Situational Teaching Design and Application Effects in the Cultivation of Aesthetic Literacy for Vocational Students: A Case Study of the "Tea Art" Course

With the gradual improvement of living standards, the tourism industry places greater emphasis on products with aesthetic value. Vocational education is employment-oriented, and its skill training tends to be mechanized, which to some extent neglects aesthetic education. This study aims to explore methods for cultivating students' aesthetic literacy through situational teaching methods. The paper first reviews the literature to understand the research progress on situational teaching methods and aesthetic literacy. Secondly, NVivo was used to extract and analyze keywords of aesthetic education policy texts and teacher interview texts to refine the dimensions of aesthetic literacy goals. Building on Du Wei's three dimensions of aesthetic knowledge, aesthetic ability, and aesthetic awareness, a dimension of moral cultivation is added, and the specific aesthetic literacy embodied in the six elements of tea art is analyzed and presented. Finally, the paper constructs a model for cultivating aesthetic literacy by combining the types of situation creation with the unique advantages of situational teaching. A six-step teaching process of "stimulate, teach, practice, integrate, showcase, evaluate" is proposed, and two rounds of action research are conducted to explore the effect of situational teaching on cultivating the aesthetic literacy of tourism major students. The study concludes the following: (1) Situational teaching methods can promote the integration of tea art courses and aesthetic education, providing a reference for integrating aesthetic education into other professional courses; (2) The teaching process design of situational teaching methods for enhancing students' aesthetic literacy is feasible; (3) Situational teaching methods have a significant effect on cultivating students' aesthetic literacy.