Enabling STE(A)M in Sustainability Education Through Dialogic/Dialectic Reconciliation

Abstract

In the context of a need for finding and enabling alternatives to unequal and extractivist perspectives on development, growth, and human well-being, this positioning paper explores possibilities for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education with an education for sustainable development focus that counters disciplinary alienations particularly between the arts and the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. The paper argues that unnecessary alienations between cultural-emblematic and mathematical-logical epistemes, especially those linked to narrow interpretations and restricted developments in dialogism and dialectics, respectively, are influenced by restricted understandings of epistemological, ontological, and praxiological philosophical drivers in meaning making and responsive action. In response, the paper develops a series of philosophical principles that, it argues, could usefully underpin STEAM education practices. These are a) iterations of epistemological expansion and contraction (in response to monologic meaning making), b) an expansive and deepening ontology (in response to ontological collapse in describing the world), c) critical and judgmental rationality (finding a middle ground between radical relativism and dogma), and d) concrete utopianism (in response to idealism and additive holisticism). The emergence of the four philosophical principles is developed through illustrative examples of a broad range of arts (fine art, performance art, photography, film, poetry, prose, and music).