Critical Aesthetic Inquiry in ELA Teacher Education

• In Event: Aesthetics & Literacies across Educational Spaces

Abstract

English language arts (ELA) teachers today find themselves in a peculiar bind. While assessment regimes progressively narrow what counts as legitimate textual work—replacing novels with excerpts and literary analysis with mechanical exercises (Aukerman & Schuldt, 2021)—the texts that young people navigate outside of school have exploded with complexity. These texts arrive not as bounded artifacts but as nodes in vast media ecosystems, underwritten by technical imperatives and economic interests (Authors, 2021). This disjuncture suggests the need for concepts and frameworks to bridge the gap between the analytical resources on offer in classrooms and the sophisticated structures of contemporary texts.

This paper explores the potential of aesthetics—the study of how texts achieve their meanings and effects by ordering sensory perception—as one such resource. While aesthetics has historically carried unfortunate associations with stale, impersonal literary analysis (White, 1995) or with cultural gatekeeping (Eagleton, 1990), recent scholarship has reclaimed it as a framework for understanding how cultural objects perform political work through their formal properties (Gaskill & Stanley, 2023). Building on what Edelman (2019) terms “the return of the aesthetic” in literary studies, alongside parallel contributions in critical literacy research, we theorize critical aesthetic inquiry as a pedagogical stance that extends critical literacy’s political commitments through deliberate attention to how texts work. This approach builds on emerging scholarship that, likewise, works to coarticulate aesthetics with ELA education, including Storm’s (2024) work on “critical aesthetic literacies” in youth literary salons and LeBlanc’s (2025) explorations of students’ engagements with narratology as a form of critical analysis.

Drawing on design-based research in an undergraduate ELA methods course, we examine what happens when preservice teachers are invited to consider not just what texts mean but how they mean. Our collaboration between practitioner-researcher (first author) and researcher (second author), integrated multiple frameworks: Lewison et al.’s (2002) dimensions of critical literacy, recent work on aesthetic perception and judgment (Aubry, 2018; Clune, 2021), and attention to the formal properties of texts across micro- and macro-level scales (Levine, 2015). Our analysis of classroom observations, fieldnotes and reflective memos, and student artifacts (e.g., classroom lesson plans, course assignments) revealed promising potentials for critical aesthetic inquiry in ELA teacher education. Preservice teachers readily integrated transmediation—altering texts’ to explore how different media forms achieve distinct effects—into their lesson planning and teaching. However, they also expressed frustration when attempting to parse media forms for which they didn’t have immediately available language or interpretive strategies (e.g., film, video games). Moreover, while students readily adopted certain dimensions of critical literacy (e.g., exploring multiple perspectives), the sociopolitical dimensions of critical practice were less present in their lesson planning.

Together, these tensions make visible the infrastructures needed for critical aesthetic inquiry to be a sustained practice in ELA education. As contemporary texts are increasingly intermediated by sociotechnical relations, teacher education must provide conceptual tools and guided practice for navigating these layered textual landscapes. We conclude by considering how ELA teacher preparation might build such infrastructures while maintaining critical literacy’s justice-oriented commitments.

Authors

• Kelsey Leigh Stokes, Baylor University

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University