Dewey (1934) noted that a meaningful experience is intellectual and that an intellectual experience should have aesthetic characteristics. In the concept of a museum as a place of education appropriate for making such a meaningful experience, this study would provide a more significant aesthetic experience at the museum by analyzing the meaning of the aesthetic experience in the museum through the ‘retrospection’ of participants in museum education. As research methods for this, this study was conducted as a qualitative case study through an in-depth interview, applying the contextual model of
learning of John H. Falk & Lynn D. Dierking (1992) and the types of aesthetic experiences, including affect-oriented, epistemological, axiological and content-oriented approaches, classified by Noël Carroll (2006), tracing participants in the education in Art Museum A, B and C for which the researcher had worked from 2002 through 2006. As a result, it could be found that understanding the process as a process of learning in which they would discover values through emotion and cognition would be the completion of a more aesthetic experience, rather than classifying the contents according to various elements constituting the museum and the features of the aesthetic experience.
This study is ongoing, which has a significance that it would look for the categorization and conceptualization of the aesthetic experience in the museum through the memories and evaluations of the participants in the education. Moreover, concerning the approach through a portfolio, judging from the fact that the research participants still keep the educational materials of the museum more than 10 years later, the values of the museum experience could be found, and those materials can be utilized in various
ways in terms of the evaluation of education as well. Thus, this study suggests the production of a portfolio under long-term and continuous planning for improving the aesthetic experience in the museum.