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.
