Aesthetic engagement and practical work with aesthetic forms can be manifested through artistic creation. Aesthetic engagement influences communication and meaning-making, and can strengthen students' social and cognitive skills and abilities.Teachers’ aesthetic awareness has an impact on their understand of children's meaning-making. The practice of engaging with artistic processes or texts involves creating knowledge while simultaneously making sense of it (Lotman, 2009, 1977a). Providing opportunities for meaningful expression is foundational to the didactics of after-school educare. This research suggests an aesthetic turn in general didactics, contributing knowledge about teachers' aesthetic awareness to create pedagogical environments conducive to children's semiotic freedom (Lenninger, 2021; Persson & Lenninger, forthcoming).This presentation builds on a study of teenagers’ semiotic distinctions in picture conversations and engagement with potential artistic texts (Lotman, 1977), and explores the types of semiotic layers/dimensions/levels the students engaged with when interacting with pictures. Students’ utterances indicated sign relations (distinctions of expression and content), contextualisation of meaning through connotation and denotation, and distinctions between plastic and pictorial organisation in pictures. In addition, students made sense of the pictures by relating to the picture-object and picture-concept, thereby engaging in aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment.In this presentation teachers’ recognition of aesthetic awareness is discussed. The study is based on interviews with teachers and their reflections and observations of their own practice. Some critical points about their perception of their own competence and the development of their own awareness are considered.