In its unholy trinity with climate change and political extremism, COVID19 continues to shape a period of unparalleled existential crisis, leaving Higher Education to navigate a peculiar territory between transformation and survival. Educational researchers, rising to the challenge, are engaging motifs of humanism, sustainability and inclusivity, sometimes uncomfortably shoehorning them into the dominant neo-liberal imperative of measurable growth and scalability (Riemer, 2021; Spector, Shreve & Daniels, 2021).

Against this backdrop, drawing from the broader traditions of aesthetic philosophy, and honed with pedagogical and organisational theories, this paper considers (and interconnects) three areas of educational research that can be enhanced during these times of crisis:

1. The pedagogical perspective, or aesthetic pedagogy
2. The academic and the organisation, or organisational aesthetics
3. The learner experience of higher education, or aesthetic learning experience

This paper provides both a theoretical framework and applicable strategies to each area to build a better appreciation of how aesthetics can be embedded in future educational research. In doing so it asks what gaps exist in the current research, why it matters, and what we can do about it. In conclusion, it proposes a holistic approach whereby all three areas form an ecosystem (of places, agents and interactions) within which engagement with aesthetics in HE research is normalised; where “education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously.” (Lewis, 2009. p. 286)

First, to the pedagogical perspective; this paper observes a discordant scholarship of aesthetic pedagogy and, consequently, any practical guidance in or support for developing pedagogies that enrich the learning experience. It is important to address this to both a) consolidate alternatives to the didactic, utilitarian approaches to teaching and b) augment newer approaches to teaching with aesthetics. This section proposes ways of augmenting current teaching practice with approaches that can enhance the learning experience and associated outcomes. Introducing this paper’s interest on the relationship between aesthetics and affect, this section demonstrates how these enhancements might be applied and what the outcomes mean for graduates.

Second, to the academic and the organisation; this paper proposes a deeper engagement with the aesthetic experience of the institutions of higher learning, noting the historical depiction of “organizations in idealized form…[deprived] of their earthly features of physicality and corporeality” (Strati, 1999 p. 4) and the consequences this has for engagement with the educational experience. To re-energise the post-COVID HE institution is to embrace the ‘physicality and corporeality’ and for researchers to re-engage with their own narrative (and the associated sensations and emotions) that has drawn them to the vocation. This section introduces the relationship between narrative and aesthetics as an area of growing interest (Alexiou, et. al., 2020) and segues into third area of focus, the learner experience.

A majority of the scholarship around aesthetic learning experience is centred around K-12 and/or arts-based curricula (for example, Hinchcliffe, 2011; Webster & Wolfe, 2013; Lewis, 2009), leaving a paucity of related literature contextualised for HE. The immediate urgency in undertaking this work is to ensure that HE researchers are not neglecting an area of critical inquiry, one in which “intellectual, emotional and possible moral changes…take place.” (Webster & Wolfe, 2013. p. 23). From this point, we can discern if, or what, strategies might be introduced into aspects of the learning experience (for example, curricula, learning activities or learning spaces/interfaces). This has the potential to impact a range of factors that affect diversity and inclusion policies (accessibility, sensory engagement) and the located (learning space design) or virtual (LMS interface design) experience of learning.

This paper adopts a ‘transformative worldview’ (Mezirow, 2006/2018, Mertens, 2017; Noriyuki Inoue, 2016; Trevors, Pollack, Saier, & Masson, 2012) to inform its methodology. While educational research has been dominated by four approaches – namely postpositivist, constructivist, pragmatist and emancipatory (Mertens, 2008) – this paper shares Mertens’ preference for transformative over emancipatory “because of a desire to emphasize the agency role for the people involved in the research. Rather than being emancipated, we work together for personal and social transformation.” (Mertens, 2008. p. 23) From this foundation, a mixed-qualitative method that employs critical and ecological perspectives (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Gibson, 1986; Hammond, 2021) serves to expand on the transformative possibilities aesthetics offers. In response to the perceived view of HE research being “particularly uncritical and under-theorized…and pedagogical writing not counted as ‘research’” (Stommel, 2015), the critical method employed aims to address this imbalance, particularly in light of the current socio-political dynamism of the HE landscape. The ecological method allows for the consideration and observation of the environmental and intersubjective conditions of HE as within an ecosystem, highlighting the para-cognitive, sensory and affective nature of aesthetic experience. It follows, from a definitional perspective, as important to note this paper’s adoption of a particular hybrid of Kantian and pre-Kantian (specifically, Ancient Greek) understanding of aesthetics, inasmuch as it accepts the Kantian definition of aesthetics as a “science which treats the conditions of sensuous perception,” (Kant, 1790 / 1987) and “not a judgment of cognition” (Kant, 1790. p. 27) while presenting the more sensorially ‘comprehensive’ (Simpson, 1985) definition of being “more than just visual perception; it stands for general perception with the senses, as well as the impression that the perceived leaves on the body.” (Bleeker et al., 2002. p. v) This refinement taps the etymological source of the word (αἰσθητικός : aisthesis) rather than the Kantian reduction “to merely an eye that observes, without a body” (Bleeker et al., 2002. p. v) while also recognising neuroscientific renderings of learning processes that place the sensory cortex as the location for ‘concrete’ experience (Zull, 2002).

Certain observers will note that many of the ideas presented herein sit comfortably within the purview of Experiential Learning Theory (ELT), and coalesce around David Kolb’s (1984) seminal work (that also acknowledges the rich theoretical pedigree that precedes in Rousseau, Dewey, Vygotsky, Piaget and Friere). The decades of subsequent scholarship and the increased investment in academic development and supporting practitioners (Learning/Educational Designers; Educational Technologists) have increased the profile of experiential pedagogies (more recently within the frameworks of active or authentic learning) to faculties. However, the promise of these interventions isn’t living up to the reality of the graduate experience, with one report finding 28.2% of graduates gaining full-time work are “not using their skills or education in their current employment.” (FYA, 2018). This paper challenges researchers to think ecosystemically about how aesthetic experience affects all aspects of HE in ways that that discrete, ELT approaches do not. By bringing the location of teaching and learning, the actors in teaching and learning and the interactions that occur at this interface, this paper asks questions of how we engage with the whole educational experience, sensorially and emotionally, and what we, as researchers can learn from this dynamic. Moreover, this paper presents this dynamic in the context of the current crises, and the associated uncertainty and disruption they bring to HE. In this context, aesthetics, as either frame or backdrop, brings dimensionality to creative and critical thinking, familiarity to paradox and ambiguity, vitality to our (collective) narrative and to deeper connection with empathy, compassion, and, consequently, with the civic project that is necessarily, now, at the heart of education.

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