Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 7 (2009)
Abstract
The data of my empirical research in the field of education discussed in this paper consist of letters produced through correspondence. I asked the participants to write about beauty in their everyday lives, giving substance to the concept as freely as they could. In this paper it is only the letters of one participant, Laura, which I limit my attention to. The aim is to find out what kind of place beauty, as defined and used by herself, holds in the managing of her everyday life. The concept of beauty is virtually missing from educational research or is misguidedly restricted only to formal art education. Beauty being for Laura an occasional checking of direction in relation to changes both in the context of her everyday life and in herself as a person sheds light to the relevance of beauty at the constitutive and perceptual level of growing as a human being.