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Expansive Meanings and Makings in ArtScience

Fri, April 17, 4:05 to 5:35pm, Sheraton, Floor: Second Level, Superior A

Abstract

Expansive Meanings and Makings in ArtScience (EMMAS) is a participatory design research project investigating the untapped potential of an artscience approach to learning and teaching. EMMAS aims to foster creative trajectories into meaningful STEM learning for youth who often experience school science as disconnected from their lives or interests (e.g., Native American, African American, Latino). In Seattle and Boston, teams of learning scientists, educators, artists, and scientists are designing artscience inquiries for middle and high school youth in two domains: climate change and the human microbiome. Youth investigate complex scientific phenomena, interpret artistic and scientific visualizations, and respond creatively to questions by integrating scientific and artistic concerns, materials and processes. An artscience repertoire (cultivating attention, making, critique, and exhibition) underlies the learning experience. In this paper we focus on initial efforts to theorize cultivating attention as an epistemic practice, design forms of engagement, and investigate meaning-making and narratives of identity.

Building on Lave & Wenger (1991), EMMAS frames learning as a social phenomenon constituted in the experienced, lived-in world, through participation in the ongoing practices of social communities. As a creative movement, artscience highlights commonalities in thinking and making practices across social communities (Brown et al., 2011; Heath, 1986; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999). Artscience emphasizes coming to know phenomena deeply—a process of making and re-making relations with phenomena, tools, materials, histories, and people (Bakhtin, 1981; Ingold, 2013; Massey, 2005; Nasir, 2012).

Using participatory design research methods, EMMAS is anchored in two multidisciplinary design groups. Using narrative, cognitive, and discourse analytic methods, we are studying the conceptual ecologies, identity narratives, and artscience repertoires that youth develop through their participation in EMMAS inquiries. Data sources include video and transcriptions of group conversations about juxtaposed artistic and scientific visualizations. Group conversations were designed to cultivate attention across multiple epistemologies, scales, modalities, and perspectives, using protocols that facilitated sustained engagement across multiple interpretive pathways, openness to emergent and uncertain meanings, and knowing as movement (Ingold, 2013). In Seattle, the data were collected during a summer outdoor STEAM camp with 10 upper elementary and middle school Native youth. In Boston, the data were collected in a public arts-dedicated high school biology classroom with 15 youth from diverse communities.

Analyses suggest that concerted work with juxtaposed artistic and scientific representations fostered boundary-crossing thinking, heterogeneous ways of seeing, and hybrid forms of expression. In their responses, youth invoked varied registers and tropes—aesthetic, scientific, visual, emotional, and metaphoric. The interpretive heterogeneity created and also complicated an expansive field of possible relations between nature and culture, matters of scale, and points of view. Further, it spurred expansive narratives of possible relations between youth and the focal ecological phenomena.

EMMAS makes a claim for elevating creativity, “the search for possible worlds” (Heath, 1986), over uniformity in learning. Artscience makes available to youth multifaceted identities that cross boundaries of art and science, school and community, nature and culture; it multiplies trajectories into meaningful learning and narratives of becoming for youth historically underrepresented in STEM.

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