Aesthetics concerns, on the one hand, people's feelings of pleasure and displeasure, and, on the other hand, the objects these feelings are directed to, that is, what people find beautiful or ugly (Wickman, 2006). Traditionally aesthetics and affect have been treated as separate from cognition and only rarely has it been studied how they are intertwined when learning a specific content (Wickman et al., 2021). However, recent situated and socio-culturally oriented research has begun to elucidate how aesthetics plays a key role for selection of content, what route learning takes in the classroom and for students' opportunities to develop an interest or taste for a specific school subject (e.g., Sinclair, 2006; Ainsworth and Bell, 2020; Wickman et al., 2021). This Research Topic compiles contributions from researchers examining these topics further.