Presentation Schedule
Incorporating a Transformative Experience Through Beauty and Aesthetics in Science Education (93763)
Session Chair: Kevin O'Connor
Thursday, 2 October 2025 17:30
Session: Session 3
Room: (1F) Sant Sebastià
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
This research investigates a class project titled, “Beauty and Aesthetics in Science”, and how it impacted preservice teachers’ understanding of the nature of science (NOS) through exploring the beauty of the natural world. Preservice teachers often have limited understanding of the NOS (Lederman, 2002) yet it is one of the main goals of science education (Blades, 2015). Participants were tasked to choose something in nature that sparked their curiosity, research the science behind the topic, maintain a journal that documented both their findings and their emotional response to the research, and finally, to prepare an aesthetic expression of their discovery. Assignments (n=150), plus 15 interviews were analyzed for this research. Employing a hermeneutic framework, the results revealed that the preservice teachers’ post-definition of science reflected a more complex understanding of science education. Five main themes emerged from the data demonstrating preservice teachers’ recognizing the necessity for science education to encompass the nature of science, creativity, and opportunities for their future students to be able to engage in topics meaningful to them. Preservice teachers described that having choice and freedom in their topic was a powerful way to foster their engagement with nature specifically, and with science in general. Furthermore, the process of creating aesthetic representations and sharing these works in class facilitated a greater emotional connection to their topics and a heightened sense of stewardship towards the natural phenomena explored. The findings indicate that preservice teachers were eager to incorporate similar open-ended inquiries into their future classrooms.
Authors:
Sharon Pelech, University of Lethbridge, Canada
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Sharon Pelech is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at University of Lethbridge in Canada
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