In the face of current socio-environmental changes, the reductionist frameworks of modern science have been put to the test. Questions of sustainability and equity, and how to ‘live well’ in the world (Griffith and Murray, 2017), demand a new attention for how we are tangled as beings-in-relation to and with others - not only humans. In World-centred Education, Biesta (2021) goes further, arguing for an education that allows time: to slow down and interrupt the flow of intentions, so that students can “meet the world and meet themselves in relation to the world” (p.50). To this effect, “imaginative learning” and “aesthetic inquiry” (Greene, 2001) are proposed as forms of knowing that focus on an integrated perception of the world, assigning human beings their place as experiencing subjects. An aesthetical approach to inquiry is based on corporeality, for the experience of external nature is always and at the same time an encounter with one’s own, internal nature, or one’s self-experience (Dewey, 1934; Wallace, 2000). This paper illustrates the implications of this theoretical stance with an example of practice. Via tactile experiences and poetic composition, prospective secondary science teachers – in Italy and the UK - explored aesthetic-affective relations of Carbon. An initial activity on the distinction of living and non-living surfaced the arbitrary nature of abstract separations. This was followed by a drawing activity whereby with eyes closed, students experimented with touch and mark-making to sense the responsiveness of the materials, and explore relational intensity across multiple times and spaces, the skin being a porous and permeable boundary of intra-activity, that is chemical, electrical and yet textural and sensuous. Finally, they composed the poetics of Carbon, tracing the bio-energetic transformations that connect organic and inorganic processes in the living world. In developing a new analytic practice, such as attending to moments of ‘productive disconcertion’ and diffractively re-reading them (Murris and Bozalek, 2019) through each other, together we asked questions of how embodied, transdisciplinary practices teach together, both within and through each other. Performance and language were thus re-defined to include the wide range of vocal and physical gesture, spurring from the sensorial continuum of body, mind and environment. By envisioning humans as “materially embodied and embedded, with the power to affect and be affected” (Braidotti, 2019, p.5) the human subject - both teacher and learner - is positioned within a complex, spatial and temporal web, where knowledge is situated and ethically accountable.

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