"I'll show you how to do ugly!"

In a qualitative-empirical study on aesthetic judgement in a third-year primary school class, the students reflect on their practical experiences, adopt theories of art didactics, perception and neuroaesthetics, and develop an exploratory approach to their future professional field and a didactic attitude that aims to promote the children’s exploratory activity in art class.

To this end, they have the children create in pairs beautiful and ugly pictures with diverse materials, and question them about their design process in a retrospective think-aloud. The evaluation and analysis of the resulting pictures, the protocols of the participatory of beauty observation and the think-aloud show that it is not the reproduction of traditional aesthetic norms, but the finding of an independent and new solution for the expression of ugliness that encourages innovative coping strategies, multi-layered, dense actions and even moments of happiness in the pupils. With these findings, which they also developed independently, the students change their view of the tasks, learning settings and objectives of their future art education work.