This paper makes two contributions to reconstructing science education curriculum. Its theoretical contribution is to define 'aesthetic knowing' and outline a rationale for cultivating it in science education responding to the ecological crisis. I argue that through the perception of relationships, 'aesthetic knowing' plays a necessary, albeit subterranean role in science education, and that science education should more explicitly cultivate aesthetic knowing, as well as the capacity to consider tradeoffs/synergies between aesthetic and other kinds of knowing. I suggest much of science's complicity in the ecological crisis is linked to discounting aesthetic knowing's role in empirical engagement, and curtailing its development in science education. Second, its practical contribution is to share and discuss approaches I have taken to developing 'aesthetic knowing' in ITE biology education across three different pedagogical contexts.

I first define aesthetic knowing, consider its relationship with other epistemic approaches, and outline what it offers to the perception, understanding and participation in empirical phenomena. Aesthetic knowing occurs when we 'catch' the gestalt (the form) quality of relations (Zwicky 2019). Put simply, aesthetic knowing is why we can perceive a melody rather than a sequence of detached notes, or recognise a face instead of a collection of disparate spatial features (Author a).  Its capacity to home in on spatial and temporal relationships is necessary for the perception of 'ecological process' writ large, from co-constituting relations in gene regulation and other intracellular processes (Brookfield 2005), to organismic homeostatic and social interactions, up to the patterns and fluctuations of planetary biogeochemical cycles (Margulis & Sagan 1997). It is, however, not limited to trading simplistic linear models for 'systems theory' accounts emphasising circularity, feedback and so on (Orr 1992), which are rather skeletal illustrations of aesthetic knowing's capabilities. Aesthetic knowing doesn't merely perceive a face from the relation between eyes and nose and so on. It is also distinguishes one face from another -even if formally they contain all the same features. In other words, aesthetic knowing perceives not only form but the 'quality of relations' in the structures in catches. By perceiving the quality of relations between entities at various levels, aesthetic knowing perceives both nomothetic regularities and idiographic particularities in the gestalt of developing ecological systems (Author b). This includes sensing whether ecologies are healthy and thriving, or vulnerable or collapsing, which is crucial for education aiming for sustainability in both human health and biotic flourishing.

Most ecologies occur at spatiotemporal scales occluded from direct view. It is a pedagogical problem how we might 'train' our aesthetic knowing in encounter with them, because many tools to perceive such ecologies reduce the texture investigated relations into snapshots and summaries. I suggest starting with dynamics immediately available in students' worlds, and offer three easily accessed pedagogical domains. The first is the ongoing experienced ecology arising from the very relations between people in the classroom. Aspects of these relationalities can be foregrounded through diverse pedagogies. A second domain is the opportunity-rich relational space between students and other organisms in local outdoor learning, where students can develop deeper acquaintance with live ecological dynamics. The third involves incorporating arts into biology education (ex. STEAM). Not only can art cultivate closer observational capacity, creating art is a continuous training in ecological participation (van Boeckel 2007). These immediate contexts can prime students to expect similarly rich concrete dynamics at other ecological levels, and not be hoodwinked into assuming simplicity at other microscopic or macroscopic levels. This has consequences for epistemic claims at these levels, and how we evaluate the sustainability of technologies and interventions based on them.

This paper is a theoretical engagement with my own practice, in dialogue with several literatures. The method employed to develop and defend 'aesthetic knowing' is primarily philosophical. It seeks to distinguish aesthetic knowing from analytic knowing and systemic/complexity forms of knowing, while also defending the need for all epistemic modes to more responsively encounter the world and its many relations. It seeks to locate these modes of knowing pragmatically insofar as they participate in the very ecologies they perceive and articulate, and politically through the ways different modes are favoured or backgrounded for different purposes. The practical dimension of the work describes experiences attempting to engage with ecologising actualising in real time as a means of cultivating aesthetic knowing. My approach is to describe both how aesthetic knowing illuminates the concrete character of co-constituting relations, and how it is itself more deeply understood through considering how it works vis a vis those relations. I also reflect on challenges and opportunities engaging with ITE students, including prospects for investigating how aesthetic knowing can in turn be explored in high school science classrooms. I consider the purposes, scope and limitations of aesthetic knowing in science education, and how it operates in mediated contexts as well, such as in statistical interpretations. I also consider aesthetic knowing’s relationship to Indigenous approaches to knowledge that also focus on aesthetic approaches to perception (ex Kimmerer 2015).

From intracellular processes to planetary biogeochemical cycles, dynamic systems of reciprocally interacting living and nonliving entities pervade the biosphere. Although such ecologies are ubiquitous, in high school biology classrooms (UK and North America, for instance) the thinking and practices required to see, understand and respond to such phenomena is only required and taught in specific and stereotypical contexts. Too many students exit science studies with a head full of scattered facts, mostly depicting simplistic cause-effect relations, and with little sense of any unifying bio-logic. This is pedagogically, but also ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically problematic in this era of accelerating ecological challenges. A 'science of qualities' to use mathematical biologist Brian Goodwin's term (1994), recognises the ontological significance of quality in the natural world and seeks qualitative supplementation to quantitative methods in scientific investigation. Aesthetic knowing is the process by which we pick up spatiotemporal patterns, and variations in those patterns, and thereby crucial in empirical investigation into not only generalities, but particularities too, and the relationship between the particular and the general. Treating phenomena solely as 'cases' of generic laws or properties misses out on understanding not only the dynamism of living systems, but also underemphasises side effects of applying such science. By contrast, an education system that addresses the varied sustainability challenges of contemporary ecological crises would foster a public able to understand and respond to the particularities of living processes and systems, and to evaluate (and/or develop) better attitudes, values, and concepts, but also technologies, natural management schemes or policies accordingly. To do so, biology education should foreground the qualitative nature of the curricular topics it studies, and ecologise its approach in turn.

Author a Author b Brookfield, J. F. Y. 2005. “The Ecology of the Genome –Mobile DNA Elements and Their Hosts.” Nature Reviews. Genetics 6 (2): 128–136. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1524 Goodwin, B (1994). How the leopard changed its spots. London: Phoenix. Kimmerer, R. W. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolios, MN: Milkweed Edition. Margulis, L., and D. Sagan. 1997. What is Life? Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Orr, D. 1992. _Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World_. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Van Boeckel, J. (2007). Artful empiricism and improvising with the unforeseen. In Culture in Sustainability, edited by Asikainen et al, 143-160. Zwicky, J. 2019. The Experience of Meaning_ Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press.