The Art of Co-Creating Arts-Based Possibility Spaces for Fostering STE(A)M Practices in Primary Education

This multi-method project asks what the arts, in transdisciplinary learning spaces, can contribute to primary education. We position our work at the interstices of: (i) the rising wave of interest in, and imperative for, building sustainable creative futures; (ii) the concept of the Anthropocene which pulls together ideas of environmental change and the relevance of education for society; and (iii) allowing pedagogical experimentation across subject boundaries to broaden learning opportunities for empowering children. Methodologically, we use the dimensions of an arts-based perceptual ecology, where direct experience, the magical (a special and exciting quality that makes something seem different from ordinary things), intuition, imagination, art-making and the language of pattern become part of an interconnected learning system, to explore how children and their teachers co-create possibility spaces for fostering transdisciplinary learning. Using a sculpture installation as stimulus, we analyse three sets of transdisciplinary practices enabled by the co-creation of possibility spaces. The first set of practices featured an artist-led workshop for teachers to engage with an art piece, to think with their hands and to work with clay as a generative event for planning curriculum spaces for transdisciplinary activities for their children. In the second set, 248children were invited to respond creatively to the art piece and consider the world as something we make rather than as something we inherit. The third set featured use of the language of patterns, connecting mathematics and art, or mathematics and music. We analyze and interpret the practices using an arts-based perceptual ecology (ABPE) framework from which to see how the arts, along with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), as a 'bracketed' concept (STE(A)M), is included, located and functions. We conclude and offer recommendations for the innovative work of primary schools as a whole - that is to say, the curriculum, pedagogy and the wider life of the school - to co-create the spaces for this kind of arts-based perceptual ecology in enhancing science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STE(A)M). We argue for the ongoing and necessary theorizing of possibility spaces for arts positioning within STE(A)M education. This multi-method project asks what the arts, in transdisciplinary learning spaces, can contribute to primary education. This chapter analyzes and interprets