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…

On becoming a website

I wrote this essay a few years ago, around the time I was going up for tenure. I saw writing this as a welcome change from the usual academic stuff I had been writing. I was bored and tired of taking on this third-person, impersonal intellectual voice and just wanted...

The Innocent

I first read Ian McEwan many years ago (in the 80's I think) when he wrote grim and macabre novels and short stories, full of strange dark humor. I found him somewhat interesting but not enough to seek out his books. And then, years later, this past fall I read...

SITE 2010, symposium on TPACK

I just got back from an extended trip to California (San Jose and San Diego). I will be posting a lot more about this trip but for now here are the slides from a symposium on "Strategies for teacher professional development of TPACK" organized by Joke Voogt of Twente...

Open source conferencing

Just found out about Dimdim (bad name!) from Manas Chakrabarti's blog, At Any Rate. Dimdim is an opensource, free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download...

SITE 2008 Keynote

The SITE Keynote presentation by Matt Koehler and myself is finally ready to release to the world. I know converting 350 sildes, and synching them to the narration was a huge task - and Matt has already spent countless hours on this. He ended up with a 60 GB file...

Article in WEF Global Information Technology Report

Everybody has heard of the  World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. As Wikipedia says, "The meeting brings together some 2,500 top business leaders, international political leaders, selected intellectuals, and journalists to discuss the most...

Design, Intuition & Creativity

Design, Intuition & Creativity

Chain-Rotational ambigram design for the word "design."One can read the word both clockwise from the top or anti-clockwise, from the bottom. Our latest article in the series we write for the journal TechTrends (under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology...

ON@TCC: Do not toss aside lightly…

One Night at the Call Center is the second novel by Chetan Bhagat. I picked it up from the library, since I had read nice things about it on some website somewhere. What a tragic waste of time. This is a terrible novel - maybe the worst I have read in a long, long...

Photography update

I have continued adding photographs from the trip to my Flickr Site... I had posted about this earlier but I guess it is time for another reminder. There are now 380 photographs on the "Travels in Asia 2008" Flickr-set (and more coming soon). Go to the...

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