The Pedagogy of Curiosity

A Pedagogy of Curiosity© is an emerging body of cross disciplinary sensory research between leading neuro-scientists, artists who use the senses as their medium, and environmentalists and educators who are experimenting with sensory approaches to learning and teaching across disciplines. A Pedagogy of Curiosity© research is developing international site-specific experiments as case studies between researchers and policy makers in Europe and Asia with the aim of sensitising society.

Vision

Sense perception is fundamental to shift the value base that determines our behaviour, individually and collectively. Influencing the values by which we live and relate to our environment and to other human beings has never been as important as now. In the face of the precariousness of our existential conditions – given the threat of global climate change and projected mass migration, accelerated population growth and the scarcity of natural resources – a change of relationship to nature and the environment, as a value and not as a commodity, as well as a shift in attitudes and patterns of consumption in the developed countries and beyond is essential for human survival.

We explore the undervalued embodied knowledge of our senses and their contribution to a full and fulfilling sentient human existence. We look at sensory possibilities in the 21st century in relation to resilient living, urban planning and public pedagogies. We encourage a new body of 21st century sensory skills and competencies to emerge from our research to contribute to a major shift of values that foster an imaginative re-engagement on a day-to-day basis with each other and our environment, both natural and man-made.

Sensory Approaches to Teaching and Learning

Looking at the current UK education curricula at all levels, sensory experience and observation feature little and if so, such practices follow the general trend and orientate towards a visual and at best acoustic awareness. Matters of smell, touch and taste, empirical and ‘haptic learning’ on the whole remain marginalised in the process of providing both generic and subject-specific skills, knowledge and experience. We determine, analyse, assert and substantiate our being in the here and now rather than being encouraged to learn experientially, to sense, to perceive and feel ourselves and to fully immerse into our environments. ‘Knowing what’ dominates over ‘knowing how to’.

Furthermore, hardly anything is left in the UK school curricula from the rich opportunities to engage in the crafts available in previous decades. Yet, learning of how to use ones hands and coordinate them with the eyes stimulates our sensorium and creates a wealth of first hand experience through which we relate to our immediate environment as well as to our selves, our inner worlds.

How, then, can the developments of mainstream programmes of learning be opened up towards holistic approaches that will enhance our sensory contact with the world and inspire our sensory imagination to anticipate future possibilities. Such approaches would build upon the capacity of our senses, and expand our perceptual repertoires and synaesthetic sensitivity. They would shape the ways we order the world and form our relationships with an increasingly precarious natural and wo/man-made environment and with other people.

To change the world, we first and foremost need to change education towards a more holistic and sensually inclusive and integrated model.

Placemaking and Resilient Living

To have an understanding of (vernacular) objects and the efforts that have gone into their design, production, distribution and marketing, it is important to recognise their connectedness to need and desire, place and identity, trade and commodity.

Global capitalist economy is fuelled by an excess of produced goods circulated around the world for which there is neither demand nor the ‘power’ to consume. We are surrounded by too much stuff, and too many things are preserved and conserved when society’s needs increasingly require a more sustainable and resilient use of resources. The making of useful objects and provision of efficient services will depend on imaginative thrifty solutions to practical needs. Creative interventions for resilient living and sustainable livelihoods within communities will rely on recycling, re-manufacturing, redistribution and re-use of existing resources.

Higher Education and Life-long Learning

In Western tradition a strict distinction between sense perception and knowing has become de rigueur. Knowing implies re/cognition and recognition is understood as an acknowledgement of the validity of a concept. Yet the production of knowledge is embedded in social and cultural practices of learning and socialisation and their implicit value hierarchies.

Knowledge is most commonly imparted and acquired in a compartmentalised, disciplinary and abstract(ed) manner. Despite an increasing recognition that many existential issues are far too complex to be solved from within singular disciplinary fields and a subsequent rise in interdisciplinary research and engagement, Higher Education curricula in the main continue to build on and reaffirm the separation between the arts (and humanities) and the sciences (and engineering).

Judging by the current enhanced government support for STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and the emphasis on the (economic) impact of research, preference remains to be given to rationality and certainty, intention and accountability over imagination and intuition, speculation and doubt.

How can the poetic and the scientific, how can curiosity and rationality, imagination and analysis, theory and application become better re/integrated through innovative pedagogies, through issue-based and thematically oriented learning at tertiary level and in continuous professional development? Is it not high time to De–STEM, that is to integrate social relations into the science agenda through sensory design education?

Background

To begin the research, Susan Benn, in her capacity as the Founder Artistic Director of Performing Arts Labs (PAL) in England, created two PAL Labs of the Senses in 2006 and 2007. Participants explored the following question:

If our senses constitute/form an inherent and essential basis for learning, how can the role of these senses be more widely understood, valued and used to stimulate the imagination in everyday living?

Might a robust Pedagogy of Curiosity be derived from such research? And if so…what might it look, feel, sound, taste and smell like?

These first residential experiments took place over three days each, led by scientific, aesthetic and pedagogic enquiry on an equal basis. Further investigations inspired subsequent projects and publications in Vienna, India and London since 2008. The evaluation of this research engages scientific, artistic and pedagogic criteria as an integral part of the investigation. Lab and project results are published here.

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