Over the past 15 years, the European Union has invested heavily in STEAM education projects (see section 2.3) to promote inquiry-based and art-based approaches to develop scientific skillsets and competencies for democratic participation in science and society. To meet these aims, there is a need to rethink the science curriculum to extend beyond traditional academic subjects; to support creativity and engagement of pupils with ‘real’ science in ‘real’ world settings linking students’ everyday knowledge to science-based knowledge (Hagendijk, Heering, Principe & Dupre, 2020; Schulze Heuling, 2021), and to provide equitable opportunities for all students to participate in their own education.
In this view, STEAM education is proposed as a transdisciplinary endeavour (Costantino, 2018, p.100); a set of practices bringing together sciences and arts to enhance social cohesiveness, build diverse relationships, and promote deeper learning and creative problem-solving (Marshall, 2010).
However, no singular definition exists about the specific disciplines that may be included, nor their particular aim or function, giving rise to different configurations of STEAM, each one with different aims and structural features such as:
Inclusion of disciplines which may or may not be part of traditional school curricula, such as Engineering (Brophy et al., 2008), with a focus on design-based learning.
Re-purposing of subjects as conventionally taught in schools by emphasizing applied and economically relevant dimensions, e.g. Design and Technology Education turning into Creative Industries (Brown et al., 2011), with a focus on readiness for work.
Combination of academic and vocational subjects, such as sciences and the arts in transdisciplinary creative inquiries (Colucci-Gray et al., 2019), with a focus on participation and sustainability.
Specifically, in this project, the interest is in developing a practice that links STEAM practices with an approach to science education that shifts the focus away from abstract models and procedural applications (Dahlin, 2003; Østergaard, 2017) to implement a pedagogy that puts the world and its phenomena at the centre, and enhances the ability of all students to draw on their everyday experiences to encounter the world and themselves (Biesta, 2022). What is crucial here is not just which arts can or cannot be included, but more importantly what these arts can specifically do and how they are positioned in relation to STEM.
In order to generate a basis for developing the praxis, the literature helpfully distinguishes two main approaches, which are informed by different aims and contributions to the creation of collective knowledge:
Art-infusion
In this assumption, STEAM education focuses on integrating arts into the teaching of STEM subjects, to enhance creativity and motivation (Perignat and Katz-Buonincontro, 2019). This approach views the arts as a tool to serve other subjects, for example by aiding transmission and presentation of factual knowledge, assuming that knowledge can be pre-set, and teachers choose which subjects to use to convey content. The goal is to increase learning outcomes and facilitate access to the curriculum (Perignat and Katz-Buonincontro, 2019, p. 32)
Art-integration
This approach seeks to promote artistic and scientific inquiry practices on equal terms, by including a broad spectrum of disciplines and material practices (Burnard, Colucci-Gray and Sinha, 2021; Colucci-Gray et al., 2013; Cook et al., 2020) and recognising the creativity that exists in everyday contexts, from painting to cooking from botany to gardening. The approach is rooted in trans-disciplinarity, recognizing the interdependences between multiple levels of the same reality and the inseparability of subject and object (Nicolescu, 2012). In this view, education should emphasize the question of attention and the sensing body as the prime locus of cognition. Freed from the expectation to entertain and deliver to specified results, both arts and sciences – of whichever kind – are implicated in an event and its performance. Trans-disciplinarity focuses on understanding how knowledge is produced by paying attention to who is involved in the co-creation process, and who is being excluded.
Critical for the developing of the practices in the SENSE. project are the insights especially from the latter approach in which the aims and roles of the arts and the sciences and their relative contribution to the process of creation of collective knowledge are both necessary and acted as indivisible.