Designing for Heterogeneity: Imagining New Geographies of Nature-Culture Relations Through Artscience

• In Event: 28.071 - Designing for and Engaging With Heterogeneity in Students' Thinking in Science

Abstract

Purpose

This paper shares findings from collaborative research to design an artscience pedagogy that works to desettle hierarchies of power (e.g., nature-culture relations) that operate in classrooms as settled expectations (Harris, 1995; Author reference) to restrict the scope of possible meaning-making, particularly for youth from historically non-dominant communities.

Framework

Intellectual traditions rooted in Cartesian influences selectively shape the aims, practices and phenomena highlighted as central to disciplinary learning. This “form-shaping ideology” (Bakhtin, 1984) positions humans as distinct and apart from the natural world in relations of mastery and entitlement (Bang & Marin, 2015; Latour, 2013) and functions as a settled expectation that controls meaning-making in disciplinary learning. This dominant conceptualization of nature-culture contrasts with cutting-edge research in emerging ecological disciplines (Paxson & Helmreich, 2014) and with decolonizing epistemologies (Cajete, 2000; Smith, 2009) that frame human and more-than-human forms of life in relations of reciprocity, humility, responsibility, and sustainability. Building on this, we are exploring educational designs that engage epistemic heterogeneity as fundamentally generative in learning and teaching (Bang et al., 2012; Author reference).

Methods

Over three years, a group of learning scientists, microbiologists, and artists collaborated with faculty at an urban public high school to design an artscience pedagogy, with the human microbiome (HMb) as our disciplinary focus. Students from historically non-dominant communities, virtually none of whom identified with school science, participated. The design aimed to desettle Cartesian structures of microbe-human relations, by emphasizing epistemically heterogeneous, participative modes of meaning-making (Shotter, 2006) quite different from those typically available in high school science. Students explored microbe-human relations through varied artistic and scientific meaning-making repertoires and created artscience responses that explored aspects of HMb important to them and their communities.

Data

Data sources include: 1) early-late responses from 26 students responding to the word “bacteria,” and 2) students’ artscience responses. Both analyses focus on shifts in students’ conceptualizations of microbe-human relations. Additionally, the second analysis highlights the ways in which youth intertwined conceptual, affective, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of microbe-human relations in their artscience responses.

Results

Statistical analyses of students’ “bacteria” responses suggest they developed more complex views of microbe-human relationships along various dimensions, e.g., shifting from the prevailing societal “germ narrative” of “them versus us” to an ecological narrative of "us AND them". Discourse analysis of students’ spoken word artscience responses identified how they used the meaning-making resources of this art form, woven together with HMb ideas, to chart new geographies of responsibility (Massey, 2004) linking humans and microbes in relations of mutual care, e.g., expressing this new eco-logic by juxtaposing multiple voices/points of view and constructing composite subjectivities in which microbes are fully “a part of” human life rather than “apart from” it.

Significance
The artscience pedagogy enabled cultivation of new possible responsive living relations with phenomena, relations that emerged in and through heterogeneous participative modes of thinking, feeling, being and making. The students, responding to these possibilities, imagined themselves into new geographies of responsibility as they engaged creatively with the complexities of socio-ecological future-making.

Authors

• Beth M. Warren, Boston University

• Ann Rosebery, TERC