Aesthetics and science education: Beauty at Work podcast

by | Wednesday, February 01, 2023

Beauty at Work is a podcast that “explores how beauty shapes our lives and the work that we do” hosted by Brandon Vaidyanathan, Associate Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. In its first season the focus is on beauty in science. As part of this series, Brandon has spoken with physicists, philosophers, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, entrepreneurs, psychologists and more. I was lucky to be a guest on this podcast, in an episode titled: Why Aesthetics is Essential for Science Education.

Brandon and I had a wonderful conversation and you can watch the video version or listen to it on your favorite podcast app (links below). Note: there are some glitches in the video due to some bandwidth issues that came up during our conversation – so the audio version may be better. An added benefit of the audio is that you don’t have to see my face 🙂

Among the many things we discussed was a framework we published in 2019 about the role that the aesthetic plays in learning in the STEM disciplines. You can learn more about the framework by going to Aesthetics & STEM education: A new framework. Other publications in this area include why science teachers should care about beauty in their teaching, the aesthetics of coding; its role in science education; and its presence in popular science media.

Links:

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Palindromic Poetry

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Wikipedia minor fail

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Psychology and Coercive Interrogation, the history

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véjà du, all over again

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A year of blogging

It was exactly a year ago, on the first of January 2008, that I began blogging (see first posting here). When I started I wasn't sure how well this blogging thing would work out. Now 12 months and 376 posts later - I have to say that I have truly enjoyed this. I had...

A surprise gift

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Creativity & Teaching, new article in TCRecord

How do exemplary teachers incorporate creativity in their teaching? For her dissertation study, Dr. Danah Henriksen  interviewed several National Teacher of the Year award winners (and finalists), to better understand their beliefs, interests, and practices involving...

All you can cheat, the web & learning

Now here's an important story coming out of Denmark: Students in Denmark Allowed Full Access to the Internet During Exams I have always been a believer in allowing students to use any resources they can during examinations. If we care about authentic assessment, what...

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