Reflecting on the history of art appreciation and viewing its current context within a community college, as a general education course that largely perpetuates cultural miseducation (Martin 2011) through preservation of the Western canon, this dissertation is a theoretical inquiry into the re-visioning of the art appreciation curriculum. In community college (and perhaps elsewhere), conceptually grounding art appreciation curriculum in “aesthetic disgust, ”(Korsmeyer 2011) or “difficult beauty, ” (Bosanquet 1923) with pedagogical creativity can yield deeper, livelier critical student engagement and (transformative) learning than a traditional conceptual grounding in beauty.

A core construct the study identifies is the centrality of beauty within art appreciation (Plato 380 B.C.E.; Burke 1757; Kant 1790). The context and setting for this study is a community college art appreciation course. It identifies student populations, the culture and the forces acting upon community colleges that affect who does (and does not) succeed there; the role of art appreciation as general education courses in community colleges. This inquiry showed that art appreciation serves often as a cultural foundation for ideas of beauty (Plato 380 B.C.E.; Burke 1757; Kant 1790) and as seen through the male gaze (Berger 1972; Benjamin 2007; Mulvey 1975). This curriculum re-visioning provided a practical framework for incorporating critical aesthetic pedagogy (Medina), cooperative learning, (Johnson and Johnson 2009), encounters of aesthetic disgust and difficult beauty (Bosanquet, 1923; Korsmeyer, 2011; Martin, 2011, Haraway, 2008) and the centrality of these concepts to art appreciation with studio experience. In this qualitative study, student selected course content led art appreciation topical classroom conversations and multiple measures were used to determine student engagement/learning.

Carolyn Korsmeyer, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Bernard Bosanquet, Three Lectures on Aesthetic (London: McMillan and Co., Limited, 1923). Yolanda Medina, Critical Aesthetic Pedagogy: Towards a Theory of Self and Social Empowerment (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).