Conference Agenda

A five-year study of an arts and engineering project was judged to have had a significant impact on pupils’ learning and engagement (see Author 2020; Authors, 2019; 2021; Authors 2022). The project, however, was expensive unless funded by external grants. Schools wanted to see how a similar approach could be embedded in their schools. This presentation outlines how the developed T*** approach, theorised from the 5 year study, was tested with 14 primary schoolteachers in 7 schools.

Teacher interviews identified a lack of experience in curriculum design and a lack of confidence in using art-making practices to develop learning. Whilst teachers sought to give children freedom to express themselves, take some responsibility for and enjoy their learning, this was in tension with concerns to cover a packed curriculum, so often remained an unrealised ambition.

Through experiencing, deconstructing and trialling art-making practices throughout a curriculum development process, teachers designed schemes of work. The process was iterative and messy with the T *** model emerging from responding to teachers’ questions from discussions and observations of their challenges and successful use of the elements of the model. The approach was grounded in the real-world practices, structures and cultures the art-makers, but was also responsive to the needs of the mainstream classroom, and attuned to the theoretical insights gleaned from previous research. Through trialling different pedagogies, adopting practice from the previous project and becoming familiar with ‘community of practising art-makers’ (CoP) (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and ‘commission’, teachers planning changed, and they developed an understanding of and confidence in the approach. In addition to the foundational CoP and commission, the model embeds a range of characteristics identified from the professional culture and practices of the art-makers (Ingold, 20130; 2017). An emphasis was given to physical theatre and drawing as engaging and underused meaning-making processes in learning and these were particularly successful in expanding the repertoire of teachers.

Teachers designed their schemes of work over 18 months (albeit with interruptions due to the pandemic), trialling elements in their settings, with regular discussion and feedback from educationalists and artists. Their developing understanding of the model, its educational implications and how it could inform their classroom practice was not an easy process. In the end of project interviews, one teacher talked about coming to a session with what they thought was a really good idea only to for it to be ‘picked apart by you [the educationalists]’. Whilst initially, such moments were disheartening, they were later acknowledged as vital to teacher understanding of the model and having the confidence use it.

In one school, an environmentalist story-based drama enabled students to empathise with issues related to the physical world and how humans engage with it and to think of themselves as a community of environmental activists. Taking on a commission required multiple subject knowledges, but also to think and behave like a member of this community of environmental activists. The commission, situated in the real-world, generated a series of tasks that the community needs to address and through which the majority of the learning occurs; learning-by-doing and/or educative conversations whilst being supervised to address the task; or by direct teaching. In this example, the community’s commission was to improve the ecology of their school grounds by designing and making homes for wildlife. It required the development of scientific, design, geographical and communicative knowledge and understanding but also the ability to empathise, listen, think critically, imagine, negotiate ideas, be responsible for particular tasks, practice particular skills, persist with ideas – to see themselves as necessary and valued members of this community by practising and behaving like environmental activists.

This presentation will discuss a "Drawing to Learn" experience based on a drawing workshop under the microscope. This workshop gathered Fine Arts and Biochemistry students from the University of Porto around biological samples prepared with the tano-ferric method by the Portuguese scientist Abel Salazar (1889-1946). We have reviewed the method of histological drawing that Abel Salazar developed as an observational tool to polarise attention and intertwined it with drawing activities to engage students in observing their own perception.

We aim to identify and explore observation and visualisation practices under the microscope in students with different backgrounds in art and STEM areas. By creating modes of interaction between student scientists and artists, we aimed to empower students to create their own visual representations instead of relying on their observation and study of pre-existing visual models.

Based on the histological drawing method described by Abel Salazar, Microscopic drawing is understood as a form of reasoning through the construction of a visual model that enables the translation of the visual-spatial content.

BACKGROUND

Although the practice of observation under the microscope is more common in scientific study and research routines, it reflects a shared commitment to artistic practice and research: the discovery of new visible worlds. With this expression – discovering a new visible world – the scientist Robert Hooke opened his essay Micrographia, initially published in 1665, where he presents microscopy as a new form of visual culture. Aware that two people observing the same sample can see different things, Hooke's notes still constitute an epistemological basis for microscopic representation today. Observing under a microscope involves making visual decisions that alter what is observed and open the way to knowledge of "true form".

After 1932, Abel Salazar developed a drawing process adjusted to the microscopic observation that is still a contemporary tool of learning through drawing, in tandem with biology learning skills (OCR, 2015): to draw is to engage ourselves in a continuous process of polarising and depolarising our attention.

More than an accurate record, drawing under the microscope is an epistemic stance on observation itself. To draw is to create an external visual model used to learn and make science (Quillin & Thomas, 2015, p.9). This visual model relates the object to the experience of observation. Like any representation, it is not neutral.

TOPICS OF DISCUSSION

Recent literature on drawing as a means of tacit communication between professors and students in learning microscopy has highlighted its benefits in overcoming resistance to absorbing new information quickly. The habit of drawing for colleagues and students is a natural and necessary consequence of joint observation under the microscope to learn to select and organise information. Drawing together becomes an alternative way of "talking to each other" (Lyon & Turland, 2020, p.7).

Microscopic observation suggests that there are different levels of cognitive engagement between the external visual models generated by students and the mental models that are formed in the student's mind (Ainsworth & Scheiter, 2021). Studies on the role of drawing in STEM areas highlight this interaction, as the brain naturally resorts to spatial information to encode other information, such as verbal or numeric, thus increasing memory and learning capacity (Quillin & Thomas, 2015; Tversky, 1999). Drawing a physical or visual model, such as a microscopic slide, can occur as a result of an already constituted mental model or as part of the cognitive tasks of selecting, organising and integrating information, which structures the learning process and the creation of mental models (Van Meter & Garner, 2005).

Many educators see STEAM education, which combines the arts and sciences to establish more creative teaching practices, as an opportunity to integrate the arts within the school curriculum in order for students to acquire 21st century skills. STEAM proponents hold that the arts can be used as a way par excellence to teach students the innovation strategies needed for the omnipresent economic competitiveness. Critics of STEAM education, however, argue that such neoliberal focus on marketability in education neglect other, deeper educational goals (Graham, 2021). Moreover, as STEAM scholar Graham (2021) points out, in a world facing grave environmental and social problems it becomes increasingly important for students and teachers to contemplate exactly what constitutes ‘good education’ over and against this instrumentalisation. And yet, precisely the arts are often pleaded as possible solution bidders to these problems, under the rubric that they not only have an economic or social binding meaning, but also offer the possibility of self-transformation (Green 2012). They purportedly do so by virtue of their orientation to the (un)human, and to the difference between who we are, and who we can be. However, whereas the emphasis here is still very much on the personal self, in this research project, we want to emphasise a relation to the actual ‘thing’ in need, being the shared world and our relations in it, in order to adequately tackle todays challenges. According to Biesta (2017), to achieve this world-centeredness, we should again look to the arts for an answer. As artistic practices are a powerful way to enter into dialogue with one’s surroundings—with ‘the world’—, to dwell on the question "what is the subject under study trying to say to me?", i.e. "what is it (or the world) asking of me?" (Vansieleghem, 2021).

However, with all this emphasis on the arts, we would almost forget that also the more traditional STEM directions (Science, Technology, Engeneering, Mathematics), were they to transcend a purely instrumental nature, do similarly possess this potentiality (Mehta et al., 2019). In other words, the STEAM initiative does seem like a called for alternative. Yet, precisely because of its labour marketoriented focus on creativity, this initiative also suffers from the shortcomings of the educational system of its time. It is therefore our aim to go beyond these shortcomings by developing a well-founded alternative approach to education that responds to today’s challenges, an approach that we would like to coin as 'Education of the Senses' (EoS). From the assumption that we are facing these radically new challenges, and that we don't know what we don't know, and what thinking should do with it, we want to explore how particular artistic and scientific strategies and practices can be used to help us go beyond knowing: to put the senses (seeing, listening, feeling, tasting) at the core to build ‘a thinking’ on. In this way, framing a STEAM education where we don’t use the arts to merely give STEM a creative component, but to shape STEM through giving the sensory experience a central place. Hence, the goal of this research is to give life to an Education of the Senses, by outlining a foundational framework for the STEAM initiative through pedagogical practices and exercises that develop connectivity and attention to the world. This goes hand in hand with reconceptualising pedagogy beyond the limits of instrumental logic, on the basis of pragmatic ideas such as those of William James, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.