Wonder, Beauty & Science

Overview

A child’s first look through a telescope at the rings of Saturn; the moment an elegant geometric proof suddenly reveals its simplicity — these are aesthetic experiences, and I’d argue they’re no less powerful than the aesthetic experience of music or the visual arts. That said, the role of the aesthetic has often been ignored in discussions of learning, and I think that’s a mistake. The newest chapter in this argument is 27 Windows on the Universe (2026), a series of essays drawing on Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer’s interviews with 27 leading cosmologists, about the wonder that draws people to study the universe.

Key Articles / Publications

Aesthetics and STEM education. Developing a Rhetoric of Aesthetics: The (Often) Forgotten Link Between Art and STEM builds on philosophy, psychology, history and biography to promote a model of learning based on aesthetic ways of knowing. It offers a generative three-fold fractal framework for the cycle of engaging in STEM practices: curiosity, seeking answers, a sense of completion that leads to new curiosities.

Aesthetics & coding. Does beauty have a role in learning to code? Good, Keenan & Mishra (2016), Education:=Coding + Aesthetics argues that it does, and should.

Why teachers should care about beauty. In Why teachers should care about beauty in science — the first piece in the iWonder: Research to Practice series I co-edited with Angie Calabrese Barton, Rohit Mehta and Sarah Keenan — we use science-education research to argue that caring about beauty can inspire wonder and curiosity in students.

More recent work in this line has moved into public scholarship, most visibly the 27 Windows on the Universe essay series (2026).

Story

My most recent work on wonder and beauty in science is 27 Windows on the Universe, a series of essays drawing on Alan Lightman and Roberta Brawer’s interviews with 27 leading cosmologists (collected in their book Origins) — what drew them to the universe, how they think, what keeps them going, and how they live with not knowing. It grew out of the Beauty at Work network of conversations: I was invited to speak on designing aesthetic educational experiences in science at the Beauty at Work symposium at Catholic University of America (May 2023), and later appeared on the Beauty at Work podcast talking about why aesthetics is essential for science education.

Mathematical poetry (crossover with Deep-Play)

What does mathematics have to do with poetry? Not much, at one level, but a lot at another — both mathematicians and poets play with structure and form, and seek elegance and parsimony. I’ve loved both, with little or no success in each, but over the years I’ve played little games with both; some of those explorations are collected here.

Connections to current work (GenAI)

In Mishra & Yadav (2013) and Evans, Henriksen & Mishra (2019), we argued that pairing deep human content knowledge with computational tools can lead to creative insight neither could reach alone. Written well before generative AI, these read differently now — the “partnership” we described has become the daily reality of anyone using GenAI. My current writing on creativity and AI picks up where this work left off.

Impact / spread

This line of work travels further outside education than most of my research. The Beauty at Work symposium put the argument in front of philosophers of science, chemists, sociologists, and artists; the podcast carried it to listeners well beyond the academy. The Rhetoric of Aesthetics framework gave researchers and teachers a shared vocabulary for something science education had long treated as decoration. And the 27 Windows on the Universe essays (2026) continue the work in public, on the blog rather than behind journal paywalls — which seems fitting for a set of ideas about wonder.