Democratizing Children's Computation: Learning Computational Science as Aesthetic Experience

In this paper, we argue that a democratic approach to children's computing education in a science class must focus on the aesthetics of children's experience. In Democracy and Education, Dewey links "democracy" with a distinctive understanding of "experience". For Dewey, the value of educational experiences lies in "the unity or integrity of experience" (DE, 248). In Art as Experience, Dewey presents aesthetic experience as the fundamental form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experiences, and can also bring together multiple forms of experiences, locating this form of experience in the work of artists. Particularly relevant to our current concern (computational literacy), Dewey calls the process through which a person transforms a material into an expressive medium an aesthetic experience (AE, 68-69). We argue here that the kind of experience that is appropriate for a democratic education in the context of children's computational science is essentially aesthetic in nature. Given that aesthetics has received relatively little attention in STEM education research, our purpose here is to highlight the power of Deweyan aesthetic experience in making computational thinking available to and attractive to all children, including those who are disinterested in computing, and especially those who are likely to be discounted by virtue of location, gender or race.
Comment: to appear in the journal Educational Theory