Global Science Opera: Enacting Posthumanising Creativity

Introduction

This article is a theory/practice positioning paper which applies posthumanising creativity as a conceptual framework for Global Science Opera (GSO) practice, in the context of global education/citizenship and STEAM education. Posthumanising creativity (PHC) takes the posthuman turn in conceptualising creativity by decentring the human and offering an intra-active explanation of impactful novelty as generated by humans and other-than-humans (Chappell, 2018). Through this positioning we demonstrate how GSO conceptualised through PHC has the potential to help students to globally attend to wicked problems, and, how PHC might contribute to understandings of creativity more generally within education. Within this introduction, GSO, wicked problems and transdisciplinarity are explained, as are their relationships with the STEAM and global education agendas. The wider posthuman turn, which is beginning to have influence, but is not yet dominant in these areas, is also explained as foundational for the theoretical positioning via PHC that follows in subsequent sections. The article goes on to define and consider posthuman understandings of creativity and how these shape GSO, and GSO’s creative process and creative pedagogy. It concludes by looking forward to how a more symbiotic approach might be beneficial and impactful to GSO and beyond.

The Global Science Opera (GSO) was the first opera initiative to produce operas as a global community (www.globalscienceopera.com); these are realized through a creative method which has its roots in the Write a Science Opera educational approach (Ben-Horin, 2014; Ben-Horin et al., 2017).¹ Educational operas are written, designed and performed by the global community, consisting of school students and their teachers, artists and scientists. During each annual production, a storyline created by one of the country-specific GSO teams, is divided into scenes and dispersed thereafter throughout the global network. Each location (e.g. school) is then responsible for writing and performing their opera scene as part of the complete opera. GSO emerged as a practice in 2014, at the intersection of developing agendas in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) education, and global education and citizenship. GSO has since been implemented globally with a remit to explore the interweaving of arts, sciences and technology within a creative and democratic inquiry process which crosses geographical and other boundaries.

Since 2015, annual productions have been inspired by a variety of scientific themes and their associated wicked problems, for example light pollution, particle physics and ecosystem restoration (Global Science Opera, 2016). GSO shares control of the learning process and content with pupils and their teachers in numerous countries, thus continuously generating research questions with relevance for the local and international practice fields, and for teaching and research professionals (Urbaniak et al., 2021).

The term ‘wicked problem’ describes issues, such as climate change and educational inequalities, that at first appear too complex to address, but that through transdisciplinary analysis and navigation can be tackled (Thomassen & Stentoft, 2020). Transdisciplinarity is defined through Benatar’s work (2000) as “an integrated approach to complex problems using the methodology and insights from a range of disciplines with differing perspectives on the problem under consideration (p. 171).”

By 2014 when GSO began to emerge, STEAM had established itself as a significant phenomenon in Europe. In 2019, Perignat and Katz-Buonincontro were able to show that there were a variety of definitions of the inter-relationship between the five disciplines including transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary. Within this developing articulation of the field, GSO can be positioned as transdisciplinary STEAM practice as the science, arts and technology involved merge together rooted in an authentic inquiry (Glass & Wilson, 2016; Liao, 2016; Quigley et al., 2017), supported by a creative, democratic process. In a recent research commission Colucci-Gray et al. (2017) argue that STEAM enables connectedness; learners link knowledge and environment, becoming more creatively engaged and responsive to their communities; and teachers make connections with peers and external partners. Ben-Horin (2015) argues that science opera is able to demonstrate these processes in action when long-term pedagogical transformation transcends short-term partnership practice.

Alongside its development of and within STEAM education, GSO has also developed in the context of changing global education agendas. The Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) was launched in 2012 by the United Nations Secretary-General identifying fostering global citizenship as a priority. As Akkari and Maleq (2020) note, “this marked a paradigm shift: framing education in a global perspective and aiming to enable learners to understand global issues and empower them to take action (p. 4).” A global perspective on issues relevant to learners, addressed through a transdisciplinary approach is at the heart of GSO; alongside the potential of opera as a performative medium which can change minds and spur those engaging with it to take action in relation to the issue under scrutiny. GSO staff and participants are very aware that global education must be responsive to changes in conceptions of citizenship in order to address global issues (Akkari & Maleq, 2020).

In recent years, within both the STEAM and global education arenas there have also been marked shifts questioning human exceptionalism within posthuman and new materialist research (e.g. Braidotti, 2013) and critiquing Western onto-epistemologies via the decolonisation agenda. GSO has been influenced by these movements as they include arguments that it is only by decentring the human and acknowledging multiple onto-epistemologies that there is hope to address wicked global issues like climate change and democratic corruption (Chappell, 2021). Burnard and Colucci-Gray (2021) argue that in order to move STEAM beyond human exceptionalism, we need to work with alternative epistemologies that decentralize the human as knowledge producer, and acknowledge transdisciplinary intersections across scientific and artistic ways of knowing and being in the natural world. Researchers such as McGinty and Bang (2015) are developing Indigenous STEAM education in collaboration with communities. They recognise that dominant Western epistemologies ignore the fact that the idea of decentring human influence has long been core to Indigenous thinking and practices. To avoid continuing the colonial legacy, those working posthumanly therefore must acknowledge the prior practices of these Indigenous thinkers and practitioners (e.g. Todd, 2016), especially when developing global practice such as GSO. Similarly within global citizenship education Reynolds (2015) articulates the influence of post colonial ideas which work to decolonise education that claims global reach and to disentangle it from its Euro-centric frame. Hacking and Taylor (2018) spotlight the key tension to argue that educators need to go beyond anthropocentric notions of education and consider ‘international mindedness’ within a posthuman frame. This means affirming nonhuman-human assemblages, enabling distributed agency and rethinking ethics. They draw on the posthuman turn to argue that within global education, the nonhuman or other-than-human should be part of the educational conversation too.

In this complex context GSO continues to develop and work to make a difference to how learning happens, to consider who is learning and with what, and how all elements approach learning together. Whilst acknowledging the decolonisation agenda’s importance, the GSO team has developed a growing curiosity with how creativity works within the initiative, as a driver for this more dispersed kind of learning and also as a driver for change within GSO and for creative actions that ensue in relation to global education. In this article, we therefore focus on our journey into posthumanising creativity, continually raising questions about what this framing means for developing GSO’s entangled artistic, pedagogic and research strands. We will use this platform to conceptualise creativity in GSO and raise questions for future consideration and development of practice.

Creativity as a central tenet – but what kind?

The notion of everyday or little c creativity (Craft, 2005) has been key to how GSO staff and participants have understood that everyone can be creative and that the originality and value of creative process should be judged for that person and/or their peer group rather than the world at large. Indeed, Chappell et al.’s (2011) notion of wise humanising creativity (WHC) was influential at GSO’s inception as it refers to creativity as collaborative and communal, both of which are central to GSO’s practices. WHC (Chappell et al., 2012, 2016) entails a welcoming of, and interaction with, opinions and values of others as the very way to realize the creative process. Ben-Horin et al. (2017) detailed ways in which this occurs in an educational environment characterized by inquiry across disciplinary boundaries of science and the arts. In this context, WHC theory allows an understanding of creativity which forefronts dialogue as the key driver for generating new ideas, which also contributes to identity development of those engaged in a process of becoming.

Similarly to the way in which paradigms are shifting in STEAM and global education, GSO staff and participants have recently become engaged in arguments around decentring humans and Western onto-epistemologies within creativity in education and arts education research. Chappell has argued that it is imperative that we move beyond conceptions of creativity which position human needs as central; her 2018 and 2021 publications develop WHC theory into new territory which decentres the human by conceptualising posthumanising creativity. She encourages educators to consider how we might step outside of ourselves or ‘de-centre’ in order to address challenges of the Anthropocene (Malhi, 2017), which have been brought about by dominant Western blindness to our impact on the earth. Such challenges include climate-based problems (Leichenko & O’Brien, 2020), technological threats to democracy (Piccone, 2018), and political violence (Khalili, 2013) and extremism brought about by, amongst other issues, land competition and emigration. More recently those connected with GSO (e.g. Chappell, in press) have also started to incorporate decolonising and anti-racist theorising and practice into their pedagogy and research with this avenue a possible further development area for the GSO project as a whole. This will hopefully create space for what Sundberg (2013) refers to as multi-epistemic literacies: diverse epistemic perspectives – whether embodied, Indigenous or posthuman – to enact pluriversal understanding.²

Joining together these turns in STEAM, global education and creativity/arts in education research, we rely on Chappell’s (2018) arguments to set out next how posthumanising creativity can be applied to understand and develop learning and change across GSO practices and to fuel students’ and others’ contributions to respond to wicked problems.

Posthumanising creative pedagogies

On the one hand we talk about posthumanising creativity as relevant to conceptualise GSO, but we can also gain from thinking about the related creative pedagogy and how this influences the shape of the creative process. By creative pedagogy, we mean the inter-relationship of teaching for creativity, teaching creatively and creative learning (Jeffrey & Craft, 2004). Page (2018) argues that we can benefit from being more aware that we are teaching and learning with matter; she emphasises that material pedagogies are embodied, where bodies are being taught and are learning “with matter and between spaces, where matter teaches us what it can and cannot do” (p. 1). Much like the definition of posthumanising creativity detailed above, she focuses on relationality. She does this in order to become clear about the “ways, materials and spaces of pedagogy” (Page, 2018, p. 1) so that she can recognise and know how to create these places to facilitate materially-grounded emancipatory pedagogy which resists dominant discourses. Here we see the call for equality and justice emphasised. Page becomes conscious of the ruptures and disruptions that a focus on intra-actions with matter can produce, the space for questioning and new potential it creates, and the renegotiations of learner-teacher-material relations. She is seeking and shaping a conception of pedagogy which is about learning how to be in the world and how this can become a practice of freedom.

Influenced by Page’s provocative call to arms, research into posthumanising creative pedagogies demonstrates how humans can be decentred and other practices and matterings can be brought in from the sidelines (Chappell et al., 2019; Chappell et al., 2021). Posthumanising creative pedagogy is clearly about encouraging embodied dialogue, allowing space for empowerment and agency, and doing ethics and trusteeship differently. Chappell et al. (2019; 2021) have explored posthumanising creativity in school-based STEAM and higher education and show that the detail of this pedagogy includes breaking subject boundaries, re-balancing verbal and written knowledge with embodied, felt, care-ful, slower, material, affective ways of knowing, de-centring human knowledge to more equally include other-than-humans and emergent ethics. Posthumanising creative pedagogy also favours flights of imagination, real life rather than hypothetical experiences and improvisational approaches that might involve confusion (Holdhus et al., 2016). These studies show that it forefronts the role of emotions, feelings and expression (including all actants/materials); those engaged in it are interested in making a real difference; again reiterating the social justice thread above. GSO’s pedagogical structure is such that, resonating with these previous studies (Chappell et al., 2019), it already aims to accommodate flights of the imagination, real life scientific challenges and an openness towards improvisation (Ben-Horin et al., 2017). It can achieve this because there is no single human being at the centre of the project. Nor does any single institution constitute GSO’s centre. In GSO, participants collaborate with those in other geographical locations in order to be part of the creative process. Thus, GSO provides an important experience of learning to operate with recognition of multiple others and multiple centres. Participants enter a space for empowerment of their ideas on a global stage. And GSO is enacted as a mechanism towards social justice: whilst being alert to digital access inequalities, it is the aim that anyone regardless of financial or other resources is welcome and able to take part.

Turning to how pedagogy then influences the shape of the creative process, both posthumanising creativity and GSO have explored this idea⁴ and how this might be relevant to any outcome that might ensue (Ben-Horin et al., 2017; Sotiriou et al., 2021). If we apply this idea of the creative process having an emerging shape, understanding of which aids facilitation, we can further benefit from heeding both the human and the other-than-human intra-action within it. GSO, framed by PHC, already reflects this because it includes the other-than-human as part of the core themes within which the inquiry is happening. For example, the ocean in the One Ocean opera, gravity in the Gravity opera, particle physics in the Ghost Particles opera, and ecosystem restoration in the Thrive! opera.⁵ Thus, posthumanising creativity as a way of understanding GSO may be able to contribute to describing distinct, eclectic creative processes’ “shapes” emerging from, and as functions and representations of, the topic of each opera production. We are therefore confronted with the following kinds of questions: in what ways does the creative process occurring in a global opera about special relativity differ from the creative process occurring in a global opera about general relativity? Could an opera about quantum physics include within it multiple endings which are unknown to the audience? Could an opera about the nature of light include two parallel stories – one shaped as a wave and the other shaped as a stream of photon particles? Future responses to these questions will move GSO further into posthumanising pedagogic practices.

Symbiotically moving forward

Within this article we have therefore set out to offer a posthumanising creativity framework for GSO, in the context of, and acknowledging a similar posthuman turn in global education/citizenship and STEAM education. This raises questions about how global educational practice can work with other-than-humans and humans with greater equity and acceptance, in the hope of better dealing with wicked problems.

In responding to this, we have argued that GSO is ripe for further including all humans and other-than-humans within its creative processes and practices, and for capitalising on outcomes, ideas, subjectivities, learnings and impacts which ensue from human/other-than-human intra-actions. We have suggested that GSO could go so far as to creatively de-centre humans in order to allow for PHC’s more dispersed kind of agency, to dialogue differently with environment and technology, and therefore educationally contribute to addressing some of the Anthropocene’s challenges, which might include the climate crisis, political violence and the unknown ethical implications of artificial intelligence. A posthuman approach is better able to do this because of its inherent intra-active understanding of relationships; dispersed agency might better solve wicked problems grounded in dispersed and complex networks of elements and issues. By framing GSO with PHC, we are also proposing it takes a more emergent approach to ethics and responsibility, that perhaps has a political and even activist element.

There are also now pedagogical questions to explore by applying current research in posthuman creative pedagogies. Page’s (2018) work is shown to be useful here to highlight how we can teach and learn with greater awareness of matter, and that this can lead to emancipatory pedagogy which resists dominant discourses. To some extents this also connects the threads around equality and social justice raised by the decolonisation agenda. It provides a pedagogical means for GSO staff and students to not only understand better their relationship with matter, but also to start to respond to the challenges of decolonisation. This will require a questioning of Western privilege and creation of greater space for cultural expressions of all kinds, including from indigenous practices. This can create tensions and discomfort for some, but is necessary in order to contribute to what Glaveanu (2020) refers to as creative global citizenship. He sees this as working with issues around democracy, diversity, dialogue, multiplicity, participation and ethnicity. As Andreotti and De Souza (2012) argue we need to face up to the lack of analysis of power and knowledge construction which continues to marginalize particular groups. This can unintentionally maintain patterns of marginalization which we hope initiatives like GSO have the potential to disrupt given a productive engagement with the creative process.

A final emergent point from this article is the importance of understanding that the posthumanising creativity framing means that GSO as an educational initiative will, by default change itself from within, and also change the systems within which it exists from within. We hope this is clear from the explanation above that the dialogic intra-action of humans of all kinds and other-than-humans changes those intra-actants, which in turn means that, for example, the virtual learning environments, the curricula and the educational systems within which posthumanising creativity occurs are also being changed.

Taking into account Osberg’s (2018) work, we have tried not to overly envision but to ask questions to provoke ourselves, hoping that GSO through the frame of PHC emerges through practice, writing and experience. Osberg warns against visioning as part of what she describes as extrapolatory anticipatory practice where the future is mapped out through extrapolations of the past and present either through creative or democratic imaginings. These practices maintain humanly driven structures and ethics and, she argues, always fail to take education out of the status quo of trying to achieve the moral criteria of “someone’s normative vision of a good future” (Osberg, 2018, p. 14). Osberg (2018) recommends that instead, we work with a symbiotic anticipatory practice, to “play with the possibility of what is not-yet needed…togetherness in difference: a fusion of mutual inspiration and an experimentation with the unknown other” (p. 14). This then allows for possibilities which we, as humans, could not have envisioned or even have known were possibilities.

So, within GSO, this could be a subtle or more obvious process. For example, being part of the initiative might alter how a teacher from the Global South goes about their pedagogy in conversation within the local natural environment; the ensuing online performance might be viewed by a policymaker in another country, perhaps in the Global North, where there may be leverage to blend across subject boundaries and educational/environmental policy implementations to address Anthropocene challenges; which leads to engagement in GSO in a new country and changes in that curriculum and how environment-children-teachers creatively learn and intra-act within it, and so on. In turn, we may come to see this conversation between GSO and PHC as generating a creative educational endeavor which meshes together various cultures, religions, ethnicities and other-than-humans such as trees, oceans, animals and the moon, enabling them to learn and change together productively. We hope it provides an example of how PHC might prove a productive way to understand creativity more generally within education. And, the more we, as a community including all ‘others’ (whether environments, technologies, other living beings or objects), are aware of the possibilities of PHC, the more we can capitalise on them.