FULL REFERENCE: Füss, M. (2026). The act and art of noticing, wondering, searching for meaning, and remaining open to beauty. NZ International Research in Early Childhood Education Journal, 28(1), 1-5.
ABSTRACT: This commentary explores aesthetic education as a way of being within contemporary early childhood education. Drawing on Maxine Greene’s philosophy of aesthetic education and reflections from Priscilla, an experienced artist-educator, it considers how attentiveness, curiosity, imagination, and creative expression might sustain educators within professional contexts increasingly shaped by standards, accountability, and measurement. Priscilla’s stories illuminate aesthetics not simply as engagement with the Arts, but as an ongoing openness to experience, possibility, relationship, and becoming. The commentary argues that aesthetic education begins with educators themselves: with cultivating the capacity to notice, wonder, search for meaning, and remain open to beauty within everyday life. Rather than calling for dramatic transformation, it invites educators to attend to what may have grown quiet within their own lives and practices.
In doing so, aesthetic education offers a way of reconnecting with the curiosity, expression, and sense of possibility that educators seek to nurture in children.
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KEY WORDS: Arts, aesthetic education, teaching practice, creativity.
INTRODUCTION:
When was the last time you danced? Not for an audience or an event, but simply because the pulsating rhythms welled up within you and compelled you to move. Perhaps it was yesterday. Perhaps you have not truly let loose on a dance floor in years.
Early childhood educators are known for their pedagogical skills in nurturing children’s creativity, imagination, and capacity for expression within their early childhood programmes (Giamminuti, 2013; Karaolis & Little). Through carefully chosen phrases, glances, and expressions, educators can encourage the children in their care to dance as if no one is watching. Yet I wonder, as you read these words, whether you genuinely consider the place of such experiences or expressions in your daily life as professional practice?
