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.

Our central research question reads as follows: under what conditions can STEAM, as an Education of the Senses, be harnessed as a response against current social and ecological issues that require a new foundation for 'pedagogical-care'? Following from this question, we will also seek answers to the following enquiries: "Which core maximes can be formulated for an education of the senses?", and "How can protocols (conditions) be generated from analyses of existing practices surrounding STEAM (and more specifically this regards laboratory and studio practices), with which we can arrive at this specific way of thinking about EoS?". It is through this investigation that we want to provide an adequate pedagogical response to the challenges in our society. Moreover, according to the design of this research, ‘domain experts’ are of vital importance. These experts need to be involved in this research to give EoS a grounded footing in the real world practice through an interdisciplinary research method. However, we would like to reconsider the idea of ‘domain’ and ‘discipline’ through a deliberation of their constitutive practices, techniques and gestures: not primarily considering art and science as disciplines or domains, but as material practices, strategies and techniques that work upon the world in a particular way. This view implies a different relationship between sciences, arts and education. A relationship that does not stem from the question of how an integration of different disciplines can lead to the acquisition of different skills and knowledge that are better adapted to the demands of a changing society. Interdisciplinarity for us is thus not a starting point, but a consequence of a ‘thing’- centered and world-centred approach (cf. Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2019). Instead of starting from disciplines, we want to enter upon concrete practices and materialities. With this, we aim at creating rich innovative practices that are therefore not so much linked to the sciences or the arts as disciplines, but to the studio and the laboratory as practices where the world becomes an object of study and that relates to a care for the new or unknown. We want to explore how these practices allow for ‘unlearning’ learning, and creating other forms of attention in the context of the development of a foundational framework for EoS.

Today’s tendency of looking at education from an instrumental viewpoint has been critised by Gert Biesta (2006) in terms of 'the learnification of education', in which the pedagogical emphasis is on the act of "learning" itself, such that crucial questions about content, why learning takes place, and the relationships that occur during learning are neglected or obscured. A process, thus, in which learning is chiefly aimed at a rapid functioning society. While this description of education may seem decent at first glance, it gives a very narrow representation of what it actually is about, let alone a proper one. Truly, such an instrumentalist logic, with its strong focus on immediate, labour market-oriented learning outcomes, is hardly what our troubled society needs today. Instead, what is called for is an educational practice in which slower, more ‘world-oriented’ education is granted at least equal prominence (this is in line with Arendt’s notion of Amor Mundi, i.e. Love for the world and the related idea of educational care elaborated on in the ‘manifesto for a post-critical pedagogy’ by Hodgson et al., 2018). With this innovative approach to education, we want to explore how artistic and scientific material practices and strategies allow for moving beyond education's singular focus on "wanting to know" from an effectiveness and efficiency logic, to the more holistic and intensive "wanting to understand" (Meirieu, 2018).

Biesta, G. (2006) Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future (Boulder, Paradigm). Biesta, G. (2017). Letting art teach. Burnard, P., & Colucci-Gray, L. (2020). Why Science and Art Creativities Matter: (Re-)Configuring STEAM for Future-Making Education (P. Burnard & L. Colluci-Gray (eds.)). Brill Sense. Demoss, K., & Morris, T. (2002). How Arts Integration Supports Student Learning: Students Shed Light on the Connections. Chicago Arts Partnerships, 1–25. Graham, M. A. (2021). The disciplinary borderlands of education: art and STEAM education (Los límites disciplinares de la educación: arte y educación STEAM). Infancia y Aprendizaje, 44(4), 769–800. https://doi.org/10.1080/02103702.2021.1926163 Hodgson, N., Vlieghe, J., & Zamojski, P. (2018). Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy. punctum books. https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0193.1.00 Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. In Anthropological Quarterly (Vol. 93, Issue 2). Polity Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/ANQ.2020.0036 Mehta, R., Keenan, S., Henriksen, D., & Mishra, P. (2019). Developing a Rhetoric of Aesthetics: The (Often) Forgotten Link Between Art and STEM. STEAM Education: Theory and Practice, 121– 145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04003-1_7 Meirieu, P. (2018). Le plaisir d’apprendre. Autrement. Vansieleghem, Nancy; 2021. The Point of Study Practices Is to Discover the Kind of Questions That We 'Also' Should Ask. Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education; 2021; pp. 107 - 118 Vlieghe, J., & Zamojski, P. (2019). Towards an Ontology of Teaching. Thing-centred Pedagogy, Affirmation and Love for the World. 11. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16003-6