way of the Latin aestheticus).2 In
his early work, Reﬂections on Poetry (1735), Baumgarten develops a theory of
aesthetic experience. He writes: The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers
have already carefully distinguished between things perceived and things
known...Therefore, things known are to be known by the superior faculty as the
object of logic; things perceived of the science of perception, or aesthetic (17).
Building on this distinction between things known and things perceived,
Baumgarten goes on to advance his theory of sensory perception in Esthetica
(1750), a work on the theory of beauty in art. In this work Baumgarten links the

aesthetic perception of “good art” with “good taste”—(the ability to judge well)

 

2 Baumgarten is credited for crafting the word “aesthetic” from the Greek aisthetikos—‘relating to
perception by the senses.’ (From the Greek aistheta - “perceptible things’ and from aisthesthai—
‘to perceive.’)

20

and devises a set of rules by which to base judgments.

However, in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Immanuel Kant
renounces Baumgarten’s science of perception, claiming that the establishment
of rules for judging the beautiful was “futile,” because those rules were merely
empirical, based on posteriori knowledge of the world:

He hoped to bring our critical judging of the beautiful under rational

principles, and to raise the rules for such judging to the level of a lawful

science. Yet that endeavor is futile. For, as far as their principal sources
are concerned, those supposed rules or criteria are merely empirical.

Hence they can never serve as determinate a priori laws to which our

judgment of taste must conform. It is, rather, our judgment of taste which

constitutes the proper test for the correctness of those rules or criteria

(21).

Kant continued to privilege knowledge gained from reason over knowledge
gained from experience in his later work, Critique of Judgment (1790), which
concerned judgments of taste, i.e., judgments of the beautiful—above all the
beautiful in nature. In this work he established the a priori conditions of the
aesthetic—conditions that, not surprisingly, transcended the limits of empirical
inquiry. This was the birth of aestheticism for aestheticisms' sake: intellectual,
non-utilitarian, and markedly disembodied.

Kant's way of explicating the aesthetic had a long and inﬂuential history in
Western European thought. He reinforced the idea that the aesthetic was based

in pure theory—and that its “truths” could be arrived at through reason alone.

21

Moreover, these truths appealed to the sensus communis, a universal “common
sense” that could be anived at externally through the “free play of our cognitive
powers.” (Kant, “Judgment” 238). Kant held that only through such common
sense could judgments be made.

Because Kant located the aesthetic in the abstract and universal (while
shunning the particular or applied), he set a precedent for the aesthetic to be
explained in other ten'ns, with other criteria—for example, with historical, cultural,
ideological, or political associations. Notably, aesthetic/sensory perception and
the meaning derived from that were no longer an acceptable way of lmowing the
world; the lower senses could only offer deceptive, illusory appearances and

mere impressions of how things really are.

Other ways of knowing

Throughout the next two centuries of Western European intellectual
thought, inquiries into the aesthetic continued to demonstrate concerns regarding
the source and status of knowledge. As a case in point, theorist Pierre
Althusser’s work located the aesthetic ﬁrmly in the context of ideology—that is, in
society’s dominant beliefs and values. In his inﬂuential essay “A Letter on Art in
Reply to Andre Daspre” (1966) Althusser investigated the inﬂuence of ideology
on artworks. Althusser claimed that art is embedded in institutions (which were
seen to play a powerful role in creating and commodifying cultural discourses),
thus advancing the values and ideas of the dominant ruling class. He wrote:
“What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’,

‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from

22

which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to
which it alludes” (Althusser 1480). Althusser continues: “Neither Balzac nor
Solzhenitsyn gives us any knowledge of the world they describe, they only make
us ‘see’, ‘perceive’ and ‘feel’ the reality of the ideology of the world” (1481 ).
Althusser words almost echo back to the ancient Greeks—that perceiving is not
really a form of knowing. He contended that the aesthetic reveals only ideology—
not reality.

Pierre’s Bourdieu’s work shows the inﬂuence of Althusser in his
pronouncement that: “Taste classiﬁes, and it classiﬁes the classiﬁer” (Bourdieu
6). Bourdieu explored the connections between aesthetic taste and social-
economic status in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of
Taste (1979). Bourdieu made the argument that our sensibilities derive from and
produce “cultural capital” which is obtained from the existence of economic and
social inequities. For Bourdieu, aesthetics was about the ability to differentiate
between “good’ and “bad” art. It was a process through which society produced
and legitimated inequities of economic and social status. He asserted that taste
functions to make social distinctions and is an acquired “cultural competence”
which can be used to legitimate and perpetuate social and economic inequalities.
For example, Bourdieu claimed “a work of art has meaning and interest only for
someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code into which it
is encoded” (2). Without this code, the beholder “feels lost in a chaos of sounds

and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason” (2). For Bourdieu, the

23

aesthetic was inseparable from its “social function of Iegitimating social
differences” (7).

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, aesthetic ways of knowing were
persistently subsumed by other ways of knowing and relating to the world,
philosophically, ideologically, historically, socially, and politically. This is a
convention that is, without question, still alive and well. Recently, the book — part
literary criticism, part philosophy — entitled The New Aestheticism (2003),
vehemently petitioned for the need for the aesthetic to attend to its own historical
position. The editors, Joughin and Malpas, stated in the introduction: “It is
impossible now to argue that aesthetics is anything other than thoroughly
imbricated with politics and culture. And this, without doubt, is entirely a good
thing” (Joughin 3). This comment demonstrates the widely-held belief that if one
wishes to speak of the aesthetic in this day and age, one must attend to its
historical (or cultural, or ideological) position—indeed it is “impossible” not to.
While the authors of The New Aestheticism stated that they were issuing in an
era of “new aestheticism” with this very premise, there is nothing exceedingly
new about their conception of the aesthetic. The authors simply echo the stance
that an aesthetic mode of knowing does not exist in and of itself (but is always
entrenched in other constructs of culture, history, etc).

To explain the aesthetic in other terms, with other criteria has been a
major occupation of a variety of stakeholders over the last two and a half
centuries. In this vein, institutional and ideology critique have been especially

prominent—the critical examination of the ideas, feelings, beliefs, and values

24

embedded in the artifacts or practices of a culture or group. Because of this, the
aesthetic, as concept, has come to be accepted as inextricably bound to ideology
and to mean little in and of itself. According to arts educator Elliot Eisner, the
aesthetic has become “a msualty of American education” because “it is
embedded in a historical context that has underestimated the role it plays in
man’s effort to know” (Eisner 32). Eisner’s observation is a poignant one,
because it acknowledges that the role of the aesthetic has been
underestimated—due to the “established” ways of knowing, which frame the
aesthetic as a highly intellectualized pursuit based on the idea that knowledge
itself is a historically, culturally, and ideologically imbricated process.
Actor-Network-Theorist Bruno Latour (2005) also makes note of the
obfuscation of the aesthetic when he states that: “Every sculpture, painting,
haute cuisine dish, techno rave, and novel has been explained to nothingness by
the social factors ‘hidden behind’ them (Latour 236). Latour continues
Through some inversion of Plato’s allegory of the Cave, all the objects
people have teamed to cherish have been replaced by puppets projecting
social shadows which are supposed to be the only “true reality” that is
‘behind’ the appreciation of the work of art” (236).
”While the modus operandi has been to “explain away” the aesthetic by
addressing the social and ideological factors hidden behind it, this
unapologetically a priori “way of knowing” has served to create a limiting
conception of what the aesthetic is and how it is experienced—privileging mind

over body, theory over experience, and universals over particulars.

25

7

Reinvesting the aesthetic with meaning

Arnold Berleant, a contemporary philosopher of the aesthetic writes of the
need for a revisioning, or reseeing of the aesthetic in Art and Engagement (1991)

Fresh concepts are required that help explain art and the aesthetic without

legislating what they must be and without co—opting them to serve other

purposes. We must learn to look at the domain of the arts without

preconceptions about what they must show, do, or mean (Berleant 211).
Learning to look without preconceptions entails not explaining the aesthetic with
other criteria, not appropriating the aesthetic in the service of some other
objective. To reimagine the aesthetic is to explain it as a phenomenon rather
than as a means to provide an explanation for something else.

An explanation of this kind is past due. As early as 1934 John Dewey
addresses the state of the aesthetic in Art as Experience. He observes: “So
extensive and subtly pervasive are the ideas that set Art upon a remote pedestal,
that many a person would be repelled rather than pleased if told that he enjoyed
his causal recreations, in part at least, because of their esthetic quality" (5).
Dewey asserts that the major challenge for a genuinely useful aesthetic theory
would be to “to recover the continuity of esthetic experience with normal
processes of living” (10). Speaking in broad terms of philosophies of aesthetics
he claims “the system in question has superimposed some preconceived idea
upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing esthetic experience to

tell its own tale” (275).

26

Building a genuinely useful aesthetic theory

Aesthetic experience, according to Dewey, has lost touch with lived
experience and should be made more concrete again. This endeavor would
conceivably involve inquiry into the aesthetic as a mode of sensory experience—
an act of perception (from aisthetikos—‘relating to perception by the senses’).
Such a conception of the aesthetic would have particular relevance for recent
new media scholarship. Current studies in new media argue for more embodied
approaches to perception for our digital age. In New Philosophy for New Media,
Mark Hansen argues that digital media has fundamentally changed how we
perceive. Hansen employs Henri Bergon’s 1896 theory of perception and his
emphasis on the body (what he calls “a center of indetermination within an

acentered universe”) to argue that the ”digital image” encompasses the entire

process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience.

He places the body in a privileged position—as the agent that ﬁlters information
in order to create images. By doing so he argues for the indispensability of the
human body in the digital era. His work demonstrates how new media artists
“have focused on foregrounding the foundation of vision in modalities of bodily
sense” and that these demonstrations mark a paradigm shift in “aesthetic culture
. . . a shift from a dominant ocularcentrist aesthetic to a haptic aesthetic rooted in
embodied affectivity” (Hansen 12). Hansen claims that, not only does the user
actively go into new media, but that the user actively creates the image — the
image is a process which takes place within the users body. He argues that the

image is a process (and not necessarily a product) that “demarcates the very

27

process through which the body renders information perceptible” (10). He holds
“the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but
must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made
perceivable through embodied experience” (Hansen 10). Perception, Hansen
argues, is no longer an ocular event but a haptic event of the body.

A further argument for a better understanding of how we make meaning
through sensory perception is made by Caroline A. Jones in the edited collection
entitled Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art.
Jones claims that aesthetic practices locate how bodies are interacting with
technologies at the present moment, and provide a site for questioning those
locations” (Jones 2). Essays within Sensorium (the term refers to the sum of an
organism's perception, the ”seat of sensation” where it experiences and
interprets the environments within which it lives) argue that “embodied ‘
experience through the senses (and their necessary and unnecessary
mediations) is how we think” (5). lmportantly, Sensorium demonstrates how new
media artists work to make the ‘sensorium’ visible. Practicing new media artists
“are not interested in having us disappear within a given apparatus. They work to
surface the effects of technology, making the viewer question mediation even
within the pleasure of media” (3). Jones’ conception of the aesthetic represents a
critical shift in awareness of the possibilities for bodily experience.

One last work for consideration is Anna Munster’s (2006) project entitled
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics that

demonstrates how the aesthetic can help foster a move toward a more embodied

28

experience of new media and meaning making. Her scholarship involves the
argument that: “aesthetics is capable of offering us both a critical commentary
that folds back upon the broader ﬂows of a more reductive information culture
and a new kind of aesthetics that unfolds into new sensory spaces for lived
experience” (Munster 38). In her analysis of recent new media artworks, Munster
suggests that the body provides the site where the “aesthetic processes of
composition” inevitably take place (145). These recent studies on the aesthetic
demonstrate that new, broader examinations of the notion are needed—
especially as we seek to understand the processes of meaning making and
sensory experience within digital environments.

My own study builds on this work as it addresses the need for a broader,
more accommodating notion of the aesthetic, while at the same time rooting it in
sensory perception (from the Greek aisthetikoS). Based on the rich history of the
concept, I deem the senses a productive starting point to examine the
phenomenon of aesthetic experience. I also believe that for such a study to be
productive, it would have to be a given that the aesthetic does not (in and of
itself) give rise to social factors, ideology, politics, or culture. In such a study, the
aesthetic, as phenomenon, can only be the consequence of its associations and
not their cause. This means that the aesthetic cannot account for its
associations. Instead, associations are what can help account for the aesthetic.
To trace these associations, I conducted a descriptive qualitative case study of

four students in an Arts and Humanities course.

29

1..

In the next chapter I describe this study in detail. I explain how I
constructed it around four individual cases of students’ aesthetic experience. This
was an opportunity to look deeply at a small number of students in order to
examine the particular associations that accounted for their aesthetic experience.
Through these cases it was possible for me to examine if and how students

made knowledge, made meaning through their aesthetic experience.

30

Chapter 3

Emerging Rhetoric

From the beginning of this study, from the ﬁrst ﬁeld observation, it was
clear to me that students experienced the aesthetic in different ways. Students
associated the aesthetic in different ways—they connected their aesthetic
experience to a wide array of modes and meanings. My task in this study was to
ask students’ to verbally associate their aesthetic experience for me.
Consequently, I use the tracing and following of these associations as an
analytical methodology. The associations l traced throughout my study were
indicators of my phenomenon of interest—aesthetic engagement. I deﬁne
aesthetic engagement as that which engages the possibilities, the potentialities
foraesthetic experience. Thus, the goal of my project was to examine the
aesthetic as a rhetorical practice, to better understand the ways in which people
made meaning through their experience with it. The act of tracing associations
led to the development and documentation of a rhetorical framework that was
true to the various ways in which the students in my study made meaning
through their aesthetic experience. In this chapter I begin with a discussion of
how I framed this project around four cases of students’ aesthetic engagement. I
then describe the methods I employed to build my cases studies: ﬁeld
observation, discourse-analysis, and discourse-based interviews. Following a
description of the methods, I explain my coding practices and the emerging
themes from this study. Finally, I represent my ﬁndings in a way that illustrates a

transdimensional approach to meaning making with the aesthetic.

31

Lenses
l employed two lenses to locate aesthetic engagement, my phenomenon

of interest I employed my ﬁrst lens to look at students' acts of material
production and consumption. This lens was conceived to be purposefully wide-
angled in order accommodate the many different ways students were producing
(composing/designing/authoring) and consuming (viewing/reading/interacting) in
the material world. ‘Materiality’ in my study included produced or consumed texts
and accounts of experiences but not things that were merely thinkable,
imaginary, abstract, or otherwise immaterial.

I employed my second lens to look at these acts of material production
and consumption through students’ sensory perception. By (re)locating the
aesthetic in sensory perception—from the concept of aisthetikosa— it was
possible to render the aesthetic visible, to render it a traceable, empirical
phenomenon in the material world. The senses considered in this study referred
to physiological methods of perception and included sight, hearing, taste, smell,
and touch. This approach made it possible for me to examine the ways in which
students engaged with the aesthetic performatively that is, through their sensory
perception—through their experience—and to examine the meanings they
associated with that experience. Thus, the aesthetic in my study was in essence
a how and not a what, it was not located in an object of perception, but in how
the aesthetic was perceived. For instance, the aesthetic was not located in a
painting or a website, but in how that painting or website was perceived by the

senses.

 

3 An explanation of aisthetikos is offered in the previous chapter.

32

It is necessary to acknowledge that while my conception of the aesthetic in
this study borrows from Baumgarten’s work, it also represents a robust
departure. Baumgarten’s work assumed a genuine difference between things
“known” (logically) and things “perceived” (perceptually). My study does not
necessarily distinguish things known from things perceived. Accordingly, I do not
adhere to a "sense hierarchy,” but instead locate aesthetic ways of knowing
ﬁrmly within each individual’s particular sensory-based associations.

Figure 3.1 demonstrates that aesthetic engagement is about the opportunities for
meaning making that arise at the intersections of these three spheres: 1)
consumption and production of texts and experiences, 2) the senses, and 3) the

material world.

Figure 3.1 Locating aesthetic engagement

Production and
consumption of texts

, The senses
and experiences

   

Opportunities for
meaning making
The material world

Thus, aesthetic engagement is about ways of meaning making through the
senses in the production or consumption texts and experiences in the material

world. The way I deﬁned and operationalized aesthetic engagement in this

33

project was deliberately in order to make visible its various potentialities (and not

limit it to preconceived notions).

The Setting
Performances of aesthetic engagement are always located in time and

space. In order to closely observe how students made meaning through their
aesthetic engagement I observed a small group of students in one particular
time—fall semester 2007—and in one particular place—an Arts and Humanities
course at a large mid-westem land grant university. This particular 16-week
course titled Self, Society, Technology focused thematically on environmental
sustainability. A prerequisite for the course in which I conducted my study was
the completion of the university writing requirement, a one-semester composition
course taught primarily by TAs and adjunct faculty. Consequently, the majority of
students in the course where I conducted my research were in their second or
third year of college. This particular Arts and Humanities course drew many
students from the College of Natural Science. This phenomenon can most likely
be attributed to one of two factors: 1) emphasis on technology in the course title:
Self, Society, Technology and 2) the online course description which stated that
the course focus would be on “understanding the environment from an arts and
humanities perspective.” While many students in the class majored in the College
of Natural Science, there were also a variety of majors represented from the
College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences, the College of Engineering, the
College of Social Sciences, the College of Communication Arts and Sciences,

and the College of Arts and Letters.

34

1"

This course was one option in a required Arts and Humanities sequence

at the university where I conducted my study. Students, no matter what their

declared major, were required to take two Arts and Humanities courses in order

to meet their Arts and Humanities general education requirements, courses

necessary to graduate from the university. To quote the general program

description, Arts and Humanities courses

seek[s] to assist students to become more familiar with ways of knowing in I
the arts and humanities and to be more knowledgeable and capable in a L
range of intellectual and expressive abilities. . . courses encourage

students to engage critically with their own society, history, and culture(s);

they also encourage students to learn more about the history and culture

of other societies. They focus on key ideas and issues in human

experience; encourage appreciation of the roles of knowledge and values

in shaping and understanding human behavior emphasize the

responsibilities and opportunities of democratic citizenship; highlight the

value of the creative arts of literature, theater, music, and arts; and alert us

to important issues that occur among peoples in an increasingly

interconnected, interdependent world.

This course also had speciﬁc objectives, particular to the course

professor. The professor designed this course to “draw on the arts and

humanities to examine how we see and understand the environment.” The

professor’s syllabus stated: “The goal of the course will be the development of

critical interpretive capacities that will enable you to understand the environments

35

that you inhabit and communicate that understanding to others.” The syllabus
also stated that by the end) of the course, students should be able to
- Demonstrate multiple understandings of the environment using different
frames of reference
0 Communicate effectively to multiple audiences utilizing different genres
and technologies
- Understand the role of ways of knowing in the arts and humanities in
developing a coherent view of the environment
Both the general and the speciﬁc course objectives stated that one of the
goals of the course was to become familiar with or understand “ways of knowing
in the arts and humanities.” Consequently, I deemed such a course an
appropriate place to study the phenomenon of aesthetic engagement.
Additionally, this course was an ideal place to conduct research on students’
aesthetic engagement given that its students were repeatedly asked to both
produce and consume a diverse range of texts. Students were asked by their
professor to consume lectures, books, articles, videos, ﬁlms, poems, artworks,
illustrations, and presentations. Students were asked to produce short writing
assignments, longer essays, reﬂections, portfolios with an emphasis on visual
components, and town-hall presentations. Many students also produced
drawings, poems, PowerPoint presentations, posters, artifacts, and photographs

in response to course assignments.4

 

4 More detailed descriptions of student production and consumption are offered in chapters 47.

36

f.

Participants, Sampling, and Case Development

The course in which I conducted my study met in a large lecture amphitheater
in a building in the center of campus during the fall semester of 2007. Out of
approximately 137 students enrolled in the course, 92 students give me consent
to examine their writing and projects assigned as part of routine classroom
practice. In order to determine appropriate study participants from this large pool
of students, it was essential that those participants met certain additional criteria.
To generate a smaller pool of students, I employed a strategy of best-case
sampling, because I wanted to use a sampling strategy that would maximize my
chances of ﬁnding my phenomenon of interest. Since I was interested in ﬁnding
and describing cases of aesthetic engagement, I wanted to choose participants
who had the best probability of being aesthetically engaged. I considered my in-
class ﬁeld observations as well as student’s written work as I looked for broad
indicators of aesthetic engagement. I looked for participants who met the
following criteria:

- Participated actively in class discussions and activities

0 Expressed ideas and opinions in class and/or composed projects that

advanced ways of understanding through various lenses of the arts and
humanities

- Indicated willingness to engage in active self-reﬂection and self-disclosure

about their writing, course experience, ideas, and opinions
This sampling strategy allowed me to work closely with students through an

intensive discourse-based interview process, which I discuss below.

37

The four students I identiﬁed for this level of the study were contacted via
email. All responses were positive and students arranged two meeting times
with me to undergo an intensive discourse-based interview process. I conducted
all interviews at the university’s collaborative technology labs, located at the
library. The ﬁrst interviews occurred during mid-semester (week 7 or 8). The
second round of interviews took place toward the end of the course (week 13 or
14).

The identity of the student participants from this study is held in strict
conﬁdence. In the analysis and reporting of the research I used a pseudonym in
the data and kept the pseudonym codes separate from the data. Participants
themselves chose their pseudonyms, a feature that the participants enjoyed
because they were able to have a degree of control in their identity construction
within this aspect of the study. While none of the participants in this study
expressed concern with protecting their anonymity, l as a researcher was
ethically bound to ensure that contextual details did not give away my
participants’ identity. To protect students in the course from any instructor bias or
favor, the course professor and TAs did not have knowledge of who participated
in my study and who did not. Table 3.1 describes the four case-study participants
by their pseudonym, major, academic college, and their year in their respective
programs of study. A detailed portrait of each participant’s aesthetic engagement

is offered in chapters 4-7.

38

Table 3.1 Study Participants

 

 

 

 

 

i Name 3 Major i College Year
i i i I
{Lilly Journalism i College of j Junior
E 7 I Communication
3 Arts & Sciences I
Jack Microbiology College of Natural Sophomore
I i 3 Science -.
Emerson i English g College of Sophomore I
I I Education I Education 2
Pi {Physics i College of Natural Junior
i I , Science I

 

In order to examine students’ aesthetic engagement at the local level, I
created multiple cases—or portraits—of aesthetic engagement, one for each
participant in the study, (using the data collection methods described in the next
section). Each portrait demonstrates how the individual study participant
associated their aesthetic experience in different ways, at different times, in
different places. Interestingly, when I traced students’ associations across my
four cases, I observed that certain associations emerged consistently. Multiple-
case sampling provided me with conﬁdence that my ﬁndings were reliable—my

ﬁndings could be generalized from one case to the next.

Methods
In this qualitative case study I employed three different methods to collect

my data. The data came from ﬁeld observations, discourse analysis, and
discourse-based interviews with study participants over a 16-week time span. In
employing the method of ﬁeld observation, I recorded written observations of the

professor and students as they went about their normal class routine. I sat

39

amongst the students during class lectures in a large amphitheater. I also
observed some class recitations (led by the TAs) during the semester for a
combined total of approximately 40 hours of about classroom ﬁeld observation. I
made a record of in-class activities and responses in a two-column notebook. In
one column I wrote a description of what I observed and in the other, I wrote a
reﬂective memo. I often brought questions to my observations, which I wrote at
the top of my notebook pages. These questions gained more focus as the study
progressed. For example, in the early stages of the study I was interested in the
broad meanings people attached to their sensory encounters. Later, I was more
interested in emerging patterns. Later still, I was interested in locating dissident
voices that did not correspond with my emerging associations.

The data from ﬁeld observations afforded me two important things. First, it
allowed me to gather descriptive notes for my study, including details on the
setting, participants, and background information on assignments and in-class
activities. These descriptive notes provided me with abundant contextual
descriptions. The second affordance of ﬁeld observations was their utility as a
point of reference. I was able to refer to them when deciding what to look for in
discourse analysis and what kinds of questions to ask in the discourse-based

interviews.

Discourse analysis
I employed the method of discourse analysis to examine the writing and

visual compositions which students produced as part of routine classroom

practice in order to understand with more clarity how students made meaning

40

through their aesthetic experiences. I had access to 92 students’ work, which I
accessed directly from the professor, teaching assistants (T As) or the course’s
online teaming management system. When necessary, I made copies of
consenting student’s work and returned all work to the instructor or TAs within 48
hours.

During the process of discourse analysis I employed my two lenses to
examine 1) student production and consumption of texts and experiences in the
material world and 2) experience via the senses. These two lenses guided my
attention during the study and are discussed in more detail in the section
“Segmenting the Data.” The primary goal of discourse analysis was to locate
particular passages of interest in student discourse that I could then discuss with

the study participants during the discourse—based interview sessions.

Discourse-Based Interviews
In my study, the four case-study participants were each interviewed twice

using a discourse-based interview process, for a total of eight interviews. Each
session lasted approximately 1 to 1.5 hours for a total of almost 12 hours of
interview data. I employed this method in order to look deeply at particular texts
(written, visual, and digital) which they had produced in the course. Discourse-
based interviews were developed in 1.983 by Odell, Goswami, and Herrington to
help uncover writer’s tacit knowledge of, and motivations for texts. The
method involves some transformations to the original texts by the
researcher. The technique typically involves: (1) presenting one or more

alternatives for some passage(s) of a text to the writer (or possibly

41

someone else), (2) asking if she would accept the altemative(s), and (3)

asking her to explain why or why not (Bazerman and Prior 189).

In my interview sessions I presented the student’s own words or phrases
in conjunction with various alternatives, which I prepared ahead of time. I then
asked the student which choice best conveyed the intended or most appropriate
meaning. I concluded by further asking the student to explain or expand on his or
her responses. In employing the discourse-based interview method, Paul Prior
notes that it is important to make clear to the interviewee that “the alternative is
not intended to be a correction or a proposed improvement, that is might be
better, worse, or no different” (Bazerman and Prior 190). Thus, during the
interviews I had to reinforce that l was not looking for a particular answer, nor
judging the responses—instead, I was solely interested in tracing the

associations they made.

The Data Analysis Strategy

Locating emergence

Employing the two lenses of aesthetic engagement oriented me toward
particular ways of working and particular approaches to data collection and
analysis. Working with these lenses helped me to determine how to segment the
data gathered from student texts and discourse-based interviews in order to
identify my indicators. Speciﬁcally, the lenses I employed guided me to look for
indicators of the following: 1) students producing or consuming meaning from a
text or experience in the material world and 2) students paying attention to the

senses. By considering the data through these wide and narrow lenses l was

42

able to identify where the phenomenon of aesthetic engagement lived in my data
and was able to determine appropriate units of analysis to systematically read my
data. The challenge was that the selection of a unit of analysis appropriate to my
phenomenon of interest was actually quite difﬁcult.5 This difﬁculty resided in the
fact that my two indicators occurred in non-uniform ways in my data. Figure 3.2
Aesthetic engagement was to be located at the levels of 1) consumption and
production of texts and experiences and 2) paying attention to the senses.
Figure 3.2 Locating emergence

Consumption and

production of texts and Paying attention to
experiences the senses

To locate these phenomena in the data set, I determined my unit of analysis to
be the d-unit, or discourse unit. The d-unit can be described as “any stretch of
continuous text—a whole text, a section, a paragraph, even a small group of
related sentences—that functions as a unit and whose parts are more related to
each other than to those outside the d-unit" (Colomb & Williams 102). The d-unit

allowed me to establish boundaries for my two phenomona of Interest: 1)

 

5 Units of analysis identify “the level at which the phenomenona of interest occurs” (Geisler, 2005:
9).

43

consumption and production of texts and experiences and 2) paying attention to

the senses.

By looking at the data from the level of the d-unit, l was able to segment my

data into separate discourse units. According to Colomb and Williams
a d-unit = an Issue + a Discussion

As explained by Colomb and Williams, an Issue performs all of the announcing
functions of discourse, it “signals those expectations that the reader will use to
construct a coherent whole and which speciﬁcally announces the Discourse
Topic” (103). The second part of the d-unit equation is the Discussion, “which
explains, describes, illustrates, draws conclusions from, or otherwise develops
the matters established in the Issue” (103). As a result of employing the d-unit as“
my unit of analysis, I was able to segment my data into manageable units,
identifying where an instance of X or Y begins (known as an “Issue”) and how it
unfolds and ends (known as a “Disucssion”). Interestingly, the structure of d-units
is recursive, meaning that “d-units can be composed of other, smaller d-units and
in turn can compose parts of larger d-units” (104). Due to this characteristic
(smaller d-units can be embedded in larger d-units) it is possible to construct

“rich, multilevel analyses” (104).

For purposes of clarity, I provide two examples of d-units from this phase of
the analysis. The ﬁrst d-unit is an example of indicator #1 —attributing meaning to

the consumption or production of a text or experience.

1) [begin d-unit] I used to work at McDonalds and I had a very hard

44

time. Nobody cares if their hamburger is exceptionally crafted. It’s
like, “Hey, just give me my food so I can go.” What’s valuable now is
not ﬁne craftsmanship—it’s the ability to be ﬂexible and multitask.
Nobody wants someone who can do one thing really well. [end d-

unit]

This d-unit marks the limits of an “area” in the data. The Issue in this d-unit
concerns a student attributing meaning to the production (the crafting) of a
hamburger. The ensuing Discussion elaborates on the value of that production

(i.e., the meaning that the student made from that production).

The second sample is an example of indicator #2—paying attention to the

senses.

2) Beauty appeals to our senses. Smell, taste, sight, sound all appeal
to us in beautiful ways. A beautiful woman is desirable to a man. A
beautiful song is enjoyable to our ears. A beautiful pastry is
entertaining to our taste-buds. Every aspect of beauty entertains the

human soul, it is this beauty that makes life meaningful.

This d-unit also marks the limits of a distinct “area” in the data. The Issue in this
d-unit concerns a student paying attention to the senses. A reference to or
association with a sense, e.g. touch, taste, etc. is the criterion for this indicator.
The ensuing Discussion elaborates some of the ways in which beauty appeals to
the senses. Thus, using the d-unit as my unit of analysis, I was able to pull, from

a larger dataset, the passages that were interesting to me.

45

Locating convergence

Since aesthetic engagement, my phenomenon of interest, was not expected
to be located in any one indicator, but In the two together, the second stage of
my analysis had to identify the convergence of my two indicators. Consequently,

I began to look speciﬁcally for the times when my two indicators converged,
because their convergence was precisely what would help to determine the ways
meaning were made through the senses in the production and consumption of
texts and experiences in the material world. Figure 3.3 demonstrates how I
narrowed down my dataset to only observe only the convergence of my two

indicators.

Figure 3.3 Locating convergence

Consumption and _ _
production of texts and Paying attention t°
experiences the senses

   

Where aesthetic
engagement
occurs

For purposes of clarity, I provide an example from this second phase of the
analysis. Convergence of my two indicators was found in sample #2, discussed

above. Convergence was found in the following selections:

A) A beautiful song is enjoyable to our ears.

46

B) A beautiful pastry is entertaining to our taste-buds.

These two instances demonstrate a convergence of my indicators because
A is about making-meaning from the experience of a beautiful song (it is
enjoyable to our ears). 8 is about making meaning from the experience of a

beautiful pastry (it entertains our taste-buds).6

By employing the d-unit as my unit of analysis in this second stage of data
segmenting, l was able to assemble the relevant data that corresponded to the
intersections of my indicators. This act of systematic reading prepared the

relevant data for further analysis.

Coding

After segmenting the data at the level of the d-unit to reﬂect the
convergence of my two indicators, I began identifying the variables—the
participant's associations of aesthetic engagement. I did this through the
attribution of codes— useful tags or labels—to categorize selected units of data.
According to composition researchers Janice M. Lauer and J. William Asher:
“The most crucial task of a case-study is the identiﬁcation of important variables
in the data. Sometimes this task is called coding—the setting up and labeling of
categories, which then become the variables of the study” (26). The researchers
claim that this process is about analyzing the data for patterns, and identifying

and operationally deﬁning and relating variables and testing them for reliability

 

6 In contrast, the ﬁnal sentence from the initial d-unit does not demonstrate a convergence of my
indicators: “Every aspect of beauty entertains the human soul, it is this beauty that makes life
meaningful.” Although this Discussion is about making meaning from the experience of beauty (it
entertains the human soul), this Discussion does not have a strong enough basis in the
observable, material world, a criterion for Indicator 1.

47

(27).

It is important to state that my coding of the data was not a one-time affair,
but a bi-weekly process that lasted the duration of my 16-week study and that
persisted for many weeks after my ﬁeld research was done. During these
sessions I coded and recoded my entire data set, since my codes were in a
continual state of ﬂux. My coding sessions occurred bi-weekly for the very
practical reason that every two weeks I met and shared my progress with a
faculty advisor and my dissertation workgroup. These meetings played an
important role in my data analysis, especially when I needed input from others in

order to evaluate my coding scheme.

In the initial stages of my research, I attributed many codes of various
shapes and sizes to my data set. I seemed to attribute a code to every
association I encountered and wound up with a coding scheme of well over 100
items. Besides this matter of quantity, another issue I needed to address was the
matter of ‘mutual exclusivity' due to attributing two (or more) codes to the same
d-unit. As Weare and Lin suggest, codes must be “comprehensive and mutually
exclusive” (284). Because of my ‘loose’ or ‘indiscreet’ coding practice at the
beginning of my study, I was not able to describe with any degree of certainty my

boundaries for my codes and categories.

At that point, I returned to my rapidly growing dataset. As I kept track of how
often each code appeared, it was relatively easy to determine which codes held
the most relevance across my data, which was primarily comprised of data from

discourse analyses and discourse-based interviews from the four participants.

48

My multiple case-study design helped me to locate points of convergence across
the multiple sources of data which comprised my dataset. These predominant
codes I labeled my ‘emergent themes.’ According to qualitative researcher Sarah
Lawerence-Lightfoot, “Emergent themes arise out of this layering of data, when

different lenses frame similar ﬁndings” (204).

At this stage in the analysis, I enjoyed seeing my codes become consistent
with what I saw, heard, and felt as a researcher. Deﬁnitions, at ﬁrst tentative and
soft became more solid. Comparisons began to hold. My emergent themes
began to explain how students made meaning through their aesthetic
engagement. Through the tactic of analytical memoing I began to understand
how my ﬁndings created a conceptual map of emergent themes.7 However, the
single most helpful tool in interpreting and organizing my data was my use of the
data display—“a visual format that presents information systematically, so the
user can draw valid conclusions and take needed action” (Miles and Huberrnan
91). Creating data displays to represent my ﬁndings helped me to visualize my
emerging themes and how they related to one another. It was with the act of
creating a data display (the ﬁrst of many) that I began to see the ways in which
my ﬁndings were connected. Each time I revised my data display, I created a
more intricate picture of my case. In turn, this new picture of my case refocused

my data collection, data coding, and led me to the creation of a data matrix.

 

7 ‘Memoing helps the analyst move easily from empirical data to a conceptual level, reﬁning and
expanding codes further, developing key categories and showing their relationships, and building
toward a more integrated understanding of events, processes, and interactions in the case” (Miles
and Huberrnan 74).

49

The Matrix: an Emerging Rhetoric

In the later stages of my analysis, I created a descriptive matrix which
helped me to lay out my emergent themes and gain a better understanding of
how student’s aesthetic associations operated separately and in relation to one
another. A matrix is another tool of analysis, a tool for gaining a better
understanding of the data set. As deﬁned by Miles and Hubennan, “Matrices
essentially involve the crossing of two or more main dimensions or variables
(often with subvariables) to see how they interact” (239). In the concluding weeks
of my study, around Week 13, I drafted my initial matrix, a model consisting of
rows and columns which conceptualized the different possibilities for aesthetic
engagement on a grid. I immediately started revising the arrangement of my
themes once I did this, because what happened at the intersections of the matrix
made distinctly visible the relationships of parts to wholes. The data matrix
performed the concept of the intersection visually and allowed for conceptual

analysis at the level of individual parts as well as their relations to each other.

During multiple workshopping sessions, my peer writing group helped me to
confront my assumptions about my data representation and suggested various
alternatives as I worked and reworked my data matrix for about eight weeks.
During these weeks I puzzled over what the matrix was doing, rhetorically, and
how the types of rows and columns described, indeed, represented my cases.
Finally, I came to a version that created a sense of balance among the
interrelated parts—the emergent themes. The ﬁnal matrix achieved a kind of

harmony among the different ways of meaning making which I had to account

50

7“_"'""!

for. Thus, the matrix was a comprehensive conceptual map of the emergent
themes from the case-study. It succinctly described the phenomenon of aesthetic
engagement in one group of people in one point in time, i.e., it represented
readings within and across my four case studies. The matrix helped to make
visible the various ways in which students made meaning through their aesthetic
engagement at the levels of logos, pathos, and ethos, thus, I described these
emergent themes, seen together in the matrix, as a rhetoric of aesthetic
engagement. This matrix, portrayed in Table 3.2, depicts the themes which
emerged from the study. It illustrates a transdimensional approach to meaning
making with the aesthetic; it represents aesthetic engagement at various
intersections of logos, pathos, and ethos—including the representative, the

sensory, and the appreciative. In Chapter 8 I explain this matrix in more detail.

 

 

 

 

 

Table 3.2 Matrix
i Representative Sensory _: Appreclatlve ''''''
I . i
i 3' 1 E 2 I 3 W
f Logos: i ;
* Formal Formal/Representative Formal/Sensory Formal/Appreciative
I Connections i
i 4 , 5 ______ i 6 -_ __
Pathos: I g
Emotional I Emotional/Representative ‘ Emotional/Sensory Emotional/Appreciative .
Connections i f '
i 7 ; 8 - 9
Ethos: .
Individual

Connections Individual/Representative Individual/Sensory Individual/Appreciative '

 

..-...,._......-.. _-.-_-.-_n. ._. we

 

51

The portrait structure

In the next four chapters (4-7), I craft a descriptive portrait for each of my
study particpants, based on data collected from discourse analyses and
discourse-based interviews. These chapters are at the same time inviting,
complex, and revealing. They are inviting in that they provide convincing and
authentic narratives tracing four students’ aesthetic engagement. They are
complex because they describe and investigate human aesthetic experience in
context. They are revealing, since they work to describe separate instances of
aesthetic engagement, while at the same time attempt to explain its

comprehensive nature.

These chapters, then, begin to chart some territory. They represent my
communication with my study participants over a sustained period of time, the
16-week fall semester of 2007. These chapters describe and explain various
aspects of students’ aesthetic experience. As a result, these chapters begin to
interpret my study’s emerging themes and develop a framework to understand
the thoughts (logos), feelings (pathos), and beliefs (ethos) students associated
with the phenomenon of aesthetic engagement.

The portrait chapters each share a comparable structure. They begin by
showing the reader who the student is, both in and oUtside of the course. These
beginning sections also work to show the students’ orientations to the course. As
one of the primary goals of the professor, according to the course syllabus, was
to help students become aware that how we “see the arts and humanities

contributes to how we understand the environment and solve environmental

52

problems,” each portrait demonstrates how learning about the environment
through the lens of the arts and humanities was a challenging yet rewarding
experience. One study participant described the course in this way: “In this class
we team about the environment—but not in the expected way. I mean, we don’t
study the mountains, but rather the ways we view the mountains. We team about

nature—how we see it, how we describe it, and how we experience it.” All four

r'ﬁ

participants reported that this was not the course they expected; most referenced
that the course title was somewhat misleading; yet all found the course an “eye- ..
opening” experience.
Next, the portraits move on to discuss Project 1 from the course in some
detail. This creative project afforded many opportunities for students to discuss
their aesthetic engagement. Each study participant reported that Project 1 had
been the most enjoyable project in the course, clue to the perception that they
“got to be creative” and “got to do what they wanted to do.” However, while study
participants commented on the freedom the project offered, there were actually a
number of guidelines for the project, which ultimately asked students to make an
argument that clearly communicated their own understanding of “nature” to a
speciﬁc audience of their choice. 1
Following a discussion of Project 1 comes a section on meaningful
aesthetic experience. I asked each participant to describe, in detail, a meaningﬁJl
aesthetic experience in his or her life. It was up to each student to interpret what
“aesthetic experience” meant. The range of experiences was'telling. For some,

this experience was consumption oriented, such as experiencing a sunset or the

53

grandeur of Niagara Falls. Others reported a more production oriented
experience, for example, taking photographs or playing video games.

The ﬁnal section of each portrait discloses further anecdotal information
revealed during the discourse-based interview process. These ﬁnal sections do
not provide closure to the individual portrait at large. Rather, they bring certain
aspects of students’ aesthetic engagement to light, with additional clarity and

depth.

54

Chapter 4

The Message on Multiple Levels:
Lilly’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement

“I have a pair of yellow and gold 5-inch stilettos
that are so gorgeous and completely out of this
world. i think, like the shoes, lam very much
unique and in a category all my own.”

Lilly sat in the front row. She wore bright colors (greens, pinks, and
yellows) even when the days got colder—when the general fashion trend leaned
toward grays and blacks. She chatted and joked easily with those around her,
including the professor. She was someone people noticed despite her petite
frame, in part, because she always looked very “put together,” and in part, due to
the comfortable grace with which she moved.

Lilly was ambitious and said that she planned to do many things when she
graduated from college, including a possible tour with the Cirque du Soleil. While
this might sound like an unrealistic goal for some, it was very much a reality for
Lilly. Lilly almost dropped out of high school to “do Cirque,” back home in
Canada.

When I asked Lilly why she wanted to do this, the answer was apparently
self-evident.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE CIRQUE DU SOLEIL?! You get to

perform. It’s the coolest thing ever. You do things not everyone gets

to do. I mean, who gets to get strapped up there on the high-wire

wearing metallic-rhinestone-studded-outﬁts swinging around to

crazy music? It’s just fun.

55

 

That being said, Lilly wasn’t necessarily wearing rose-colored glasses.
Having toured Cirque’s training facilities and talked to its members she came to
ﬁnd out that “they don’t treat their injured troupe members very well. They
basically ﬁre them. When you sign a 3-year contract doing 2-shows a day, your
body can just give out.”

This is where Lilly’s university degree in broadcast journalism would come
in. For a career, Lilly would like to be a reporter, ideally, a television news
anchor. Her dream job would be to work for E! News and “interview famous
people all day.” In order to become a television news anchor, Lilly was realistic
about the “grueling 15-hour days” she would have to put in, and the amount of
”grunt-work” necessary when starting out in the world of broadcast journalism.

However, that did not seem to phase Lilly because she was accustomed
to hard work. Lilly was a student athlete at the university and for as long as she
could remember she had an exceptionally disciplined routine

I have classes scheduled in the morning from 8:00-12:30. I do a rehab

maintenance program three times a week. (I had shoulder surgery a year

ago so, I have to keep that strong.) Practice is from 2:00 until 6:30 six

days a week. Then I go to dinner or else I pack a dinner. Some nights I

have group-project meetings, or tutoring sessions. Other nights I’ll go to

the lab to do homework. I usually get home around 12:30 am. Then

there’s always recruiting or fundraising or other stuff for the team when I’m

not studying, training, or competing on the weekends. I have one day off a

week. When I have time off I usually sleep.

56

Lilly scheduled time to meet with me on her precious days off. On these
days we met at one of the collaborative technology labs at the university library,
where I held all of my interviews with my participants. These labs are private
studio spaces outfitted with ergonomic furniture, dual platform capabilities, and
interactive Whiteboards. While sometimes Lilly and I would use a computer to
reference something brought up in class (a photograph, a TED talk, a YouTube
video), usually we just sat next to each other at a low coffee table, each with a

copy of her projects and short writing assignments from the course.

On Project 1

When introducing Project 1 in class, the professor asked students to be
speciﬁc in their choice of audience. His instructions on the assignment sheet
read: “Everyone” is not a good choice; good choices are more speciﬁc, such as
“my dorm ﬂoor,” “my fraternity,” or “my hometown newspaper.” Lilly’s choice of
audience was noticeably thoughtful. She stated in the beginning of her project:

I have selected my 79—year old grandmother Beverly as my audience. My

grandmother has recently been diagnosed with stage-four lymph node

cancer and because of her age and frailty; she is not doing well
physically. With this project I would like to show her that her life has been
one of natural beauty and that she has experienced nature in multiple
forms.

In this project Lilly asserted that the course had compelled her to see the world

differently. She wrote

57

At the beginning of this course, my views on nature were too constricted.

I thought that it was out there, with the birds, the trees and the grass.

However, after only a few short weeks of lecture, and the assigned

readings (especially William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground), I am able to

challenge that way of seeing the world. My argument is that nature is
more than trees and grass, but is a way to view the natural aspects of
everyday life and society.

Another requirement for the assignment was the creation of an album
containing “a collection of images, artifacts, and other found objects in varying
media, that you arrange deliberately to achieve your purpose.” Lilly stated: “My
37 pictures are mounted on colored construction paper, reﬂecting the colors of
the rainbow. The images start with the most obvious ideas of nature (the trees,
the mountains, the seasons) and end with the most far off or least considered
idea (that is—humans: a new born baby, different body types, an old man)” In an
interview, I asked Lilly to explain how some of the images in her album (see

Figure 4.1) communicated her understanding of nature.

58

Figure 4.1 Lilly’s album pictures

 

On Frida Kahlo:
The image of the Mexiwn artist Frida Kahlo illustrated thenative culture of
her country through her work. She is best known for self-portraits showing
her physical pain and suffering through her work. Frida may not ﬁt the
typical mold of physical attractiveness, yet the way she painted herself
and her emotions shows a type of human nature and beauty that can also
be viewed as nature.

On the Dove advertisement:
In a world where beauty seems to by anything but natural, these pictures
(as part of the Dove beauty campaign) show that natural beauty comes In

the size and shape that nature has given you.

59

On the baby and the old man:

The picture of the baby illustrates new life, in human form. The picture of

the elderly man shows the natural evolution of life on the opposite end of

the spectrum, in the sense that humans cannot ﬁght age or the aging

process. Together, these two pictures show nature as a cycle, as a

journey, with a concrete beginning and ending.

This last point Lilly considered the most important, as her project goal was
to persuade her grandmother that physically growing old was actually a beautiful
reﬂection of nature’s cyclical process. This argument was intended to help her
grandmother come to terms with old age and illness, to show her that “nothing
was wrong” with what was happening to her. Instead, growing old could be seen
as an opportunity to become a living (and dying) embodiment of a natural
process—something Lilly viewed as “beautiful.” When I asked Lilly what she
meant by “beautiful” she explained: “When I see an old woman with long white
hair, well, I believe that is beautiful. It can be beautiful to physically grow old
because you are reﬂecting the natural process. This is one more way that nature
manifests itself in the world.”

I then asked Lilly to describe what she meant by “natural process.” After
admitting how hard it was to explain her thinking, she said: “Right now my
grandmother is depressed and afraid—because she is dying. But my project is
trying to show that—for my grandmother—this is the sunset moment of life.

Instead of feeling afraid, she could be feeling relaxed and at peace—like one

60

feels when viewing a sunset. Aging can be a radiant and beautiful experience. It
all depends on how you perceive it.”

When I asked Lilly how this project aesthetically engaged her, she talked
about how much she enjoyed assembling the project. She reported that at the
beginning: “I was constantly thinking about what I could do—even walking to
class—tuming it over and over in my mind.” Then, once her audience became
more concrete in her mind, she was able to put the aesthetic elements together
in a way that facilitated her message. She ventured: “The aesthetic elements
work to get beyond the surface-level of things.” I asked Lilly for an example and
she explained: “There is read and then there is really read. You might read for
content, or to skim, or to summarize. But then there’s really read. The way you
might read a letter from a loved one.” I asked Lilly to expand on this comment.
She said: “Sometimes you read it over and over, in order to understand
everything the writer is trying to say. You do this in order to get underneath it.”
Lilly said that she assembled the 37 images of her view of nature in order to
demonstrate the underlying message that nature takes many fonns—in order for
her audience “to stop and look, at all the aspects of it. That is what the aesthetic
does for my project; it allows the audience to enter deeper into the message on
multiple levels.”

Lilly’s focus on audience engagement was both astute and perceptive. As
a competitive athlete, and someone who planned to “perform” on the high wire
for Cirque du Soleil and in front of a camera as a news anchor, an awareness of

audience was an essential asset. In discussing her project, she explained that

61

people made meaning through their aesthetic engagement on many levels.
These layers of meaning allowed the audience to “get underneath” the more
superﬁcial, or surface-level material, and “to enter” into some of the deeper, more
nuanced layers of meaning. Her project had many such layers, as she chose to
create an intimate, philosophical, and spiritually revealing project speciﬁcally for

her grandmother.

On aesthetic experience

In one conversation with Lilly, I asked her to describe a meaningful
aesthetic experience in her life. She asked what exactly I meant by “aesthetic,”
and I told her that she could deﬁne aesthetic in any way that she wanted to. She
decided that she would deﬁne it as “beautiful.” She proceeded to describe an
experience she had while in Mexico, viewing a sunset:

l was in an Inﬁnity pool above the ocean watching the sun go down. I was

aware of the air surrounding me, the smell of the ocean, the way the entire

sky lit up with color, the way the water looked like it was on ﬁre, the warm
water on my skin, the sound of the water hitting the sand below. All this
set the stage for my aesthetic experience as I watched the sun fall lower
and lower into the horizon. There was the feeling of being nowhere but in
the moment. I felt totally relaxed and at peace. And there was the
appreciation that comes from witnessing something so real.

This sunset experience was signiﬁcant for Lilly, in part, because it was not
an everyday event. Throughout my conversations with Lilly, she was consistent

in noting how an aesthetic experience was different from everyday routine. She

62

explained: “T ake milk for instance. I drink milk everyday and it is not an aesthetic
experience for me to drink it. But take hot cocoa with lots of marshmallows.
When I drink that, it can be an aesthetic experience. I can appreciate different
feelings and sensations.”

Aesthetic engagement, for Lilly, was a kind of “zone” she could enter,
where she could experience the world in a different way. In our discussions she
revealed that being in this “zone” was more than a surface-level experience: “It’s
about going deep, it’s an experience-oriented knowing where you are really in the
moment.” For Lilly, her “experience-oriented knowing” was very difﬁcult to put
into words. “It’s basically indescribable,” she insisted. But, when I asked her to
try to expand on what she meant by “experience-oriented knowing” she offered
the following illustration: “When you are watching ﬁre, really watching how it
burns and moves, you become fascinated with its different colors and shapes.
Then you are really in the moment—you’re not thinking about tomorrow. The
meaning is in the experience—and there’s different degrees of experience.”

For Lilly, being in the “zone” of aesthetic engagement meant paying
attention to her surroundings in a way that deepened‘and enriched the quality of
the experience. It was about deeply dwelling in the present moment (where
“you’re not thinking about tomorrow”). She explained, “When people enjoy
beauty, they want to take their time to take it all in. When you watch a sunset,
you really watch it. You don’t just go look at it quickly and leave! You take the

time to soak it in.” What made aesthetic experience different than everyday

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experience for Lilly was the degree, or quality of presence she brought to the
“aesthetic” moment.

When she said “there’s different degrees of experience” she was talking
about how a person can bring varying degrees of presence as well as various
ways of knowing to the aesthetic moment. Lilly’s own description of her sunset
experience would ﬁt this position, as she described how she accessed this “zone”
through her senses. She described how she was conscious of: “the smell of the
ocean, the way the entire sky lit up with color, the way the water looked like it
was on ﬁre, the warm water on my skin, the sound of the water hitting the sand.”
She also described “the feeling of being nowhere but in the moment” while
simultaneously feeling “relaxed,” “at peace,” and “appreciative” of her experience.
This was an apt description of multiple ways of “experience-oriented-knowing.”

However, from Lilly’s description of the sun setting, we can observe that
she was not solely focused on the object (the sunset and its “formal” attributes,
such color, shape, etc.). Instead, she located her experience in how she
perceived that sunset through the senses. Throughout this study I found that
sensory perception did not merely “enhance” aesthetic experience
(Csikszentmihalyi 120) rather, it was the foundation of people’s engagement with

the material world—and is the initial basis for aesthetic ways of knowing and

meaning making.

On wallowing

The discourse-based interview process allowed Lilly and l the opportunity

to zero in on certain words or phrases, in order to uncover her potentially tacit

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knowledge regarding her views on the aesthetic. On one occasion, it was
necessary for Lilly and l to spend a great deal of time discussing her decision to
use the word “wallow" in a short writing assignment.

After we looked at an excerpt from her writing assignment (seen below), I
asked, “How did you arrive at the word wallovrl’?

Excerpt:

This shot was taken in a butterﬂy conservatory, a dome-like building that

was created simply for consumer purposes. This conservatory was

constructed so that people could pay to come walk, sit, and wallow in the
natural beauty of the plants, ﬂowers, and the life of the majestic butterﬂy.
Lilly answered:

“Do you remember when we were discussing sunsets, and how people

don’t just glimpse them for a second, but actually try to soak them in? I

used the word wallow for that reason. When you are watching butterﬂies,

you see the delicacy of the wings, their intricate patterns, the amazing

colors. Wallow, to me, is about how people should act when visiting a

place that was built solely for the experience of viewing butterﬂies.

As a researcher, however, I was interested in going deeper into the
meaning/s Lilly attributed to experiencing the butterﬂies. In order to dig deeper, I
ﬁrst showed Lilly her original sentence. I then showed her two more sentences
and asked her to choose the option that was closest in meaning to what she had

originally intended.

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Original sentence:
This conservatory was constructed so that people could pay to come walk, sit,
and [wallow] in the natural beauty of the plants, ﬂowers and the life of the
majestic butterﬂy.
Option 1:
This conservatory was constructed so that people could pay to come walk, sit,
and [indulge unrestrainedly] in the natural beauty of the plants, ﬂowers and the
life of the majestic butterﬂy.
ommnz
This conservatory was constructed so that people could pay to come walk, sit,
and [give their attention to] the natural beauty of the plants, ﬂowers and the life of
the majestic butterﬂy.

Lilly immediately admitted that the second option “makes more sense.”
She explained “you make the effort to visit the conservatory and pay your eight
bucks to experience—to pay attention to—what’s going on around you. It’s a
special experience.” I then revealed to Lilly that “indulge unrestrainedly” (from
Option 1) was actually a dictionary deﬁnition of wallow. She laughed and said
that the word indulge “reminded her of chocolate.” She qualiﬁed this by stating
that, “But you do use this word to explain something you enjoy.”

I then asked Lilly if she would now use another word instead of “wallow."
After thinking about this for a moment, Lilly answered that she would use the
word experience, “because you are experiencing something that you don’t get to

experience everyday.” Her comments here were consistent with what she had

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stated previously regarding aesthetic experience as fundamentally different from
routine experience. She continued
Unless you work there, you don’t go to the butterﬂy conservatory every
day. So, when you do go, it’s something special. If you are paying to go
see something, it has a certain value—probably an enjoyable experience.
It is something that you don’t do all the time, so it causes you to
experience part of the day differently.
It was necessary to conduct this rather ﬁne-grained analysis of Lilly’s use of the
word wallow because her word choice was a possible “outlier” in my data set,
meaning that it was an instance that potentially did not “gel” with the research
data I had collected thus far. While all participants noted “interesting,” “fun,” and
“pleasurable” experiences in this study, I found that these were not necessarily
criteria for their aesthetic engagement in the production or consumption of texts
and experiences. To clarify, all participants at one point or another disclosed that
they made meaning through their emotional connections to an aesthetic
experience. However, this was not a prerequisite for aesthetic engagement—it
was simply a possibility. Frequently, students reported that their aesthetic
engagement was facilitated by fostering degrees of “presence” and “paying
attention” (which, in some cases, might be considered contrary to “indulging” or

“reveling”).

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Chapter 5

How we perceive things:
Jack’s portrait of aesthetic engagement

[probably have the aesthetic
sensibilities of your average ten-year
old. llike cartoons; I ’m a fan of
SpongeBob SquarePants. I like bright
colors. I like ‘zany.’ Now, there are
people much more highbrow than
that, but that’s not me.

Everyone in the course knew who Jack was. He enthusiastically spoke-up
in class to offer comments and opinions—something out of the norm in such a
large class—and often made the class collectively laugh with what might be
described as his “off-beat sense of humor.” In our interviews Jack was funny,
self-assured, moreover, he was deeply caring about the world around him.

For example, every Thursday when Jack got out of class, he saw the
campus student organic farm—stand across the street selling fresh corn and
heirloom tomatoes. He commented: “It was so nice to see, so refreshing. It’s
good to know that there are people here who are doing that. It’s good to know
that all of our corn doesn’t come from giant corn factories. It’s good to know that
that kind of cultivation is still alive in this day and age. It’s a matter of pride.” Jack
appreciated the things he could take pride in. He used to work at McDonalds,
and in his own words, he had a “very hard time” there. “Nobody cares if their
hamburger is exceptionally crafted. It’s just like, give me my food so I can go. No

one cares. What’s valuable in employees now is not ﬁne craftsmanship, it’s the

ability to be ﬂexible and multitask. Nobody wants someone who can do one thing

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really well.” In our conversations, Jack referred numerous times to the art of
craftsmanship - to skilled and devoted making. It is something he believed “is not
really valued in our society anymore.” He explained: “Take Stradivarius for
instance. They devoted their whole lives to violin making. You would have to
have a certain internal fortitude and belief in what you are doing. That’s
admirable. I like that.” He continued, “Too much of our activity is automated—
with too little awareness and too little appreciation for process. I say this because
while the end product is important, it is also about a way of undertaking an
activity.”

As a student of biology—of living organisms—Jack had a great appreciation
for process. He studied microbiology, a branch of science that deals with
microorganisms like bacterium and fungi. As a child, Jack’s dream was to be a
scientist at NASA. However, now he seemed a little less) speciﬁc about his career
goals. He might “do research or go to medical school—maybe.” In spite of not
knowing exactly what he would do, it was clear that Jack would devote his life to
meaningful, scientiﬁc work—to make a valuable contribution to humanity. The
whole point of science,” he explained, is “to have something that you can apply to

humanity.”

On Project 1

According to the course syllabus, the professor conceived of the course as
divided into three themes, or modules: 1) ways of seeing, 2) ways of knowing,
and 3) ways of acting. When I asked Jack how aesthetics played a part in the

course, he explained:

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The ﬁrst third of the course was about “ways of seeing”—and that’s pretty
much all about aesthetics, that is, about how we perceive things. This is
meaningful because the ways we perceive things alters the ways we
become aware of knowledge and how we communicate that knowledge,
which is all about “ways of knowing,” the second part of the course. This in
turn informs our actions, since we act on the information we have, the “ways
of acting” portion of the course. This process of acting in the world can circle
back around to the beginning of the cycle, since our actions can sometimes
change our perspective — how we see things.

This was Jack’s interpretation of the course, as the professor did not formally

make this cyclical nature of the units explicit. Throughout my interviews with

Jack, I teamed that he had a knack for pulling seemingly disparate threads

together, ﬁnding meaningful order, forming uniﬁed wholes.
In the ﬁrst project assignment, which fell under the “ways of seeing” theme,

Jack did just this, as he formed a uniﬁed theory of humanity and nature:
There are few among us who would deny that nature is beautiful.
Unfortunately though, many people seem to be under the false impression
that nature and mankind are mutually exclusive. It is my belief that in order
to better appreciate nature, humanity needs to reject that premise that all of
man’s presence in nature is negative, and embrace the idea that man and
nature can coexist peacefully. Such a step is necessary for the
advancement of the way we think about nature because mankind and

nature are so deeply entwined that they are virtually inseparable.

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In this project, Jack argued that “nature” and “humankind” were so intrinsically
connected that they were actually one, and should be viewed as such. The
audience for this project was his adult sister, a parent to a young child. Jack
argued that it was best to teach children this integrative view of nature and
humankind at an early age.

Jack represented his argument for Project 1 visually, with photographs that
he took from around campus, which he then pasted into a “nature” themed
scrapbook. He explained, “After much deliberation I chose to exploit the latest fad
in the world of arts and crafts—scrap booking. Surely it is reasonable to assume
that my audience would respond best to something they are familiar with, and I
happen to know that my audience enjoys the construction of scrapbooks.”

Jack and I discussed his photographs at length. He felt that the act of going
out into the world to locate and photograph his “evidence” helped him to
communicate his argument. He explained: “From a practical standpoint it [the
argument] was much easier to express. It was much easier to draw the
connection - and really that’s what education is all about—leaming to draw the
connections.”

I asked Jack if the act of taking the photographs enabled him to be engaged
In the project in a different way. He answered emphatically: “Yeah. Not only on
the level of a student trying to get a good grade. But it also really forced me to
hunt and to ﬁnd the thing that l was talking about. I don’t think I would have
actually believed in my own thesis, if I had not witnessed these things ﬁrst hand.”

Jack then referred to the photographs in his project (See Figure 5.1), to illustrate

71

his claim that humanity and nature can peacefully coexist: “It is obvious by
looking at the ivy scaling the building that man is In no way limiting nature; to the
contrary, when man builds a wall he provides a space for nature. Both man and
nature participate in creating the wall.”

Figure 5.1 Photo of ivy

 

He offered another example (See Figure 5.2): “It is actually common to see such
examples of trees growing through gates or fences. In this photo the fence and
the tree are one, they cannot be separated without causing damage to both

objects.”

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5.2 Photo of a tree

 

I told Jack that l was interested to know if the act of constructing the argument
visually enhanced his teaming process. He explained: “I was able to make more
meaningful connections — by going out and taking my own pictures. I'm making
better connections, getting different views of nature, aesthetics, design elements,
even different perspectives and viewpoints—you know—l even stood on a park
bench to get the right angle.” Jack also said that his project wouldn’t have “meant
as much” If he had not personally taken the photographs he used for his project.
He explained: “When you take pictures yourself, you know the intent. If you used
a picture from Google it would be your interpretation of the photo. But when you
take it yourself you know what it means. It means more. People say that food
tastes better when you grow it yourself. It's kind of like that.”

The act of taking photographs enhanced Jack’s teaming process, as it

engaged him aesthetically—on multiple levels. Jack reported that his

73

engagement was meaningful because the act of creating a visual argument took
the project to a personal level. The act of locating and assembling the visual
evidence “ﬁrst hand,” allowed him to establish an individual connection with his
project—as he entered into a personal relationship with the argument. His
“found-argument” also was aesthetimlly engaging on the level of ethos—or
character. His argument gained real-world credibility as he located and collected
evidence of his argument ﬁrst-hand. Due to this, Jack was “able to believe in‘ his

own thesis.

On aesthetic experience

In one interview with Jack, I asked him to describe a meaningful aesthetic
experience in his life. He chose a visit to Niagara Falls: “I was around 12 years-
old. It was the ﬁrst big, glorious, awe—inspiring thing I’d ever seen. It was larger
than life. You could go behind the falls in these tunnels. It was powerful. It
sounded like a roaring jet-plane.” When I asked Jack to describe what that
experience was like, he said: “Nothing short of being part of the experience is
sufﬁcient to truly describe the experience. It was a very beautiful place. Seeing
the sheer size of the falls allowed me to grasp their size and grandeur. The
roaring of the falls created a feeling of insigniﬁcance—it allowed me to realize
how big the world truly was.” A

Jack’s aesthetic experience had all the elements of the sublime—the
encounter of beauty or grandeur of such magnitude that it inspires great
admiration or awe. This kind of aesthetic engagement, for Jack, concerned

powerful sensory, emotional, and appreciative connections, similar to Lilly’s

74

Mexican sunset experience in the preceding chapter. Jack initially located his
experience in how he perceived Niagara Falls through the senses (primarily the
senses of sight and sound). He claimed: “Sight allows one to relate the falls with
other objects in order to grasp their magnitude. The roaring of the falls creates a
feeling of insigniﬁcance that submerges the onlooker in the framework that allows
them to realize how big the world truly is. Without the sensory input of the eyes
and ears, it would be impossible to establish the perspective necessary to be
emotionally impacted by the experience.”

From there, Jack went on to describe the meaningful emotional and
appreciative connections he associated with the experience. Jack described how
he couldn’t help but to feel admiration and respect for the falls: “They are
impressive because they are of such an impressive scale, and humans have
always been impressed with the large and powerful.” This grand impression
subsequently allowed him to “recognize the beauty of our existence in the grand
scheme of things.” This description was consistent with Jack’s views regarding
the connectedness of all living things. Even as a young boy, he was already
interested in the sciences and the “bigger picture:” To me, seeing something so
wonderful and powerful in the world helped to instill a sense that we were part of

a bigger picture, just as everything else in the world is.”

On representation

In our interviews, Jack returned frequently to the signiﬁcance of
craftsmanship, or skilled and devoted making. High-culture or ﬁne art did not

offer much to impress Jack. Instead, he saw value in the “home-made Valentine”

75

qualities of both processes and products. He was drawn to things imbued with
meaning and character—to experiences not, in his words, “dulled by the weight
of mediocrity.”

To illustrate his thoughts on craftsmanship he turned to a digital portfolio he
had developed in a writing class the previous semesten “The professor asked us
to create a digital portfolio in a way that was meaningful to us. And since I’m a
microbiology major, I chose to use various microbes.” He described how this
portfolio (see Figure 5.3) was a “visual representation” of his interests and
explained how the site functioned to convey his digital identity: “It represents my
personal aesthetic on many levels. For one, it hasn’t been mass-produced. It
looks like a person made it and not a big corporation—and this is important.”

Figure 5.3 Jack’s website

 

Jack went on to describe his use of color: “I chose a blue background, because I
think blue is soothing. I like things when they're bluish. It's odd, bemuse my

favorite colors are in the red area, but blue is more calming. When I’m sitting at a

76

computer, I don’t want to be riled up; I want to be calm.” When I pressed Jack
further about his color choice for his website (for instance, why not green or
purple?) he explained: “I never thought of this before, but blue is the color of
technology. There’s that blue bar, blue screen-savers, Bluetooth...and the P83.
Everything these days has that blue ﬂashing light. It just works.” He then
described the depth of thought that went into the digital collage he created for his
site.
This image on my homepage is an image of a virus. So instead of the virus
injecting its genetic information into a cell and then having it replicate and
create more viri, instead, it’s injecting my writing. 80, to me, it represents a
fusion or a coupling of the arts and the sciences. Of course, this
interpretation is not obvious to the average onlooker. It’s very nuanced.
From here Jack went on to discuss the fractal art within the “Images” folder. This
folder contained a series of images Jack created using computer software that
generated fractal “art” (see Figure 5.4) He explained:
You basically start out by generating a batch of images—fractals are just
made by mathematical equations. One tiny little change in variable can
completely change the picture. It uses a random number generator and
plugs it into different pictures. You can take them and manipulate their

equations and numbers to create different images.

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Figure 5.4 “Spore”

 

The image above was Jack’s favorite. I wondered if Jack considered this image
“aesthetically engaging.” He explained:
Yes, it is aesthetically engaging to me because I really like fractals. It has
to do with the whole chaos theory thing. This makes me think of math and
science and so I'm automatically interested. Plus, the reason I named this
one “Spore” is because it looks like an electron-microscope image of a
fungal spore, so it makes me think of plants and fungi. It also gives the
impression that there’s a shadow, or that It’s 3-D.
Here, Jack related part of his aesthetic engagement to his interests in
Microbiology. Interestingly, he experienced aesthetic engagement with this
image, because of its representative connections to the disciplines of Math and
Science, and because the image reminded him of a fungal spore, something he
was familiar with in his discipline. He continued: “Aesthetically, it could look cold

and sharp to someone. It could appear dark and unfeeling. But not to me.”

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Through the image entitled “Spore,” Jack forged a representative connection to
his area of study. The spore was a portrayal, or symbol of his interest in
Microbiology.

I proceeded to ask if the act of creating the fractal art was aesthetically
engaging. Jack once more said yes and that the process was fascinating
because “with a fractal, you can go into one of these jagged peaks, and it will be
a repetition of all the other jagged peaks. You can inﬁnitely zoom in.” Jack tumed
to chaos theory to explain his fascination. “What might look like chaos, what we
might perceive as chaos, is actually ﬁnely-structured—it’s just that we can’t
usually perceive that structure. Also, one little change, one little butterﬂy ﬂapping
its wings, one tiny decimal in the equation, and the picture is completely
changedf

On one level, creating fractals connected with Jack’s general interest in
chaos theory. But on another level, he was able to observe—indeed play—with
one of the tenets of chaos theory, that is, when one small thread was altered,
everything changed. For Jack, this connection was meaningful because it took
him took him beyond his intellectual investment in chaos theory toward
something even more meaningful. Through the act of creating fractals he was
able to demonstrate “the connectedness of all things.” Jack’s fractal art was,

quite literally, something he could believe in.

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Chapter 6

Making real connections:
Emerson’s portrait of aesthetic engagement

“I’m not into going to
galleries to interpret complex
symbolism—but I’ll gladly go

to the middle of nowhere to
take pictures.”

Although she did not expect to enjoy taking her general education
requirements, Emerson was enamored with the course by day two. In a course
titled Self, Society, and Technology, she did not imagine the degree to which
paintings, poems, and photographs would play an almost daily role in class
discussions. On day two, the professor had shown a photograph of planet Earth.
He then gave the students the writing prompt: What does this picture mean to
you? After a few minutes he opened up the question to discussion and students
began to respond: “Life. Home. A part of something bigger. Creation. Beauty.”
Emerson called out: “It’s gorgeous.” “Largely emotional responses,” the professor
observed.

He explained that this photograph was the very ﬁrst picture of the Earth
with the sun behind it, taken in 1972 by Apollo 17 (see Figure 6.1). He then
asked the class to imagine the impact this photograph would have had if they
had never seen an image of Earth. He said, “When some people ﬁrst saw this
photo, they wept at their ﬁrst vision of the planet.” He continued, “Truth and

beauty, as rendered in painting and poems is just as important as science’s

contributions. For example, it was the power and force of this photo that got the

80

Clean Air Act passed, not the numerous scientiﬁc studies.” This lesson was
intended to illustrate the contributions the arts and humanities could make,
including powerful emotional and aesthetic arguments laden with value and
power.

Figure 6.1 Apollo 17 photograph

 

Emerson said that after this lesson, she had been emotionally affected
from just imagining how it must have felt to see the planet for the ﬁrst time. She
became engaged in the Ideas of the course because they were suddenly
“speaking her language.” As a photographer herself, Emerson knew the profound
impact photographs could have. Years ago, she had begun taking portraits of
the children In her mother's home-based day care. Inspired by photographer

Anne Geddes, Emerson dressed the children in whimsical costumes and spent

81

hours photographing them. When her family and friends raved about these
portraits, Emerson was encouraged to develop her “natural eye” for picture
taking. She said: “When I had my ﬁrst camera, I had a lot of encouragement from
friends and family. I got more and more into it as I realized people’s reception
was very positive.” With this positive feedback, she began to venture outdoors, in
the unpopulated areas surrounding the small town in which she lived.

Her photo albums contained many remarkable photographs of rural
landscapes, storms, clouds, trees, forests, streams, animals, bridges, lakes,
ﬁelds, and ice. She recently invested in a hefty, professional-grade digital camera
to continue developing her passion for photography. However, Emerson did not
plan to make a living as a professional photographer. Instead, she was going into
elementary education, as she had always been around young children and loved
“working with kids.” She was content to pursue a teaching career and take

pictures during the summer months—possibly for income.

On Project 1

Taking the course IAH 206 was a self-proclaimed “transformative
experience” for Emerson. As she wrote in the reﬂection for Project 1:

Prior to taking IAH 206 I knew very little about the problems that

environmentalists face or the organizations that are trying to better this

Earth. I have never adopted a river or hugged a tree and I rarely recycled.

But as I write these things I ﬁnd that I am becoming disgusted with myself

and my lack of concern with the environment and the world in which I live.

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This confession was somewhat surprising to me, as I had seen Emerson’s
extraordinary photographs. From her photographs, one could easily assume that
the photographer enjoyed an intimate, even reverential relationship with the
natural world around her and thus an interest in its protection. Emerson
remarked that unfortunately, that was not necessarily so, as she had simply
viewed nature as something that was “outside.” She explained that she began
her transformation when discussions in the ﬁrst few weeks of the course caused
her to think about nature in a different way: “The simple and obvious question
posed in the class: ‘What is nature?’ is so confusing. This question never would
have occurred to me before. Now it is always on my mind.” In actively
investigating environmental issues for the ﬁrst time in her life, Emerson
discovered the concept of “green burials” and decided to explore this issue
further for Project 1.

Emerson conceived of her project as a booth featured at the university’s
Earth Day Fair, in order to give college-age students information about eco-
cemeteries and the concept of a “green” or natural burial.” In her project she
discussed how green burials minimize one’s footprint on the Earth:

The objective behind a green burial is simple; to minimize one’s

impact on the environment and to actually give oneself back to

the Earth. Simply put, a green burial means no embalming, no

conventional marker and no metal caskets. People may choose

to mark the graves with ﬂowers that are native to the area, some

sort of indigenous rock or nothing at all.

83

For her Earth Day fair display, Emerson built two miniature caskets out of
cardboard boxes—one traditional, one eco-friendly. The traditional casket was
painted metallic black with a large silver cross on the top. The eco-friendly casket
was covered with hundreds of strands of green grass and small prairie ﬂowers.
To further inform her audience about green burials, she continued her argument
inside the caskets. Emerson explained: “On the inside lid of my miniature casket l
have pictures of traditional cemeteries. I chose these pictures because they
show the extent to which the tombstones overtake the landscape of these
cemeteries. Inside the casket l have a list of facts obtained from Wikipediacom
about traditional funerals and formaldehyde’s impact on the Earth’s
environment.” In contrast to the traditional casket, the eco-friendly casket had
photographs of multiple natural burial sites. Emerson explained:

These pictures are meant to show the natural beauty of these places.

Similar to the concept behind spreading cremated ashes; eco-cemeteries

are created with the intent that people are visiting their loved ones when

they come to the park, that the deceased are actually a part of the
environment here, rather than just lying in a concrete vault beneath the
surface.
By representing her argument in various ways, she believed she could better
convey what green burials have to offer.

Although Emerson acknowledged that burials were often viewed as a

“taboo” and “creepy” subject, she insisted that her visual casket argument was

not at all off-putting and was in fact “kind of cute.” She then described how her

84

two caskets worked together “to show the drastic difference between the two
burial options in a neat, creative way.” In her written project reﬂection she stated:
“Although death and burial is a very taboo and difﬁcult subject for many people to
deal with, I designed my visuals in a way that is esthetically pleasing and not
intimidating so that more people will be willing to hear what I have to say about
the subject.” In an interview, I asked Emerson what she meant by “[a]esthetically
pleasing.” She explained that “the boxes [caskets] were more interesting,
arresting, and interactive than just viewing pictures or reading information.” She
was also quick to point out that people would be engaged with her display
because “people would have to open them up and confront multiple
representations.” Not only was there the tangible argument of the caskets
themselves, there was also the photographs and more text-based information
inside the boxes to engage her audience.

Emerson’s project was successful because her primary focus was the
audience’s perception of her argument. She had speciﬁcally designed her project
with this orientation in mind, beginning with the tactile and sensory argument of
the three-dimensional caskets. As the audience interacted with the caskets, they
were confronted with additional elements (text, image) to reinforce their
understanding on multiple levels. Emerson recognized that these elements all

worked together to become a vehicle for her audience's aesthetic engagement.

On aesthetic experience

Emerson said that the most important aesthetic experience in her life was

“When I discovered that I not only enjoyed photography, but that I had a good

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“eye” for it.” For Emerson, the production of the photograph was where her own
aesthetic engagement occurred. Although, she was delighted that her family and
friends appreciated the ﬁnished product, Emerson’s aesthetic engagement was
primarily in the doing—in the moment of taking the photograph. She explained
that what she loved about it was more than just pointing and shooting: “It’s about
adjusting white balance, iso’s depth, perspective, composition—all those things.”

In fact, Emerson rarely went to galleries or exhibitions to view paintings or
other artist’s photographs. “I take pictures almost every day” she said, “but I only
occasionally look at others photographer’s work.” Emerson felt that when she
looked at others’ photos she was “wasting time.” She said: “I’m not into going to
galleries to interpret complex symbolism—but I’ll gladly go to the middle of
nowhere to take pictures.” Emerson explained that the “complex symbolism” one
usually encounters in artist’s work was a tum-off because she didn’t enjoy trying
to ﬁgure out the artist’s abstract or intended message. Furthermore, she did not
believe there was only one kind of meaning in a work: “We all see the same thing
physically, but it’s what we do with the information we have received. We tend to
do different things, perceive things differently.” She continued, “We might see the
same thing but we might respond and interpret it in completely different ways.”
For Emerson, each individual’s perception was valid, no view counted more than
another.

Emerson and I spent a good deal of time paging through her photography
albums, which were housed in her laptop. We stopped at an interesting

photograph of Icons on a lake (see Figure 6.2). When I asked her if the

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photograph was aesthetically engaging, she said, “It’s a mother feeding a baby,
so it invokes a kind of compassionate, mother and child moment.” She continued
that it was thn‘lling for her, as a photographer, because “Ioons don’t usually let
you get that close—especially to the babies. It was exciting and rare to be able to
get so close.”

Figure 6.2 Photograph of loans

 

I asked Emerson to discuss the composition of the photograph and she

said: “As far as formal qualities go, I have no idea. It's just raw and in the
moment. It’s not perfect. It shows how things really are.” I wondered why she did
not think the photograph was “perfect" and she explained: If you were to edit it,
you might lighten the water and remove the seaweed from the loon’s mouth. But
then it would no longer represent the moment at hand that this picture really

captures.” Capturing “raw moments” was in fact part of Emerson’s aesthetic style

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as a photographer: “I try to get views that other people wouldn’t necessarily see.
To pick out ordinary things and show how interesting they are. To show their
beauty, their essence, their story.”

As we began to page through her album again, we stopped brieﬂy at an image of
a tree in winter. She offered: “The story in this picture is about the last leaves,
and the one branch that is still holding on.” The next photograph featured a rusty
bridge (see Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3 Photograph of bridge

I
.,
I
l,

 

She said:
Some people have taken pictures of this bridge, where it looks rusty. They
try to make it look ugly. My attempt at this picture is to make it look like it

belongs. It is natural to the place. There are trees that are growing through

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it. Everything goes together, it has grown together. The trees need the
bridge now. They support each other.
This was yet another perfect example of Emerson’s photographic style, to show
people different views, to turn ordinary things extraordinary by making visible

their beauty, their essence, their story.

Preparation for teaching

Emerson chose to go into elementary education because she loved
working with kids and wanted to use her creativity in her job. She had recently
taken an inﬂuential teacher education class on children’s literature, to help her
prepare for entering the elementary classroom. In this class, she critically
examined literary classics and award books for children, including both critics
and children's responses to the literature. She explained that this class was
aesthetically engaging for her because: “We had to get really involved in it, and
not only look at the books from a teacher’s perspective but also from a child’s
perspective. How a child would see and react to it.” The ability to enter into the
books from different perspectives was a valuable quality of the course. Emerson
and her classmates were asked to read and respond to the books through a
child’s point of view and to contemplate what young students might think and
feel. This course also brought up important concerns for diversity and equity in
the classroom. As she commented: “It was interesting how people with different
backgrounds and experiences could interpret the books and pictures differently.”

She added that: “there’s actually some offensive things going on in some of the

books.”

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The course was important to Emerson because it changed her attitudes
regarding the teaching of young people through stories. She explained: “A young
person doesn’t necessarily think analytically about the pictures in the books, but
when we as a class looked closely at the words and pictures it was really
fascinating.” The interplay of word and image can inﬂuence (sometimes in subtle
ways) a range of aesthetic responses. Through the course, Emerson began to
learn the value of those responses, in order to facilitate effective classroom
practice. To illustrate, the course read Maurice Sendak’s Where the Mid Things
Are (1963) and spent a great deal of time discussing why the book was a classic
example of children’s literature. Emerson noted: “We realized that the book went
really deeply into the emotions of the main character, Max. Even though the book
was really short—it expressed, through effective words and pictures, a whole
array of intense emotions from a child’s point of view.”

Emerson saw how she could explore the emotions of the young boy Max
with her students, as a way to connect with them on an experiential level. If she
could get her students to make real, experience-based connections to the
material, she saw opportunities for learning to take place. To relate to her
students, she could ask: Who here has ever been angry, like Max? Who has ever
been frustrated, like Max? Who has ever wanted to be “King of the Wild Things,”
like Max? The idea was to collect a variety of answers and establish recognition
of both commonalities and difference. Emerson saw picture books as an effective
way to teach children because “pictures do not have right or wrong answers. You

can respond to them emotionally. Emotions can’t be wrong.” For Emerson,

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teaching and learning through picture books was a way for everybody in the
class to relate on an emotional and experiential-level to different people and their
different experiences. It was about celebrating both the unity and the diversity of

expeﬂences.

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Chapter 7

The Perceptual Materials of Reality:
Pi’s Portrait of Aesthetic Engagement

But aesthetic experience could also be
negative... it could be bad pizza.

Pi would rollerblade into class every day sporting the ubiquitous iPod and
white ear buds. Music played an important role in his life and was integrated into
its every aspect. His music preferences varied widely, and included classical,
rock, jazz, metal, punk rock, techno, ska, indie, bluegrass, and rap—“basically
everything but country.” Pi attributed his appreciation of music to piano lessons,
starting at an early age. “I studied concert piano for thirteen years,” he explained.
This fall, Pi became interested in techno, especially the art of sampling. He had
recently created several compositions, which were connected to, but very
different from the original source material—variations on Beethoven’s 3rd
Movement of the Moonlight Sonata.

Pi also practiced Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art which “mixes dancing,
games, music, and ﬁghting.” He described Capoeira in this way:

Two people go into a circle and it’s called “playing a game.” Basically, they

are not trying to hurt each other but they are ﬁghting each other. Capoeira

has room for expression. Depending on how I feel, my “game” is
completely different. There are a range of emotions that can be conveyed
through “the game.” The way we move, it’s emotional. It’s conveyed
through body language. It’s subtle, but it is there if you are paying

aﬂenﬁon.

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While music and Capoeira preoccupied this busy math and physics double
major, Pi’s true passion was videogames. His areas of expertise were role
playing games (RPGs) and action/adventure games. He preferred games with 3-
dimensional open environments. In discussing the importance of gaming in his
life, he said, “Some claim that videogames are not an art form, but I couldn’t
disagree more.” He continued, “In terms of keeping people engaged in a task, it’s
hard to beat them, and for a very good reason: visuals, music, and story are
coupled with a form of interaction not found in other media.” To illustrate the art
of the game, Pi described what it was like to play Devil May Cry 3 (See Figure
7.1):

I love the presentation, the attention to detail in this game. There are

gothic looking towers, small ﬁres, an ornate staircase—broken in parts.

‘ And the music ﬁts the mood of the game very well; it’s dark, heavy, and
gritty metal. There are a number of weapons you can choose from and
you can switch between them with a button click. There are ﬁve different
guns you can use. And then you have six different styles you can play with
and each emphasizes something different. One emphasizes swords.
Another acrobatics. There are a lot of decisions to the game, which makes
it feel deep and immersive. You can ﬁght somebody, throw them up in the
air, choke them with your gun, jump on them, jump off of them, switch to

another weapon...

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Figure 7.1 Screen capture from Devil May Cry 3

 

Pi claimed that the game engaged him because it embodied many of the

perceptual qualities of lived experience. It employed space, time, and movement
in its game play. It constructed a social setting, a physical, material locale. It even
employed the use of memory and dreams. The game also drew him in directly
through the senses and offered “beautiful game play”—which he claimed had to
do with the user’s immersion within the game. Devil May Cry offered such game
play:

When you are playing you can go in the castle and can look at the

paintings hanging on the walls. The lighting is cool and interesting. And

the music is gorgeous. dramatic, and operatic. I would like to do an

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arrangement of it for the piano. The game is beautiful to play because of
the way it has integrated art and music. The art and music make it more
immersive and more exciting to play.
Pi then likened the heightened experience of playing Devil May Cry 3 to the way
professional chefs have the culinary arts. He explained, “Chefs cultivate an
appreciation of how their food tastes, looks, smells.” He went on to describe a
recent dining experience at a food “Gallery” on campus he said
The food there tastes a lot better. And I think a lot of that has to do with
presentation. For example, I ordered a steak salad there once. The server
puts the salad on the plate. He then takes the steak and lays it out in
strips, then he layers the peppers on there, and ﬁnally he quickly zigzags
the dressing over it. I thought: “Wow. That was really unnecessary. I’m just
going to eatit.’ But it looked really cool. And I enjoyed it more because it
looked nice.
Pi claimed that certain kinds of games and certain kinds of foods were “an art”
because through them he “attained a heightened sense of experience and

appreciation” which accordingly contributed to a “deeper degree of engagement.”

On Project 1

Pi was challenged by the ﬁrst assignment in the course. When he found
out that he had to construct an argument that communicated his understanding
of nature from an “arts and humanities perspective” he was slightly vexed.

l was a little stumped, so I thought—what if I tried to talk about art but

approach it from a more abstract—scientiﬁc based view of the

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environment? That was when I decided to look at the arts and humanities

more as a form of communication, as a big all-encompassing kind of thing,

rather than saying it was art or drawing or music.
After much deliberation, he settled on the theme of “viewing nature differently.”
He explained, “The word nature feels so natural, you don’t think about it. About
what it means. But once you do, it’s like, that's really interesting. Nature is all
around and you know it, but you don’t necessarily recognize it. I tried to bring that
question to my audience’s (my friend’s) attention: What or where is nature?”

Pi’s project began with a bag containing chalk and white rocks. The
directions say: “Draw with these on the sidewalk.” He explained that he wanted
his audience to physically go outside as he demonstrated the chalk’s often
overlooked ties to nature. “I wanted my audience to think: drawing with rocks,
drawing with chalk. Really the same thing.” The next visual argument in Pi’s
project was a bird’s nest. He described the process of building the nest: “I went
out and collected some sticks and garbage to build the nest. l assembled various
kinds of grasses from campus, pine needles, sticks, beer caps, a broken piece of
a lighter, foil from some applesauce. I found out it is really hard to build a bird's
nest.” He then asked his audience to list what was in the nest and to categorize
the items as “natural or not.”

I asked Pi if he could have communicated a similar argument using only
words. He answered that a word-based project wouldn’t have been engaging to

his audience and that the artifacts helped him to make the argument:

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With writing, if you want people to really read it, you’ve got to ﬁnd a wayto
draw them in. People pay attention if they have stuff to do, and stuff that
interests them. Reading a paper can get kind of boring. Interacting with
the artifacts helps the audience internalize the ideas that are expressed. It
gives the audience a lot of ways of getting at something.
Reaching his audience was central in his mind as he constructed this project. It
was important to Pi that his project argued his point in more than one way. “The
more stuff you have people doing,” he explained, “the more attention they are
going to pay.” He continued:
Sometimes you have a great idea, but it’s almost no good it it’s not
accessible to people. If you have this idea and no one can understand it
then it’s not very useful at all. Immanuel Kant didn’t care that very few
people would be able to access his stuff. His ideas were hard enough but
then his sentence structure was virtually incomprehensible—comma,
comma, semicolon, etc. But that was okay with him. He wasn’t that
concerned with being accessible.
To Pi, having more than one way to argue a point was key. He wanted his
audience to be able to access his ideas. If the ﬁrst way did not (drawing with
chalk), perhaps the next (the bird’s nest) would. As he knew the audience he had
selected for his project, his friend, liked to play videogames, Pi designed his

project to have an active, involved component to keep his friend interested.

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On aesthetic experience

Pi discussed many important aesthetic experiences in his life, such as
understanding the intricacies of a piece of music, seeing a certain painting up
close for the ﬁrst time, and attending a concert. But when pressed to choose one
to talk about, he chose playing the videogame Legend of Mana for
Playstation. He explained, “This was the ﬁrst videogame I played which made me
stop and pay attention to the music and the artwork. Since then, I have looked
back at other games and marveled at their artistic direction, but Legend of Mana
was the ﬁrst to make me realize how important art was to great videogames.”
See Figure 7.2.

Figure 7.2 Legend of Mana Character

 

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I asked Pi to describe what made playing this game such an important aesthetic
experience for him. He said, “The music was beautiful, varied, and engaging.
The art had a storybook quality to it, very different from the next generation
graphics that most Playstation games were sporting at the time.” We then went
into more detail about what “storybook quality" meant. He offered, “The game
contains beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds and characters. When I was
playing the game, it has almost an older, children’s book quality. A Peter rabbit-
antique—soft-brushed-pastel look. The look combines well with the music” (See

Figure 7.3).

Figure 7.3 An example of a detailed background from Legend of Mana

 

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Pi continued on to say that the interactive quality of the game also had an “artistic
feel to it”. He explained, “One could forge their own weapons, build robots,
construct musical instruments, raise pets, and grow produce.” When we
discussed the signiﬁcance of making things in the game (forging weapons,
building robots, constructing instruments, raising pets, and growing produce) Pi
chose to clarify with an example:

When you read something, you can’t know exactly what the author

intended, so when you read it you take part in their literary creation. The

author made the words, but then you recreate it by trying to come up with
your story, what you get out of it. There is interplay between what the
author created and the meaning you make. It is always going to be
experienced a little differently by the next person.
Pi then likened this experience of reading to the act of playing videogames. He
explained, “There is obviously a creative process on the end of the people who
design them. But there is also a creative process on the part of the person
playing them. The whole process of taking it in, interpreting it is a personal
creative act.”

I continued to ask Pi about the opportunities for creating knowledge—and
meaning—while interacting with the multimodal platform of the video game. Pi
focused on how a game’s focal point was “always the user.” He talked about the
capacity for games to shape the perceptual materials, “the building blocks,” that
constitute an alternate perceived reality for the user—a reality without temporal,

spatial, or physical constraints. For Pi, the most important element of this was the

100

 

user’s ability to be an active participant in the perceptual process. The user takes
action, directs action, sequences action within the alternate reality of a game—
but importantly—it is not an illusion. A game works with actual performances of
perception and meaning making to bring a user into the world of the game.
Consequently, a user's perceptual engagement with the game is real, even if the
game is based on science ﬁction or fantasy. According to Pi, “The more active a
user is required to be, the more effective the game is in deepening the user’s
engagement, in achieving its constructed reality.” The video game as a medium
shapes the conditions of a user’s aesthetic experience. It invites the user into an
all—encompassing realm, an order of reality that exists only through the user’s

active perceptual engagement—but exists nonetheless.

On education

According to Pi, aesthetic engagement “has to do with recognizing the
communicative power of art’s many forms.” For Pi, videogames were
aesthetically engaging because they were able to convey meaning on a variety of
levels. In our interviews, we spent a good deal of time talking about what would
make education more aesthetically engaging for students. He explained, “In this
class, I think that our aesthetic engagement is focused on understanding a
multitude of views on nature through non-traditional means, such as the artistic
renditions of nature, photographs of nature, and written works which are not
primarily scientiﬁc.”

Pi then gave an example:

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One day in class the professor asked what art is and I mentioned that I
take a broad view and think that art is a way of communicating using the
senses. Singing is art. Spoken word is art—it uses rhythm and tempo to
communicate meaning. And public speaking is also a form of art. Anything
that communicates an idea and appeals to the senses to get that idea
across concerns aesthetics. So, aesthetic engagement to me has to do
with how you communicate an idea through the senses, audio, visual,
touch, etc.

I asked Pi if he could recall a speciﬁc lesson that engaged him on an aesthetic

level. He said yes, and mentioned a particular day when the professor had

brought in some botanic-l prints by the Maria Sibylla Merian (see Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4 Botanical Drawing by Maria Merian (1627-1717)

 

102

“The professor asked us if these drawings were art or science,” Pi recalled. “This
was an interesting question that got us all engaged. It was interesting to see
people’s responses and their reasoning. There was not a right or wrong answer.”
This lesson was interesting to Pi because as his classmates gathered evidence
to create their arguments (regarding whether the print represented art or
science), people started to get “really involved” in the discussion. Pi claimed,
“People were really involved and were sharing all kinds of ideas and impressions.
This kind of lesson makes it more personal to us, so we can relate our
experiences, and this makes it more important and engaging to us.”

In our interviews, Pi discussed various ideas to enhance the aesthetically
engaging aspects of the course. He explained, “I like reading, but I might not
make reading the main focus of the class. It would have been more engaging if
we had looked more at particular passages from the readings, instead of
focusing on the broad sweeping content oriented questions.” He added, “I also
Would have liked to do more with visuals. I like art and visual representations of
nature, but I don’t know a lot about it. That would be interesting.” Pi was
interested in gaining a more critical understanding of how the image conveyed
meaning. Ultimately, he was motivated to learn about the variety of meanings
that can be made through an act of communication—what he considered

aesthetic engagement to be about.

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Chapter 8
A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Engagement

The goal of this project was to examine the aesthetic as a rhetorical
practice, to better understand the ways students made meaning through their
experience with it. From the individual portrait chapters it is clear that aesthetic
“meaning” can be associated in vastly diverse ways, yet interestingly, these ways
are not at odds with each other. Instead, these diverse performances form a
constellation of possibilities and approaches to aesthetic meaning making. The
act of interpreting and analyzing students’ various associations led to the
documentation and development of a rhetorical framework. This framework,
depicted in Table 8.1, represents my interpretation of the various ways in which

the students in my study made meaning through their aesthetic experience.

Table 8.1 A Rhetoric of Aesthetic Engagement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I l Representative Sensory " Appreciative
1 2 g 3
i Logos: . i
2 Formal Formal/Representative 3 Formal/Sensory Formal/Appreciative
i Connections §
3 4 5 6
Pathos: I ;
Emotional Emotional/Representative Emotional/Sensory Emotional/Appreciative j
Connections :
’r h 7 8 j 9
Ethos: 5
l Individual i . _ j . . . .
I Connections Individual/Representative IndrvrduaI/Sensory Indivrdual/Apprecratrve ;
I i 2 ‘

 

104

The nine intersections illustrated in this framework describe different
aspects of my study participants’ aesthetic engagement. I will ﬁrst deﬁne each of
the six key concepts and then provide more anecdotal, contextual details
concerning each of the nine intersections. Seen together, these instances
rhetorically map the multifaceted role of the aesthetic in students’ lived
experience. Ultimately, this framework scaffolds an emerging theory of students’
aesthetic engagement. This is a useful tool which demonstrates both a way to
communicate and actively engage the possibilities, the potentialities for aesthetic

expenence.

Key Concepts of Aesthetic Engagement

Representative

Students assembled aesthetic meaning through connections that
represented previous associations and encounters. This kind of engagement
illuminated aspects of their connectedness to each other and to the external
world—to people, places and ideas that lay beyond the individual.
Representative connections included associations that were familiar, typical,

characteristic, or symbolic.

Sensory

Students assembled aesthetic meaning through their sensory
connections. The senses were the medium through which students participated
directly with acts of production and consumption in this study. This emphasis

located the aesthetic in the material, empirical world (as opposed to the

105

immaterial world). While the senses were the starting point for inquiry into the
aesthetic as a knowledge making practice, sometimes the senses were also an

ending point, meaning, no further associations were deemed necessary.

Appreciative

Students assembled aesthetic meaning through their appreciative
connections. Students demonstrated appreciation through the quality of their
attention and observation. A necessary attribute of an appreciative experience
was conscious presence and attention. This kind of noticing notably heightened

or enhanced the quality of an experience.

Formal Connections—logos

Students assembled aesthetic meaning through shared or common
associations of logic and reason. These associations were generally made based
on how students perceived and responded to the given mode (the way or
manner) of external representation. This kind of engagement spoke to the “logic”
underlying or guiding a performance of consumption or production. These
elements included formal and informal design principles, styles, techniques,

movements, and genres.

Emotional Connections—pathos

Students attributed aesthetic meaning through their emotional
associations. Performances of consumption and production evoked a wide array
of emotions, such as delight, awe, anger, and revulsion. Often these emotional

associations proceeded to move the student to decision or action.

106

Individual Connections—ethos

Students assembled aesthetic meaning through their individual
connections. Students’ individual associations were regarded as meaningful
because they reﬂected their lived experience, personal beliefs, imaginative lives,
and unique styles, and tastes.

The key concepts described above, representative, sensory, appreciative,
formal, emotional, and individual are fundamental to explaining how students
discussed their aesthetic experience in this study. Equally important is my
interpretation of the ways students repeatedly combined or crisscrossed these
concepts in their discussions, as shown in the matrix. These nine intersections
reveal different, but sometimes interrelated aspects of students’ aesthetic

engagement.

1. Formal + Representative Connections

When formal and representative connections were activated, students
made meaning through a given mode or manner by means of previous
associations and encounters. For example, Jack’s Project 1 took the form of a
scrapbook, in order to engage his chosen audience, his sister. He explained, “my
audience would respond best to something they are familiar with, and I happen to
know that my audience enjoys the construction of scrapbooks.” Jack opted for
the form of the scrapbook because he thought it would best engage his
audience. This example illustrates a formal/representative possibility for

aesthetic engagement.

107

2. Formal + Sensory Connections

When formal and sensory connections were activated meaning was made
through a given mode or manner by means of the senses. For example, Lilly
spoke about watching ﬁre burn and move as she became fascinated with its
“different colors and shapes.” For Lilly, the way ﬁre burned was an engaging
sensorial experience. This would be an example of formal/sensory aesthetic

engagement.

3. Formal + Appreciative Connections

When formal and appreciative connections were activated, meaning was
made through a given mode or manner through conscious presence and
attention. For example, when Lilly experienced the sunset in Mexico, she was
paying attention to her surroundings in a way that deepened and enriched the
quality of her experience. She was noticing what there was to be noticed. As her
attention focused on the setting sun, she felt “nowhere but in the moment.” This

is an example of a formal/appreciative possibility for aesthetic engagement.

4. Emotional + Representative Connections

When emotional and representative connections were activated, meaning
was made through feelings and subjective reactions to familiar encounters. For
example, Emerson claimed that her photograph of Icons on a lake was
aesthetically engaging because, “It’s a mother feeding a baby, so it invokes a
kind of compassionate, mother and child moment.” Emerson's compassion was

evoked by the representation of mother and child. The photograph’s personal

108

 

resonance for Emerson is an example of an emotional/representative possibility

for aesthetic engagement.

5. Emotional + Sensory Connections

When emotional and sensory connections were activated, meaning was
made through feelings and subjective reactions to sensory perceptions. For
example, when Jack visited Niagara Falls, his senses were overloaded with the
sights and sounds of the falls (the sheer size of the falls and its deafening roar).
This caused him to feel awe-inspired and is an example of an emotional/sensory

possibility for aesthetic engagement.

6. Emotional + Appreciative Connections

When emotional and appreciative connections were activated, meaning was
made through feelings and subjective reactions to conscious presence and
attention. For example, when Emerson recalled the course professor discussing
the ﬁrst Apollo 17 photographs, she became emotionally affected from attentively
“imagining how it must have felt to see the planet for the ﬁrst time.” This is an

example of an emotional/appreciative possibility for aesthetic engagement.

7. Individual + Representative Connections

When individual and representative connections were activated, aesthetic I
meaning was made by connecting personal beliefs and attitudes to familiar
encounters. For example, when Jack designed his website he chose the color
blue for his background. He chose this color because he felt blue was calming

and soothing (an instance of 5 emotional/sensory connections). However, he

109

 

also stated that he believed the color blue to be an appropriate choice because it
was “the color of technology,” as seen in navigation bars, screensavers,
Bluetooth, etc. Jack’s outward associations of the color blue are an example of

an individual/representative possibility for aesthetic engagement.

8. Individual + Sensory Connections

When individual and sensory connections were activated, aesthetic
meaning was made by connecting personal beliefs and attitudes to sensory
perceptions. For example when Pi described the video game Devil May Cry 3, he
remarked on how vividly the game drew him in through the senses, while
observing the paintings, lighting, and the integration of music within the game.

This is an example of an individual/sensory possibility for aesthetic engagement.

9. Individual + Appreciative Connections

When individual and appreciative connections were activated, aesthetic
meaning was made by connecting personal beliefs and attitudes to conscious
presence and attention. For example Pi believed that Devil May Cry 3 had
beautiful game play. He came to this conclusion because he achieved a
heightened “sense of experience and appreciation” while playing. This is an

example of an individual/appreciative possibility for aesthetic engagement.

An Embodied Process

The rhetoric of aesthetic engagement demonstrates that aesthetic
meaning making is a complex and multidimensional process. It is a process in

which meaning is made through bodily perceptions, representative associations,

110

 

emotions—a wide range of possibilities. Signiﬁcantly, the possibilities for
aesthetic engagement are not mutually exclusive. For example, when Jack
discussed the design of his website, he employed Emotional/Sensory
Connections (#5) and Individual/ Representative Connections (#7). When Lilly
discussed her Mexican sunset experience, she employed Formal/Appreciative
Connections (#3), Emotional/Sensory Connections (#5), and
Individual/Appreciative Connections (#9). Interestingly, this study suggested a
positive correlation between the number of intersections employed and the
degree of the student's aesthetic engagement.

As a conceptual tool, the matrix shows different aspects of students’
aesthetic meaning making at the levels of logos (how student think), pathos (how
students feel), and ethos (how students believe). Due to the range of
possibilities, this framework may expand notions of “what counts” as aesthetic
experience. It is a much broader account than some versions, which emphasize
disinterested judgment or rational cognition as the basis for aesthetic knowledge.
This more accommodating conception conceives of the aesthetic, not as
something set apart as a special order, but as a mode of human experience—as
an important everyday knowledge making practice. It is a practice that does not
favor mind over body or body over mind. Instead, it reveals meaning made
through body and mind as particular aspects of a larger knowledge making
process.

Aesthetics, thus, is the study of how people make and experience

meaning through their sensory perception. The framework of aesthetic

111

engagement explains the many ways such meaning is made and experienced.
Such a framework offers a necessary navigational aid for our changing times; it is
a blueprint for a human—centered approach to understanding how students take

and make aesthetic-based meaning.

112

Chapter 9

Aesthetic Spaces of Composition

A tangible result of this study is the rhetorical framework explained in the
previous chapter. This framework represents a blueprint for a useful theory of
aesthetic engagement. Such a blueprint can support new directions in
composition and new media studies, especially multimodal composition practices
in aesthetic spaces. The key to negotiating these aesthetic spaces of
composition is in working from a practical theory which can account for a variety
of aesthetic possibilities. This project supports a theory grounded in “perception
by the senses,” and is able to address the diverse potentialities for meaning
making in the consumption and production of new media texts and experiences.
Accordingly, this theory of aesthetic engagement delivers several affordances in

the context of composition and new media studies. I

This theory provides a wider, more accommodating conception
of the aesthetic appropriate for multimodal work

Inquiry into the changing nature of new writing practices comprises an
important direction for composition and new media studies. Given that practices
of multimodal composition are ﬂourishing, an understanding of how students take
and make meaning from multiple media is more important than ever before.
Kress and other multimodal scholars believe that as we see writing become

subordinated to the logic of the visual, new spaces and new strategies will be

113

 

 

needed.8 Discussing the challenges of new media, DeVoss and Selfe advise that
“New media and new realms have invited new rhetorical positionings for the
creative souls working in these spaces, and as teachers of composition, we need
to help students explore, develop, and communicate more effectively in them”
(46). Clearly, there is a pressing need for a better understanding of how students
make meaning through their experience with new media.

This study’s ﬁndings can help expand understanding of how new
composition practices are changing the ways we take and make meaning. The
framework is a useful tool which can help bridge the chasm between the
theoretical and the material, by explaining how we make meaning through our
sensory perception. Aesthetic engagement cannot be found in a text, in a ﬁnite
object of perception, but rather in how the aesthetic is perceived.9 This theory
provides an expansive conception of the aesthetic by describing nine ways in
which the aesthetic may be perceived. These nine ways, viewed together,
imagine the aesthetic within a larger cultural matrix and allow for a more inclusive
and ﬂexible view toward the many different modes of aesthetic activity and
design. lmportantly, this accommodating notion situates aesthetic engagement
not as something set apart as a special order, but as part and parcel of everyday

. human experience.

 

8 In the inﬂuential article, “Gains and Losses: New Forms of Texts, Knowledge, and Learning,”
Gunther Kress (2005) examines contemporary newspapers, tabloids, textbooks, and drawings to
illustrate how word-based writing is being quite literally “pushed to the margins” in favor of more
visual means of representation.

9 This way of understanding the aesthetic (as “a how”) is in opposition to art critic and perceptual
psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, as he decisively locates the aesthetic in “a what.” Arnheim explains
in his Gestalt Theory of Expression: “The phenomenon in question is actually present in the
object of perception” (64). This conception also goes against some recent scholarship in English
studies, especially Misson and Morgan (2006) who claim that “The aesthetic...is a quality
inherent in texts” (Misson, et. al, 212)”

114

 

This working-theory supports multiple perspectives toward
meaning making

A sensory-based aesthetic allows us to account for a wide range of
possibilities for making and taking meaning. Kress and van Leeuwen, have
predicted that: “When readers begin to understand and value the multiple
semiotic modes of new media texts, the shape of “what counts as forms of
knowledge in ‘disciplines’ or ‘subjects’ will also begin to change (Kress and van
Leeuwen 43). This aesthetic theory changes our views of “what counts” as
“knowledge” ” by accounting for the multiple ways in which we take and make
meaning in the acts of consumption and production. This theory takes a trans-
dimensional approach to knowledge making; it explains aesthetic engagement at
the intersections of logos, pathos, and ethos—including the representative, the
sensory, and the appreciative. It demonstrates how meaning is attributed in a

variety of situations, in a diversity of ways.

Accounting for these multiple modes and perspectives is an important
direction for composition and new media studies. Scholarship in the ﬁeld can and
should address how work in new media opens new, diverse spaces for ways of
knowing, understanding, and interpretation. Part of this change entails the ways
in‘which readers and writers design meaning from their engagement with the
image and other materials available to them through the interface of the screen.
Signiﬁcantly, meaning is now designed by the experiencerﬁnterpreter/reader as
much as by the writer/creator. Study participant Pi alluded to this practice, when

he stated, “the whole process of taking it in, interpreting it, is a personal creative

115

 

 

act.” The framework provided here not only establishes new forms of knowledge
and meaning making for our changing times, but it accommodates and values

the inherent diversity of those different modes and meanings.

This working-theory offers a ﬂexible navigational aid for
composition in aesthetic spaces

This theory of aesthetic engagement represents a ﬂexible view of
interconnected knowledge. Through it, students are able to access multiple
perspectives, multiple knowledge sources, and multiple points of view. Students
may explore an aesthetic performance (an act of production or consumption)
from a variety of vantage points, each perspective highlighting aspects of the
performance in a somewhat different way than the other perspectives. In this
way, the complexity and richness of the performance is understood and
communicated through the framework’s multiple access points. Current theories
of learning support this ﬂexible approach to knowledge construction. Cognitive
ﬂexibility theorist, Rand Spiro claims that “highly interconnected, web-like
knowledge structures . . .pennit greater ﬂexibility in the ways that knowledge can
potentially be assembled for use in comprehension or problem solving” (Spiro
170). This theory of aesthetic engagement is one such approach that supports
the ﬂexible application of knowledge in new contexts and serves as a tool for
solving and dealing with new problems and situations.

This theory can help students to work within and across the genres,
objectives, and audiences that comprise various writing situations by developing

students’ capacities in understanding the diverse potentialities for meaning

116

 

 

making within the context of word-based, visual, and web-based texts. An
understanding of how people communicate through discourse provides
scaffolding from which students can address the writing situations they actually
encounter in their composing lives—whether they are conducting textual
analyses, composing visual arguments, or designing with multimedia. The theory
can also aid students in understanding how audiences make meaning via their
sensory perception—that is, how they read, view, interact and otherwise make
meaning through their senses. Additionally, the theory emphasizes active
knowledge construction over the passive transmission of information, thus,
enabling students to master the complex concepts they encounter and to transfer

that knowledge to a variety of digital and real-world contexts.

Directions for Future Research

As the media students produce and consume on a daily basis increasingly
combines and converges, an understanding of how people take and make
meaning in digital environments is more important than ever before. This study
contributed to such inquiry, as its results created usable, practical knowledge that
drew on real cases of students’ aesthetic engagement. The application of these
results has the potential to inform more enriching opportunities for learning in
both real-world and digital environments. It is important to promote further
evidence-based research to support the design of effective Ieaming
environments that utilize the full communicative potentials of emerging

technologies.

117

This rhetoric of aesthetic engagement can offer students theoretically
grounded yet practical learning experiences as they are taught to both analyze
and design writing for digital environments. It is an opportunity for work in the
ﬁeld of rhetoric and composition to contribute to an understanding of how the
media people produce and consume conveys meaning. Locating the aesthetic in
perception, in performance, expands the aesthetics’ scope, utility, and
applicability to composition and new media studies. Still, further analysis and
exploration is needed regarding the ways students “read” and “write in aesthetic
spaces. This includes further inquiry into 1) how images communicate meaning,
2) how people design for meaning making, and 3) how people make meaning
through their interaction with convergent modes and media. Upon further study,
instructional materials may be developed which address new composition
practices, based on this theory of aesthetic engagement. These materials would
build on how students actually use and apply the nine ways of meaning making,
focusing on media convergent contexts. In essence, these materials could
constitute a model of new media writing theory and pedagogy, which can be
applied to a range of topics in the classroom including visual rhetoric, user-
experience design, human-computer interaction, web development, and new

media art.

118

Appendix 1
A Difﬁcult Day

For a number of years, I taught a course in the Arts and Humanities, titled
”The US. & the World.” This particular course was designed to explore the
unities and diversities of the American experience and was organized historically
with thematic emphasis on literature and the arts. The artistic and literary
elements were intended to enhance the more political and historical content we
studied by contributing different artistic and humanistic perspectives and
viewpoints. However, my students oﬂen had resistance to making sustained
arguments and thinking and writing critically about these artistic (creative) and
literary elements.

For example, I recall one particularly difﬁcult teaching day in the
classroom. We were in the second week of a Modernism unit when I brought in a
painting to enhance the primary documents we were reading. The painting was
Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912). Simply put, many of
my students immediately began to protest: “What is this? I could paint this!
Where’s the nude? Where’s the staircase? This “means” something? This means
what I think it means. This says only what I think it says. How could it possibly

say anything else? I suck at paintings. I certainly wouldn’t buy this!”

119

Figure 10.1 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending A Staircase (1912)

 

Since different experiences produce and shape thought in different ways, I had
brought in the painting in order to explore different approaches to the course
material and to help students make connections in the Modernism unit. However,
observing that many of my students were irate, indignant or simply dumb-
founded, I decided to back up and create an impromptu mini-lecture on the
historical resonance of the nude in the world of art. The idea was to engage my
students in the joy and discovery of the work of art.

From there, we moved from the traditional depiction of nudes in art to
Duchamp’s representation of the nude. I believe less than half of the students
were following me. We spent an inordinate amount of time just trying to locate
the nude (or nudes) in Duchamp‘s painting. Then we worked to locate the

staircase. The lesson continued in a painstaking fashion.

120

At the end of the class hour I was exhausted. In my teaching journal I wrote:
My students were completely unprepared for this. I have to ﬁnd a better
way to incorporate works of art into my lessons. I need a vocabulary to
talk about these things. I need my students to be able to hold on to
something so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel again tomorrow if
we look at another painting. I need some practical tools to discuss the
aesthetic. I need to be able to show them that, yes, this painting actually

means something.

Consequently, in my desire for students to engage meaningfully with the
aesthetic texts in the course, I had to confront a very real problem: How to teach
an understanding of a diverse body of aesthetic texts to students with no formal
education in the arts? In response to my students’ resistance to analyzing works
of art and literature, I underwent a SOTL research project, to answer this
perplexing question. At the time, I was primarily interested in developing a
teaching and Ieaming tool which could help students navigate the artistic and
literary materials in the course. I wanted to ﬁnd a way to enable students’ critical

perception and analysis concerning the creative texts in the course.

The Aesthetic Toolbox

Building upon the theory and practice of arts education pioneers such as John
Dewey, Maxine Greene, and Richard Gale, I built my ﬁrst project upon the notion
of “aesthetic literacy,” the goal of which is ”to provide students with another tool,
another skill, another way to see the world, the culture and their own lives" (Gale

9). As a result, I drafted, studied and later presented the “Aesthetic Literacy

121

Toolbox”—a teaching and Ieaming tool which I hoped would develop my
students’ aesthetic interpretation and analysis skills and to provide some useful
tools for myself the next time I tried to enhance course material with an aesthetic
text.

I designed the Toolbox to present fundamental concepts of aesthetic literacy
in such a way as to create a common vocabulary for students with diverse
backgrounds to communicate meaningfully about the artistic subjects they
encountered in the course. Using the conceptual “tools” feeling, design,
movement, familiarity, vocabulary and idea students investigated a range of
subjects including painting, sculpture, poetry, literature, photography,
architecture, and music. This vocabulary enriched their understanding of artistic
subjects and aided in the development of their critical and interpretative skills.
For example, my research indicated that familiarity with the concepts of the
Toolbox helped students to think through sophisticated concepts and to bring
speciﬁc evidence to support their arguments and interpretations of artistic
subjects. The “tools” provided a connective tissue through which traditionally
disparate bodies of knowledge could be brought into dialogue with one another.

When the tools were used repeatedly in classroom activities I observed
that we had created a scaffold to seamlessly incorporate any work of art — almost
any aspect of any work - into our discussions. Moreover, in the later versions of
the course, there ensued a more balanced emphasis on student consumption
(viewing/reading/interacting) and student production (composing/designing/

authoring). Not only were we using the Aesthetic Toolbox to talk about aesthetic

122

 

texts in the course, we were employing the toolbox’s concepts in our own
creation of aesthetic texts—including poetry, posters, paintings, photography,
skits, and digital stories.

One of the largest successes in working with the Toolbox involved the
ways in which students found useful ways to transfer their knowledge of the
aesthetic outside of the classroom walls:

I could use it [the Toolbox] in my future classes to help me better

analyze any novels I may have to read. It could also help me in the

real world. I have no problem examining art now. A trip to an art

museum once would have been boring, but now that I know what to

look for it would actually be something I look forward to and would

want to do (Student 2006).

Often, I witnessed changes in orientations and attitudes toward both consuming
and producing creative material. I believed this achievement was facilitated by
the components of the Toolbox that speciﬁcally helped students make sense of
their own aesthetic experience and how that experience related to the world both
within and outside of classroom walls.

In spring 2006, with the aid of the program in the Arts and Humanities, a
Toolbox website was created. This website expanded both the range and
efﬁcacy of the Toolbox by bringing an interactive, multimedia component to
student learning. The online Toolbox was also an opportunity for me to assess
possibilities for integrating technology in the arts and humanities classroom to

achieve instructional goals.

123

Figure 10.2 The Online Aesthetic Toolbox

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Thinking inside a box

My continued work with the aesthetic and student learning (two
international SOTL conference presentations and 2 pilot studies) eventually
suggested that my Toolbox was rather limited as a teaching and Ieaming tool.
My classroom researched revealed that its design only allowed students access
to a limited number of contexts—to paintings, sculptures, poetry, literature,
photography, architecture, and music. The design of the Toolbox did not allow
students to reﬂect on the aesthetic found in nature or the natural world. Nor did
the Toolbox allow students the freedom to reﬂect on their aesthetic experiences

that fell outside the allotted contexts—although this was a next step many

124

students made on their own. While assessing the effectiveness of the Toolbox as
a teaching tool I had to confront the fact that the aesthetic was actually found in
more places than paintings, sculptures, poetry, literature, photography, and
music. While considering this dilemma, I came to the realization that my original
conception of the aesthetic had severely limiting consequences for student
learning. Because I had located the aesthetic in a limited number of speciﬁc
things, I had drastically narrowed the possibilities for student engagement.

I had spent years in the classroom developing my students’ “aesthetic
literacy.” Yet I had limited or altogether dismissed legitimate ways of
experiencing the aesthetic. This mistake had ultimately reduced my students’
conceptions of art and literature and even what “counted” as aesthetic
experience. After years of teaching and researching the aesthetic, I had ﬁnally
arrived at the rather obvious questions: What is the aesthetic? What are the ways
students experience the aesthetic? How do students make meaning through it?
What are its possibilities for teaching and Ieaming? The need for a better
understanding of the aesthetic and its potentials for teaching and Ieaming

motivated the current study.

125

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