Megan Kounnas

February 2018
ARE6049
Independent Project

The Legacy of CEMREL’s Aesthetic Education Program

Before considering how the understanding of aesthetic experience is important to
modern day education, one needs to know what aesthetic education is. Madeja and
Onuska (1977) did a fine job of explaining that aesthetic education teaches students
how to perceive feelings they have during different sensory experiences. It teaches
students to take into consideration the aesthetic experience such as viewing a painting,
the process for which that painting was produced, the actual physical painting, and the
historical or cultural traditions that influenced the artist to create the painting.
In 1967, the Central Midwestern Regional Educational Lab, Inc., known as
CEMREL, was granted federal money to help bring reform to art education through the
development of scientifically researched curriculum materials that were tested out in
classrooms (Marche, 2003). Starting in 1968, director and vice-president of CEMREL,
Stanley S. Madeja, had the difficult job of finding a team to help create a new curriculum
that would establish aesthetic education as an accepted area of study in schools
(Madeja, 1976). A man named Manuel Barkan had already developed curriculum
guidelines for aesthetic education prior to CEMREL, and these guidelines provided a
foundation for which the Aesthetic Education Program, developed at CEMREL, could
work from (Stankiewicz, 2001).
Madeja and Onuska (1977) felt that the art education community had not well
articulated the role of aesthetics and the arts in children’s basic education, and that
students were deprived cognitively. The purpose of the Aesthetic Education Program
was to provide students in kindergarten through sixth grade with opportunities to
engage in a variety of art forms from theatre and film to music and visual arts while
learning how to perceive, analyze, judge and value these engagements as aesthetic
experiences. Being able to appreciate aesthetic experiences would therefore improve
students’ capabilities to organize ideas, understand processes, analyze similarities and
differences, and would improve decision making skills and develop language in all areas
of study (Marché, 2003). Jeremy S. Bruner was a man who had made a model
curriculum in the 1960s that outlined six levels of units that would give a base for each
developmental stage and grade level. The AED wasn’t specifically based on Bruner’s
model, but it influenced the curriculum designers to choose the skills and knowledge
they wanted to focus on in each level (Madeja & Onuska, 1977)
There were several curricular goals that CEMREL had for the Aesthetic
Education Program. The first goal was to make students aware that all things occurring
in the environment have aesthetic qualities and to help them analyze these qualities
after experiencing them. The AEP also wanted to demonstrate how the arts affect
aesthetic conditions in our environment or every-day life. Another goal was to show
students similarities and differences between the different art disciplines and how each
discipline will provide some sort of aesthetic experience. The AEP wanted to expose
students to the creative and critical process to give them better understanding of how
and why things are created and why artists choose to work in their chosen media and
method. Students would also be introduced to a variety of viewpoints and opinions
about aesthetic qualities to help them develop their own criteria for making aesthetic
judgements. The last goal was to demonstrate the importance and the relevance of
aesthetics to individuals and society and how they affect our daily lives (Madeja &
Onuska, 1977).
The Central Midwestern Regional Laboratory’s Aesthetic Education Program also
had goals to help implement the curriculum successfully in schools. Because it was a
government funded project, they had to carefully document and give feedback for every
step they took in implementing the program (Marché, 2003). Their first goal was to
carefully design an elementary curriculum for grades kindergarten through six using
multimedia instruction with units that could be incorporated by students, teachers,
schools and communities into preexisting curricula reflecting educational values.
Teacher education programs would also be important to the Arts Education
Program in order to facilitate the installation of the curriculum in schools. CEMREL not
only had to get teachers, administration and parents on board with the AEP, but they
also had to convince the federal government by sensitizing them to the importance of
aesthetic education for all students. Without the federal government on board, they
would have no funding and the program would not succeed. The last goal was to build
a base of support for the concept of teaching children about aesthetics by incorporating
the program into as many schools in the United States as possible (Madeja, 1976).
To make the Aesthetic Education Program fit into the curriculum, CEMREL had
to make sure teachers, administrators and parents weren’t intimidated by implementing
an entirely new curriculum into their already packed schedules. In order for it to be
successful, the curriculum had to be flexible and complement rather than replace
teachers’ current instruction. Both general classroom teachers and art educators could
use aspects of the program to enhance their lessons reinforcing that aesthetic
experiences occur in every aspect of life, not just in art classes (Marché, 2003). Madeja
(1976) makes it clear in his report that the Aesthetic Education Program was not to be
taught as a discipline in itself, but to be taught as a broader context area of study noting
the actual aesthetic experiences one has multiple times on a daily basis in all subject
areas.
Madeja and Onuska (1977) outline how the Aesthetic Education Program was
sequenced into six levels representing a series of units with a particular center of
concentration. The levels progress with students’ developmental and grade level.
Level one was geared for kindergarten through first grade and focused on aesthetics in
the physical world. In this level, students would be introduced to lessons on space,
light, sound, and motion. This was the introduction level and was important because
students would be having their first explanations of aesthetic experience that would
guide them throughout the rest of the levels until sixth grade.
In second grade, they would be at level two and would focus on aesthetics and
the arts elements. In their lessons, teachers would incorporate aesthetic experiences
and processes based on texture, shape, part and whole, color, rhythm, sound in poems
and stories, characterization, dramatic conflict, non-verbal communication, setting and
environment and movement. Their lessons might involve visiting a local potter’s studio
to watch and learn the process in which a pot is thrown using a moving wheel or taking
a walk around the school grounds to observe different textures and shapes that are
used on the interior and exterior of buildings.
Level three started in third grade and had a focus on aesthetics and the creative
process. In this level, students would be give opportunities to examine point of view,
arrange sounds with magnetic tapes, create patterns of duration and pitch, create word
pictures, relate sound and movement, create characterization, construct dramatic plots,
form movement phrases and create with sounds and images. A great lesson example
that incorporated a few of these topics into one lesson was to invite a panel of different
artists such as writers, visual artists and musicians who all work with a similar theme to
come discuss their point of view and process and how their work is therefore unique
and shows individuality. Students would have the opportunity to see that different arts
disciplines and how they interrelate yet produce completely different results and view-
points.
Fourth graders would be at level four in the program and would have lessons
that focused on aesthetics and the artist. They would be introduced to the actual people
making the art and the critics making artistic judgement. Critics, writers, composers,
visual artists, choreographers, actors, architects and film makers would all be discussed
in detail. Giving students many opportunities to meet artists and see their craft would
be the ultimate goal at this level. A visit to a gallery with themed subject matter by
different artists showing students similarities and differences in artistic approach would
be a great field trip idea. While there, having students inquire about lighting and display
techniques would help them learn not only the aesthetic process of setting up a gallery,
but also would teach them that artists’ work is made better not by the artist herself, but
by the gallery staff and their skills.
The theme for level five was aesthetics and the culture and would be taught in
fifth grade. Students had specific concepts to cover including the United States and
their approach to aesthetics, the first Americans’ approach to aesthetics, Mexico and
their approach to aesthetics, the Yoruba and their approach to aesthetics, the U.S.S.R.
and their approach to aesthetics and Japan’s approach to aesthetics. While studying
both the United States culture and the aesthetic approaches of other nations, students
would have lessons focusing on discovering cultural groups in their own community and
their aesthetic contribution to the environment. Culture and arts festivals were a good
way to incorporate all the arts disciplines into a school and community-wide celebration
of heritage with ethnic foods, costumes, dance, theatre and visual art displays.
Students were also supposed to start recognizing if cultures in their community were
properly represented in stores or gift shops or if they were stereotyped or appropriated.
Level six was the last unit of study in the Aesthetic Education Program. It was to
be implemented in sixth grade with the theme of aesthetics in the environment. It
focused on the following subject matters: environments are places and people together;
sensing places; moving through environments; cities are…; and imagine a place.
Teachers could start discussions on these topics by visiting parks or playgrounds in
their community to see how the design has or hasn’t made the surrounding environment
more pleasing. They might think about why a space was designed in the manner it was
taking into consideration how people move through the space and interact with each
other and the surroundings.
 After completing these six levels of the Aesthetic Education Program, Marché
(2003) notes that it was assumed that students would then have a better ability to
organize their ideas, understand processes, analyze similarities and differences and
have improved abilities to form judgements that would make them better prepared for
the upper middle and high school courses while also making them well-rounded and
thoughtful citizens.
The Central Midwestern Regional Educational Lab was being awarded the first
and largest inflow of federal money funded by the United States Office of Education
(USOE) and the National Institute for Education (NIE) (Marché, 2003). There were
federal data requirements that CEMREL needed to report in order to keep their program
going, and this included proof of assessment of the program. To test out the AEP
curriculum, CEMREL went to Boone Elementary School in University City, Missouri and
chose a few teachers at different age groups and of different disciplines to write case
studies incorporating aesthetic education into their already established lessons.
Of the teachers chosen to implement the curriculum was a third-grade classroom
teacher. She incorporated the level three theme of aesthetics and the creative process
into her lessons. She played games where students would have to use descriptive
words using texture, shape, size and color to allow other students to guess objects they
were seeing. She incorporated texture with her language arts lessons having students
write about objects they were viewing and then would give them a physical project to
make using texture. She would have them observe patterns and textures in the
hallways of the school and took them on nature walks allowing them to use cameras to
capture textures they liked and then held discussions about the aesthetic experiences
they all had throughout the process. Another chosen teacher to test out the AEP was a
fifth-grade classroom teacher who focused on the level five theme of aesthetics and the
culture. He incorporated point of view which was one of the level three focuses in many
of the lessons he did with students. There was also a music teacher that was chosen to
incorporate the AEP in his lessons and report back his experiences (Madeja & Onuska,
1977). All the data collected and documented including the case studies with images
and feedback were sent to the USOE and NIE to show the program was functional and
relevant.
To make the implementation of the AEP curriculum less daunting, CEMREL
provided detailed step-by-step criteria to schools for each level so that teachers could
have ready-to-use materials in their classes. Material packages were included in the
unit outlines that gave teachers learning tools to work with to make lessons more
effective. These packages might have included touchable materials, photographs,
pictures, games, puzzles, books or teacher training materials. They were organized
with one concept per package per theme, where each theme had multiple concepts,
therefore multiple packages. Verbal concepts were packaged with verbal materials,
visual concepts were packaged with visual materials and so on. The packages were
individualized and created for individual use since the point of the Aesthetic Education
Program was that aesthetic experiences are personal responses. It was expected that
these packages be used to present critical, historical and conceptual content from the
arts to help students have enriched aesthetic experiences while learning about
processes and reasoning for these experiences (Copeland, 1983).
 Unfortunately for CEMREL, the Aesthetic Education Program was not officially
ever successfully implemented in United States elementary schools. In 1980, the
Raegan administration cut budgets for social programs and CEMREL lost its federal
funding (Marché, 2003). Madeja (1976) stated before the program came to an end that
even if all that came out of the program were the outcomes of the case studies in detail
to gain school system acceptance of the idea of AEP, the program would have been
worth it.
Madeja’s efforts were not in vain. Even though the Aesthetic Education Program
was never used in schools, it motivated future art curriculum programs such as
Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) and sold units to programs like the Arts in
General Education Program (AGE) for teacher use (Marché, 2003). Discipline-Based
Art Education focused their approach on four disciplines including art production, art
history, art criticism and aesthetics (Dobbs, 1992). The origins of DBAE can be traced
back to the 1960’s growing support and need for a broader approach to the arts
curriculum, which is when CEMREL started their Aesthetic Education Program.
Aspects of both Discipline-Based Art Education and the Aesthetic Education Program
are seen in classrooms today with the opinion that children can be exposed to a wide
range of art activities that enable them to create and observe like an artist allowing them
to grow cognitively and understand every day aesthetic experiences.

References
Copeland, B.D. (1983). Art and aesthetic learning packages. Art Education, 36(3), 32
35.
Dobbs, S.M. (1992). The DBAE handbook: An overview of discipline-based art
education. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Center for Education in the Arts.
Madeja, S.S. (1976). The CEMREL aesthetic education program: A report. The
journal of Aesthetic Education, 10(3/4), 209-216.
Madeja, S.S., & Onuska, S. (1977). Through the arts to the aesthetic: The CEMREL
aesthetic education curriculum. St. Louis, MS: Central Midwestern Regional
Educational Lab., Inc.
Marché, T. (2003). Narratives of 1970s disciplinary reform: Competition or
collaboration? Studies in Art Education, 44(4), 371-384.
Stankiewicz, M. A. (2001). The aesthetic culture of pupils. In M. A. Stankiewicz, Roots
of art education practice (pp.105-125). Worcester, MA: Davis Publications.