Abstract
This article seeks to probe into the deep meaning of art education and the aesthetic experience in school settings, by showing a way of creating class-work based on the Dewey's Genetic Method and focusing on the meaning of the experience utilizing the methodology of Educational Criticism, in the constructivist paradigm. First, I describe how the class practice which activates children's expressive expression was designed along with the features of the "Genetic Method"; then, a focus is made on the last hour of shared experience as the culmination of this series of class works, and presented in the form of an educational criticism. I could see the deep experience of music expression, which can be seen as the "aesthetic experience", as Dewey called it, where the consciousness of "self" is resolved and inter-penetratingly experienced between the wind as the others, and I. And I pointed out as the outcome of the Educational Criticism, that such an aesthetic experience is composed outside of the framework of school subjects, and that the aesthetic experience as such was the index of the learning as the generation of meaning by the learners' community themselves, that is by no means restricted to the realm of so called artistic. In the process of learning as the generation of meaning by the learners' community included was the confirmation of individual's identities. The practice of this specific educational criticism opens up the implication's for the future the significance of the educational criticism as a method of qualitative research in the curriculum to uncover and disclose the "dimension of the aesthetic experience of the curriculum".
