Laura Colucci-Gray, University of Edinburgh
Globally, humans face complex and intertwined environmental challenges, many of which are not only larger than ourselves but are systematically interwoven with the fabric of daily life. While scientific accounts point to global descriptions and global trends, sustainable transitions and the profoundly human questions of ‘how to live well in the world’ are culturally situated, historically emplaced experiences. They encompass profoundly imaginative dimensions, demanding a renovated attention for how we exist as beings-in-relation to and with others – not only humans.
Drawing on a series of transdisciplinary STEAM projects, including food gardens and touch-based citizen science, in this paper I will put forward a proposal for a science education in the space of the sensible, that is, as a praxis combining first-person and second-person aesthetic inquiries, unfolding in a context of embodied, perceptual and affective experiences across sciences and the arts. Extending beyond the utilitarian idea of what science education can gain from the arts, in the space of the sensible, educators and students are invited to experiment in vivo with different values and scenarios, approaching scientific inquiry through artistic forms (and vice versa). Across all projects, this practice was led by the desire to deepen our own perceptual abilities to be present, and to attend to normalised exclusions and historical erasures; to trouble human/non-human boundaries and to p(art)ticipate: both by being part – as present witness to multiple and diverse ways of knowing – and partaking in – as actors – working together in working things out.
Returning to the question of relations set out at the beginning, perhaps the hardest test for the researcher-pedagogue and pedagogue-researcher is encapsulated in the words of the musician John Cage: “It is not simply by observing the individuals, but by reintegrating individuals into nature, by opening the world to the individual, that we will get ourselves out of this mess” (Cage, For the Birds, 1981, p. 56, italics in original).