Antibiotic resistance (ABR) has emerged as a sustainability issue in global policy (WHO, 2015; UN, 2016) as well as in medical and public health research in which it is argued to be comparable in complexity and severity to climate change (Jasovsky et al., 2016; Cars et al.,2008; 2015; Nathan et. al., 2014; Littmann et al., 2015; Laxminarayan R et. al., 2013; 2016). ABR can be understood as a wicked problem (Rittel and Webber 1973; Kronlid 2014) involving questions related to global equity, unequal exposure to risk of disease and potential undermining of healthcare systems with political and social repercussions but the topic has seldom been addressed in ESE research. ABR is often approached as a medical expert-oriented issue in ABR education which has resulted in onto-epistemological tensions when addressing issues of ABR in people's everyday activities (Jasovsky et al., 2016; Cars et al.,2008; 2015; Nathan et. al., 2014). There are different ways of approaching ABR in education, most often this takes the form an medical expert-oriented approach that excludes alternative ways of understanding teaching and learning ABR.  This has been especially poignant in communities with existing indigenous knowledge systems as there may emerge tensions between the medical expert-oriented discourses often at the core of ABR education (Agrawal, 1995) and discourses drawing on these indigenous knowledge systems. The Alforja Educativa educational project strives to involve children as well as parents and the local community in addressing ABR. A feature of the Alforja Educativa educational program is to ground the educational content in the indigenous knowledge system (Agrawal, 1995) of Sumak Kawsay, which understands humans as both belonging to nature and society.

This paper explores assumptions regarding the relation between art and science in ABR education which is here viewed as an integral part of ESE. [1][2]Taking a discourse analytical approach, the objective is to investigate how art and artistic activities are constituted as part of the educational content of the Alforja Educativa. The argument for focusing on the artistic in educational content as a potential pathway to overcome the onto-epistemological tensions that characterise ABR education draws on Dewey’s (1934) work on the artistic and the aesthetic; the production and consumption of art as a part of being and growing as humans (Rosenblatt 1985; Dewey 1938/1997; Dewey and Bentley 1949/2008).The artistic can be understood as constituting special potential or ”embody possibilities” for certain experiences. These experiences are understood as transactional encounters (Dewey 1934; Hansson 2014) the character of which depends on the degree of learners imagination. As such, art is viewed as having specific potentials of generating imaginative experiences among learners in which they can transgress the onto-epistemological boundaries which has often been a limiting factor in ABR education (Puolakka 2014).

The Alforja Educativa brings up questions about the oppressive and potentially productive relations of indigenous knowledge systems (Agrawal, 1995) with other knowledge systems, geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo, 2002) and the possibilities of third space epistemologies (Bhabha 1996; Soja, 2010). Through the paper we hope to contribute with increased understanding of how art is used to constitute an alternative educational approach to ABR education defined by medical expert-oriented discourses. The concept of third space epistemologies (Bhabha, 1996; Soja, 2010) is used as an analytical frame to position discourses of ABR education along an onto-epistemological spectrum.

The ABR educational project, Alforja Educativa, advanced in Ecuador and centers on community-based education involving school children as well as parents and local communities. The project is based on the onto-epistemology of Sumak Kawsay including a sense of humans as belonging to nature and society. A crucial aspect of the Alforja Educativa is to build a supportive environment enabling children to do their own research on the use and misuse of antibiotics by approaching ABR through art and artistic activities. To analyse how relations of art and science are constituted in Alfora Educative, we utilise a pragmatic discourse analytical approach (Cherryholmes, 1988) to analyse the educational material produced by The Alfora Educativa Educational Project. Such an approach implies a transactional view of the relation between teaching material and the culture of the educational practice. This pragmatist understanding implies that the meanings offered in the written texts of the Alfjorja Educativa educational material is assumed to also constitute what is offered students in terms of meanings in ABR educational practice (Quennerstedt, 2006). The discourse analysis is further informed by Rosenblatt’s framework of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘efferent’ readings (Rosenblatt 1985; 2005; Hansson 2014), which function as analytical concepts with which to study what opportunities learners are offered to explore ABR as expressed in the educational material. Aesthetic readings focus on personal lived through experiences while efferent readings focus on generating information from a text. This line of reasoning can be linked to the value given to aesthetic experiences as powerful for environmental meaning making in aesthetic, experiential and ecological approaches to ESE (Rosenblatt 1985, 2005; Hansson 2014). By drawing on Rosenblatt’s ‘readings’ we contrast aesthetic readings with efferent readings characterised by medical expert-oriented approaches to ABR education. Thus, we expect the analysis to highlight assumptions about antibiotic resistance through the identification of discourses of antibiotic resistance that are interwoven with understandings of human-microbe relations. In focus for the analysis are the artistic narratives used to narrate human-microbe relations and descriptions of the microbial world, speaking to the aim of exploring assumptions regarding the relation between art and science in ABR education.

Through the pragmatic discourse analysis we expect the paper to outline if and how the art and artistic content in the Alforja Educativa can contribute with increased understanding of how to approach ABR in an ESE.context. As such, we expect to find new images and metaphors of the dynamic relationship between microbes, human beings and other species that existing in the educational material sometimes in opposition and sometimes as complements to traditional approaches to microbial ecology. The expected outcomes of the study consist of how artistic educational content have the potential to overcome onto-epistemological tensions in present day ABR education. As argued by Dewey (1938) artistic educational content has the potential to contribute to the kind of experiences that enable learners to enact their imagination in education. If the Alforja Educativa educational content offers opportunities for aesthetic imaginative experiences this could enable learners to build on and develop new ways of addressing ABR that would not only be novel but also be meaningful and relate to learners own experiences looking both into the past and the future. Through the use of third-space ontology theory we expect to be able to further discuss these discourses in the educational material in terms of third-space ontologies (Bhabha, 1996; Soja, 2010).

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