Contemporary educational challenges call for approaches that move beyond pre-defined knowledge and outcomes, especially in times of uncertainty and complexity. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2008) work with linking care and curiosity, this paper explores how a performative and artistic approach to curriculum can create curiosity and care. This paper asks: How can performative and artistic approaches to curriculum cultivate curiosity and care as relational, emergent, and ethical practices in contemporary education? To explore this question, the paper approaches education as entangled processes that emerge within and between students, teachers, materials, space, time, and context. Drawing on posthumanist perspectives (Barad, 2003, 2007; Haraway, 2016) within an ethico-onto-epistemology, the paper positions education as an emergent practice in which ethical response-ability (Barad, 2007; Juelskjær, 2019) and relational attentiveness are inseparable from learning itself. Response-ability means the ability to respond to different matter across both human and the more-than-human (Despret, 2004).  From Karen Barads perspective, ethico-onto-epistemology means that knowing, being, and ethical response-ability are inseparable and emerge together through what we do (Barad, 2007). In education, what we create, how we create it, and how we relate while doing so are inseparable ethical acts. 

Performative approaches in education highlight learning and knowledge as created through ongoing intra-actions rather than transmitted from teacher to student (Østern, 2024; Østern et al, 2025). In this framework, curiosity and care are understood not as personal traits or fixed learning outcomes, but as ethical and aesthetic dimensions that emerge relationally and situationally. Inspired by a series of artistic and performative practices within drama education in Norwegian upper-secondary schools, we explored the core elements of drama and theatre; time, space, body, text and actor-audience relations and what they could be(come). This allowed the drama students to engage with materials, spaces, texts, and temporality in ways that generate emergent learning processes. Time becomes fluid and relational, shaped by embodied engagement; space(s) operates as co-creator; and text, movement, and artistic gestures entangle, producing new forms of knowing and understanding. The roles of teacher, student, and audience are decentered, shifting the ethical and pedagogical responsibility across the participants and the learning environment. Such intra-activity allows care to be enacted as attentiveness to the ongoing flow of relations and curiosity as openness to emergent possibilities.

Although situated within arts education, this performative and artistic approach offers insights for other disciplines by demonstrating how ethics can be enacted through pedagogical practice rather than pre-defined. It invites educators to focus on how learning situations are relationally and materially produced, emphasizing care, responsiveness, and uncertainty as central educational values. In this sense, arts-based pedagogy becomes a critical resource for rethinking education as an ethical and creative practice across subjects.

At the same time, openness and participation cannot be assumed as inherently democratic or inclusive. As Bishop (2012) reminds us, participatory and open-ended practices may obscure questions of power, authorship, and responsibility if the conditions for participation are not critically examined. In educational contexts, this raises important questions about who is invited to participate, under what terms, and how risk, uncertainty, and care are unevenly distributed. A performative approach therefore requires continuous critical reflection on its ethical and pedagogical implications, rather than positioning openness itself as a pedagogical ideal.

In line with a/r/tographic and performative research methodologies (Irwin, 2004; Irwin & Springgay, 2008; Østern et al., 2021), this study approaches research as a creative and relational practice through a post-qualitative inquiry (Murris, 2021) using arts-based methods (Leavy, 2017) . The inquiry was conducted through the design and facilitation of performative and artistic teaching processes, where curriculum was enacted rather than implemented. As artist/researcher/teacher, I engaged directly in these processes together with students, exploring what emerged through embodied, material, and relational intra-actions. Rather than separating teaching, research, and analysis into distinct phases, the research unfolded performatively, allowing insights to emerge through engagement with practice. Artistic processes functioned both as pedagogical strategies and as modes of inquiry, enabling experimentation, risk-taking, and interdisciplinary exploration. Documentation included reflective and poetic writing and drawing from the students, video, sound and material traces from the teaching processes, which were revisited and read diffractively (Barad, 2014) through theory. Knowledge is not approached as representational data, but as something produced through the relations of bodies, materials, space, time, and curriculum. This methodological orientation holds curiosity and care as emergent qualities of practice, highlighting how performative and artistic approaches can create ethical and relational awareness within educational contexts.

By emphasizing the emergent, relational, and aesthetic dimensions of education, this paper contributes to broader debates on what education can be(come) in contemporary society. It suggests that performative and artistic approaches (Østern et al., 2021; Østern & Knudsen, 2019; Østern, 2024) to curriculum offer educational possibilities: creating curiosity as an ethical stance of inquiry, and care as an embodied, relational practice that underpins learning processes. This orientation challenges conventional expectations of predictability and standardization, proposing a pedagogy that embraces complexity, risk, and the potential of uncertainty while constantly distributing responsibility. This sketches how curiosity and care can be entangled, creating educational potentials that are both ethically and creatively grounded in uncertain worlds. In practice, curiosity is created through open-ended, exploratory tasks that invite students to experiment with materials, movement, sound, text, and space, while attending to what emerges in the moment rather than what is pre-defined. Care is enacted through relational attentiveness, dialogue, and responsiveness, where both teachers and students share response-ability (Barad, 2007) for shaping the learning situation and its outcomes. The de-centered role of the teacher, moving between artist, researcher, and facilitator, allows multiple voices including students, materials, and environment to participate in meaning-making. Such performative approaches encourage ongoing reflection, adaptation, and ethical responsiveness, where curiosity and care are continuously re-negotiated through intra-actions. This study demonstrates how artistic and performative approaches to curriculum can open spaces for inquiry, experimentation, and relational engagement that extend beyond drama education, offering models for ethical, exploratory, and interdisciplinary pedagogies in contemporary education.

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