Marina Sotiropoulou-Zormpala – författare

Enriching Arts Education through Aesthetics examines the use of aesthetic theory as the foundation to design and implement arts activities suitable for integration in school curricula in pre-school and primary school education. This book suggests teaching practices based on the connection between aesthetics and arts education and shows that this kind of integration promotes enriched learning experiences.

The book explores how the core ideas of four main aesthetic approaches – the representationalist, the expressionist, the formalist, and the postmodernist – translate into respective ways of designing and implementing experiential aesthetics-based activities. Containing relevant examples of interventions used in classes, it analyzes the ways in which the combination of different aesthetic approaches can support varied, multifaceted, multimodal and balanced teaching situations in school.

This innovative book will appeal to academics, researchers, professionals and students in the fields of arts education, early childhood and primary education and curriculum studies.

This book re‑examines the role of arts integration in the preschool and primary school curricula, arguing for the creation of an educational environment where children can process every taught subject as an aesthetic stimulus.

Deriving from the author’s earlier work, this scholarly volume attempts to develop novel criteria for arts integration curricula, through examining the effects of different indicative arts integration activities implemented in preschool and primary classrooms. Taking a pedagogical approach, chapters enable readers to connect theoretical insights, implementation strategies and corresponding methodological guidelines. Ultimately, this book argues that the aesthetic integration of the arts into the curricula of preschool and primary schools has three distinct, important effects on the educational process: fostering a more creative and productive education through a multilevel approach, creating opportunities for holistic education by enhancing children’s multifaceted learning involvement and promoting multimodal and inclusive education by providing diverse resources of meaning‑making.

This book will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate students and academics in the fields of primary education, curriculum studies, teacher education and arts education. Educational policymakers and teacher trainers may also benefit from this volume more broadly.