Aesthetic Understanding as Informed Experience: The Role of Knowledge in Our Art Viewing Experiences

Concepts of Art and Interpretation in Interviews with Educators from Tate Britain

“…Tate's Ways In framework, responds to this principle and fosters interpretation processes that renounce the search for keys to a correct meaning, instead accepting all possible mean-ings as interesting, including those contributed by the learner. It thus demonstrates its agreement with a critical vision, as defended by different researchers on museum education, which suggests that in educational activities, no specific voice should be privileged, and authority in the construction of meanings should be shared (Barrett 2000;Hubard 2007;Lachapelle et al 2003;Meszaros 2007). These ideas are suggested in the following opinions of educators who work in the gallery:…”

“…For this reason, the most influential researchers and professionals involved in museum education have dealt with the issue of interpretation from diverse points of view. Research, reflections and proposals about interpretation practices in museum education may draw upon new art histories (Mayer 1999), new theories of communication (Hooper-Greenhill 2000), narrative forms of education (Garoian 2001;Reese 2003) and other approaches from different aesthetic points of view, like the hermeneutics of Gadamer (Meszaros 2007), Dewey's aesthetic and pedagogic philosophy (Costantino 2008;Van Moer et al 2008), Umberto Eco's ideas about literary texts (Hubard 2007) or Csikzentmihaly's ideas on aesthetic experience (Lachapelle et al 2003;Lankford 2002), among others.…”

Older People Learning through Contemporary Visual Art – Engagement and Barriers

“…However, Pringle (2006, 11) notes that personal interpretations need to be justified in terms of evidence in the art work. Lachapelle et al (2003) encourage learners to:…”

Sustained Experiential Learning: Modified Monasticism and Pilgrimage

“…Teachers of art and aesthetic learning must develop pedagogies for students that hone emotional and sensory responses to art objects as the students integrate such responses with complementary academic information. Drawing on the works of several scholars of aesthetic training, Lachappelle, Murray, and Neim have developed a teaching strategy that addresses dimensions of the experience of encountering an object of art: affective, perceptual, communicative, and cognitive, each a different kind of knowledge appropriate for subjects like art, and as we shall see, religion, that pull together “ ‘a body of knowledge coming from an external source and the questions and intuitions that surface from within’ ” (Gérard Artaud quoted in Lachappelle, Murray, and Neim 2003, 80). The pedagogy suggested is designed to integrate these types of knowledge in a multiphased approach that leads to a new kind of knowledge, “reconstructed knowledge” (Lachappelle, Murray, and Neim 2003, 90).…”

“…As the viewer returns multiple times to the artwork, the interplay of experiential encounters with a sharpened understanding based on theoretical knowledge stimulates a series of changing responses to, and understanding of, the work of art. In addition to providing a means of comprehending a specific work of art, the combination of experience and theory over time becomes a template for approaching and understanding future aesthetic encounters (Lachappelle, Murray, and Neim 2003, 84–91).…”