Transdisciplinarity: Accepting Responsibility for Letting Arts and Science Teach Together

• In Event: Arts Education in Changing Times

Abstract

The arts excite, inspire and deepen our understanding of who we are and how we make sense of the world. ‘STEAM education’, with its addition of ‘arts’ to STEM subjects, is a construct, developed outside formal curricula, yielding the promise of pedagogical innovation, yet it remains a highly contested concept. For many teachers STEAM spells out controversial, undesirable subject hierarchies contributing to the crisis in contemporary arts education. This paper provides the case and evidence for repositioning STEAM-based education where arts and sciences are not separate or even separable endeavours, but rather combine as transdisciplinary configurations. This paper draws upon the efforts of artists and scientists to make a case with evidence for accepting responsibility for posthumanist transdisciplinary educational reform.

Authors

• Pamela A. Burnard, University of Cambridge

• Laura Colucci-Gray, The University of Edinburgh

• Laura Colucci-Gray, The University of Edinburgh

• Carolyn Fiona Cooke, The Open University