| How does one instruct pre-service teachers to create aesthetic moments in participatory classrooms, using dramatic methods that require a personal experience with and an understanding of aesthetic experience? This work seeks to discover if, by shared experience, one can develop in and transfer to students and future teachers the ability to use words, actions, and images to manage an experiential and pedagogical knowledge of an aesthetic moment.;An aesthetic moment is a moment of experience in which feelings of personal connection, challenge, and involvement are perceived by individuals and communicated to others involved in the group activity. This aesthetic experience empowers the individual to action while concurrently reflecting the responsibilities to communicate and negotiate meaning within the group. A healthy instructional practice and positive classroom environment create a setting where aesthetic moments can be achieved often in class. The students exhibit positive behaviors such as commitment, inquiry, participation, communication, and negotiation.;The action research process of create, experience, interpret, and reflect mirrors a competent teacher practice of preparation, implementation, interpretation, and reflection. They are comparable cycles of human investigation, both examining data at different spirals during the process of data collection, interpretation, and validation. The action solution in this research is to teach pre-service teachers and classroom instructors to be more aware of: (1) identifying and creating an aesthetic condition, (2) the ability to contextualize learning, (3) the ability to negotiate meaning, (4) developing a sense of inquiry, and (5) the ability to establish relevance.;Drama is a useful medium for the construction of meaningful classroom expression, in part through the language of gesture and the process of symbolic interactionism. Dramatic reconstructions promoted through communicative inquiry behaviors have the ability to become the textual material for various types of human investigation including education, where the transformative "grounded" nature of drama, from individual experience to expressive group interaction, facilitates an understanding of shared group consciousness. |
