Artscience: Participative Thinking, Feeling, and Making With Socioecological Phenomena

• In Event: 18.026 - Equitable Pedagogies and Relationality in Making

Abstract

Purpose: We will share findings from collaborative research to design an “artscience pedagogy” that aims to cultivate youths’ attunement and involvement with complex ecological phenomena (climate change, the human microbiome). Our focus will be on the ways in which youth come to see and value human-nature relations (Authors, 2012, 2015) through their participation in a transdisciplinary repertoire emphasizing practices of cultivating attention, making, interpreting, critiquing, and exhibiting/intervening.

Theoretical Framework: Following Ingold (2013), we approach making as a process of growth and not as a project. As a project, making assumes the transposition of a mental image into a material object, and in this sense is characteristic of school STEM practice. In contrast, as a process of growth, making becomes a confluence of forces and materials, with the maker as “a participant in amongst a world of active materials” (Ingold, 2013, p. 21). In this sense, attending, thinking, feeling and making are entwined processes of open, expansive, responsive engagement with the world.

The artscience pedagogy is designed, among other goals, to disrupt hierarchies of ways of knowing that, we argue, structure inequality in science learning (Authors, 2012), and to open up more relationally responsive, participative modes of thinking, feeling, and making (Shotter, 2006) than are conventionally made available in school to youth from historically non-dominant communities. Artscience builds from the heterogeneity of human sense-making (Authors, 2010, 2014, 2016; Lee, 2008) to support youth in creating “narratives of life” (Heath, 1986) that are imagined through relations of reciprocity, humility, responsibility, and sustainability (Cajete, 2000; Hulme, 2009; Massey, 2005) rather than human domination and entitlement.

Methods & Data Sources: We draw on data from two cycles of participatory design research in two sites, which serve African American, Latino/a, and Native youth (middle and high school age). Data sources include: a) video recordings and transcriptions of artscience explorations; b) pre- and post- interviews with youth; and c) youth-created artscience responses. Using social-interactional, narrative, and discourse analytic methods, we focus on the verbal and multimodal narratives that youth created as they explored climate change and the human microbiome within an artscience framework and, specifically, the ways in which youth came to construct, express, and evaluate human-nature relations.

Findings: Focusing on the pre- and post-interviews, we found a number of critical shifts in youths’ constructions of human-nature relations: 1) away from human-centric relations of distancing and entitlement toward mutual relations of reciprocity and responsibility, 2) growing attunement to ways of living and forms of life beyond human life, and 3) explicit navigation across micro- and macro-scales of ecological phenomena in interpreting complex artistic and scientific visualizations.

Significance: We argue that dominant constructions of human-nature relations in school operate as a subtle and powerful, yet little addressed, structure of inequality in learning. An artscience pedagogy makes possible more deeply participative modes of thinking, feeling, and making that support youth in remaking human-nature relations and narrating possible futures with climate change and microbial life.

Authors

• Beth M. Warren, Boston University

• Megan Bang, University of Washington

• Ann Rosebery, TERC