Cultivating primary creativities in STEAM gardens

Confronted with current global climatic challenges, there is renovated attention and debate on the mission of schools vis a’ vis preparing children for the future. Vertical discourses of education for excellence - fulfilling visions of global economic growth - intersect with horizontal discourses of inclusion and visions of education that meets children’s rights and needs. STEAM is a newly emerging curriculum-practice construct aiming to bridge apparently contrasting educational discourses through configurations of contextualised and interdisciplinary learning that are multi-modal, multi-vocal and pluralist in nature. Specifically, this chapter will focus on STEAM gardens, as a hybrid educational space emerging from the confluence of children’s geographies with contemporary studies on cognition and arts and design. Drawing on current experiences in Scotland, this chapter will describe STEAM gardens as a form of pedagogical innovation, which re-positions knowledge and curriculum as inextricably linked to ‘space-making’, whereby the act of ‘gardening’ is both academic and experiential, cognitive and sensorial, individual and relational. The chapter argues that for education to speak to the future, a radical shift is to occur from ‘powerful’ knowledge to ‘living knowledge’.