https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X221084323
Review of Research in Education
March 2022, Vol. 46, pp. 166 –197
DOI: 10.3102/0091732X221084323
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166
Chapter 6
Transdisciplinarity: Re-Visioning How Sciences  
and Arts Together Can Enact Democratizing  
Creative Educational Experiences
Pamela Burnard
Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
laura ColuCCi-Gray
Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh
Carolyn Cooke
The Open University
The movement from STEM to STEAM, with its emphasis on real-world applications, 
promises to meet the changing needs of a globally connected world. However, the potential 
of transdisciplinarity to inspire and deepen our understanding of who we are and how 
we make sense of a world in turmoil remains undertheorized. This article makes a case 
for repositioning STEAM education as democratized enactments of transdisciplinary 
education, where arts and sciences are not separate or even separable endeavors. Drawing 
upon posthumanist theorizing, three projects will exemplify transdisciplinarity across 
music, mathematics, and science education. Transgressing and transcending disciplinary 
boundaries, and attending to both human and nonhuman perspectives, we invite a rethink 
of the work of schools, going beyond democratizing creativity to fully enact posthumanist 
transdisciplinarity.
InTRoDuCTIon
Being creative educators in the 21st century is inspiring, but increasingly complex. 
Educating children and young people to be positive, engaged, active, global citizens 
has become even more relevant in the face of the complex societal challenges of global 
1084323RREXXX10.3102/0091732X221084323Review of Research in EducationBurnard et al.: 
research-article2022
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  167
health crises, climate change, disruptive geopolitical events, and rising inequalities. 
Caught between a future of environmental and social instability on the one hand, 
and technological and technocratic determinism on the other, the relationship 
between democracy and education is profoundly challenged (MacBeath & Moos, 
2004). As neoliberal forces continue to reinforce instrumental approaches, both in 
society as well as in education, many authors across the social and the natural sciences 
are calling for a new science (Caniglia et al., 2021) offering new insights for research 
and practice in education (Cole, 2021). Key steps towards such a new science include 
the repositioning of the non-human (materials, machines, environments, and other 
living forms, such as plants and animals) in research and questions about what mat-
ters and what counts as knowing; and, in so doing, to rethink democratic participa-
tion. This new science troubles the role of creativity in education by unlocking 
multiple viewpoints and multiple logics, seriously asking which creativity we are edu-
cating for (Glaveneau, 2018).
Aim of This Chapter
In this chapter, we advance the debate on new ways of thinking about the co-author-
ing of transdisciplinary creativities, and their potentialities for democratizing education 
research and practices. By bringing together three projects in which the authors have been 
directly involved, we make a case for repositioning STEAM education as democratized 
enactments of transdisciplinary education, where arts and sciences are not separate or even 
separable endeavors.
STEAM is a relatively new acronym in education which refers to the combination 
and synergistic interplay of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics 
(STEM) plus the arts. While original contributions aligned STEAM as a continua-
tion of STEM (Cultural Learning Alliance, 2017) and largely as the assemblage of 
scientific, technological, and artistic disciplines driving the promise of employability 
and economic growth, a rich and lively debate has developed in the literature on the 
particular collocation and/or definition of the arts. Ranging from visual and perform-
ing arts, digital media, aesthetics and crafts, and even the liberal arts and humanities, 
the ‘A’ in STEAM can serve a range of different purposes (Colucci-Gray, Burnard, 
et al., 2017). In its simplest form, the arts may add instrumental weight to scientific 
and technological developments, for example, by creating new consumers’ needs via 
marketing and advertising, or using dramatized performance to increase the appeal of 
science for the general public. Such is the position espoused by those seeking to 
infuse creativity into science by means of the arts, in order to add to science innova-
tion and impact potential (see Thurley, 2016, Segarra et al., 2018; Brown, 2019). 
Similarly, in science education, approaches to transfer science content in a more cre-
ative way are well documented (Colucci-Gray et al., 2019. They range from the use 
of drama to model abstract processes (e.g., the four seasons; the digestive system) or 
the use of poems and songs to remember new or complex words to the integration of 
art-centric skills, such as visual thinking, recognizing and forming patterns, and the 
168  Review of Research in Education, 46
hand skills learned by using tools, or pens, as a means to further develop STEM 
inquiry abilities (Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 2011).
However, while such approaches have garnered success, they are largely driven by 
a vertical discourse (Colucci-Gray et al., 2019) which presumes that arts and 
sciences—deployed to serve a given agenda or curriculum—are necessarily appealing 
or even accessible to everyone (Mejias et al., 2021). But it is also a position that denies 
serious engagement with the intrinsic and diverse values of artistic and scientific 
practices, in ways that may be meaningful for a diversity of students, and may offer a 
broader range of educational experiences (Davies & Trowsdale, 2021). In this sense, 
an instrumental view of STEAM may fall within the admonition of Biesta (2020) as 
a form of education which may get (some) students to “pursue their own learning 
trajectories, define their own learning needs, but never interrupted” (p. 2). At best, 
such are the students who remain anchored within themselves; at worst, these are the 
students who remain unable to pay attention to the world in which they take form 
and that gives them form. The trouble with education in this sense will not be the 
lack of art or creativity in science. Rather, as we have seen with the recent surge of 
interest in environmental action amongst young people, a different form—and a dif-
ferent aesthetic—of education is being asked for (Colucci-Gray, 2021): one that 
enables a more fluid exploration of the multiplicities and meetings of sciences and 
arts; that arises from within learners’ socio-cultural, economic, and political condi-
tions; and that asks serious questions about whose world we are educating for.
By bringing together three STEAM-related projects as case studies from three 
different educational contexts (primary and secondary education, and teacher edu-
cation), this chapter draws upon and challenges these tensions. Confronted with the 
homogenizing forces of global performance and those demanding justice, we seek to 
re-configure the educational space as a site for pluralist/transdisciplinary dialogue. 
We argue that creativity and the expansion of diverse and multiple creativities are 
not democratized when opposing agendas in education dictate the implementation 
of fixed, dis-embodied, fractured practices. This condition may apply equally across 
geographical contexts, from early years and primary education to secondary con-
texts, whenever teaching equates to instruction and performance according to pre-
existing parameters, overriding difference (of local and lived experiences, languages, 
communities) by teaching to the test. Rather, the democratization of diverse 
creativities—at all levels of education—requires moving away from right–wrong, 
body and mind dichotomies, by re-thinking the roles of educators and those who are 
being educated engaging in practices that are co-authored, co-produced, relational, 
and communicated in ways that are co-constitutive of democratic ways (Burnard & 
Loughrey, 2021).
Situating our research within pedagogical practice, we push forward with theoriz-
ing in this field by starting from a deeper understanding of “STEAM” as “configur-
ings,” that is, as enactments of learning processes drawing together and synthesizing 
different epistemological and methodological approaches, where knowledge creation 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  169
is always engaged in action. First, we begin by defining the term “transdisciplinarity” 
and proceed to examine its role in troubling established disciplinary conceptions of 
knowledge. In our analysis, we draw upon the contributions of feminist and post-
humanist theorizing on diffraction (Barad, 2007), which also informs the reading of 
the three case-study examples that we present later as STEAM enactments of democ-
ratizing creativities.
Why Does Transdisciplinarity Matter?
Transdisciplinarity has been described as:
a practice that transgresses and transcends disciplinary boundaries . . . and seems to have the most 
potential to respond to new demands and imperatives. This potential springs from the characteristic 
features of transdisciplinarity, which include problem focus (research originates from and is contextualized 
in “real-world” problems), evolving methodology (the research involves iterative, reflective processes that 
are responsive to the particular questions, settings, and research groupings) and collaboration (including 
collaboration between transdisciplinary researchers, disciplinary researchers and external actors with 
interests in the research). (Russell et al., 2008, pp. 460–461)
While advocating integration, transdisciplinary thinking does not exclude disci-
plinary thinking. Instead, transdisciplinarity seeks to de-couple the specific language 
of a discipline from its original context, opening up new possibilities for viewing and 
experiencing the same phenomenon from a different position. Arguably, transdisci-
plinarity is at the core of creative scientific thinking, as shown by the ways in which 
researchers seek out new words to describe natural phenomenon by drawing from 
different and often discontinuous realms of personal experience (Sutton, 1992). For 
example, concepts such as “web,” “cell,” “vessels,” or even networks emerge from the 
creative act of bringing together the specialist knowledge of a discipline with the 
experience of an everyday occurrence. In a similar fashion, shifting established lines 
of demarcation in the use of language—by inviting other actors, contexts, and differ-
ent points of view—opens up opportunities for new interpretations, and for the 
reconsideration of values underpinning linguistic choices. This interpretative stance 
provides the setting for transdisciplinary inquiries. As Perry (2021) reiterated, for 
transdisciplinarity to come into being, a different professional stance is needed, one 
which embraces “pluriversality,” meaning the “surplus” of meanings and ways of 
learning which enables the complexity of a changing world to come into the realm of 
our experience.
While transdisciplinary inquiries are taking hold in research fields across the sci-
ences, arts, and humanities, less is known about their application in educational con-
texts (Steiner & Posch, 2006; Taylor & Ivinson, 2013). Differently from multi- and 
interdisciplinary inquiries, in which researchers come together to contribute knowl-
edge in a cumulative manner, transdisciplinary research relies on researchers and 
practitioners working together to learn from one another, address a social mission, 
and deepen the value assumptions underpinning research agendas (Klein, 2015). 
170  Review of Research in Education, 46
Transdisciplinary educational practices are documented across a wide range of educa-
tional phases, from early childhood education (see Lindgren, 2020) to higher educa-
tion (see Bayley, 2018). However, as Takeuchi et al. (2020) note in their literature 
review of transdisciplinarity in STEM, there was little evidence of “critical and expan-
sive conceptualisations of transdisciplinarity” (p. 223) within the 154 peer-reviewed 
articles they reviewed. Examples where there is evidence of transdisciplinary practices 
include collaboration amongst teachers and teacher educators in Australia 
(MacDonald et al., 2019) where the STEAM agenda appears to be growing. In 
reporting their own experience of transdisciplinary, multi-site, live-streamed STEAM 
professional learning, the authors illustrate dispositions and qualities that transcend 
their disciplines, such as empathy, openness to new ideas and experiences, “bravery” 
as openness to failure, and trust (Smith & Henriksen 2016). Further theorizing on 
transdisciplinary ways of working are also emerging from authors in the field of the 
arts, drawing on feminist and post-humanist approaches—as discussed by Chappell 
et al. (2019)—and arguing for the importance of “learners and teachers bringing 
their own lives and . . . curiosities into their becoming” in fluid, stretchy entangle-
ments (p. 309), whereas Bayley shares examples of arts-based practices developing 
“embodied and affective ways of . . . pushing the boundaries of human-centred 
thinking towards new territories” (2018, p. 9).
In this view, creative educational experiences are democratized as part of a multi-
plicity of ways of both making sense and making a difference to the world; yet, these 
are not seen as separate endeavors, but as a form of transdisciplinary creativity 
enacted through what we introduce here as “diffraction,” both a methodological and 
a pedagogical tool.
Transdisciplinarity as Diffraction
A term originally derived from physics, diffraction refers to the pattern of light and 
dark resulting from the passage of light waves through a slit (or another medium, such 
as the water surface). Depending on how the size of the slit and the amplitude of the 
wavelengths compare, the spreading of the light may be more or less accentuated. As 
Barad (2007) maintains, using an optical metaphor to review matters of knowledge 
and method is a powerful tool for deconstructing ideas of knowledge as representa-
tion, which have become dominant in the Western world. Through representation, 
words are taken to mirror a reality out there, whereby the world is categorized and 
objectified through its component parts. From this it follows that education— 
conceived largely as a cognitive process of representation and assimilation—will 
require tools—which may be digital, linguistic, or more broadly artistic—to enable 
transfer from abstract reality to experience, regardless of the individual or unique con-
ditions and experiences of the students.
By going against the mirroring metaphor of representationalism, diffraction is not 
concerned with sameness, but with understanding differences from within, attentive 
to fine detail (p. 91) “as a commitment to understanding which differences matter, 
how they matter and for whom” (p. 90). In this sense, diffraction is used 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  171
methodologically to trouble humans’ arrogance of locating knowledge and meaning 
making only in the human subject and mind and thus to resist the “epistemic vio-
lence” (Braidotti, 2019b, p. 39) done by humanism, by reinstating learning and expe-
rience as fundamentally relational and involving the more than human world. This 
orientation is not anchored in binary logic, but rather recognizes that knowledge(s) 
is/are only ever partial, and is/are not static or separable from the living and non-
living world (Haraway, 2016). Similarly, in education, transdisciplinary creativity 
and creative learning will be re-purposed beyond simple acquisition of concepts in 
order to queer boundaries of either discipline or method, and nurture new under-
standings of our dependence on others, humans and non-humans.
We take this as a generative point of departure for reformulating the purpose of 
STEAM education as a forum of encounter of diverse disciplines, which offers the 
opportunity for revisiting and transcending hierarchies of knowledge to promote 
new, affective and material relational configurations: a process of democratization of 
education.
In making this case, we organize the chapter into three parts. In Part 1, we provide 
a critical reading of the literatures across music, arts, science, and creativity education 
to highlight current debates and timely shifts in thinking connecting with contempo-
rary debates on transdisciplinarity. We then draw upon Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) 
ontology with its attention to the forces of life (and creativity) as multiplicities, and 
Braidotti (2019a) on renewing the mechanisms of knowledge production in the edu-
cational discourse. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) terminology, we will call our 
re-reading a “de/re-territorializing” as we will both deconstruct assumptions and 
reframe the discussion by including non-human influences, and being open to trans-
disciplinary inquiries. In Part 2, we describe three STEAM-related projects con-
ducted in three different educational contexts, each one offering a particular instance 
of creative educational experiences illustrated as entanglements of humans and non-
humans in tactile and aesthetic engagement with materials—playdough and mark 
making with pencils—and the growth of living things. The cross-case diffractive 
analysis of the three cases provides pointers for understanding the philosophical and 
practical features of democratizing creativity in transdisciplinary inquiries. Such a 
diffractive analysis involves reading insights through a plurality of theoretical per-
spectives (Mazzei, 2014), not as a normative linear movement, but more akin to the 
movement of a rhizome or creeping rootstalk which pushes outwards, sending out 
roots and shoots as it spreads and intersects with the shoots of other stalks. This meta-
phor of the rhizome, as it was originally adopted by Deleuze and Guattari (1988), 
refers to a way of knowing driven by affective, discursive, historical, socio-cultural, 
and material conditions, naturally exceeding the disciplinary “gaze,” and inviting dif-
ferent sets of questions and alternative ways of “seeing,” “knowing,” and “doing” of 
both education and research. Finally, in Part 3 we pull out the emerging “lines of 
flights” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) from across the three projects which speak of 
172  Review of Research in Education, 46
new insights and new directions for democratizing creative educational experiences. 
We conclude with some recommendations for research and practice.
PART 1: LITERATuRES REVISITED
The review of the literature presented here synthesizes key debates occurring in 
each disciplinary community with a view to advancing the potential re-reading of 
each field from a posthumanist stance. As described by Braidotti (2019a) as one of 
the first original thinkers in this field, posthumanism is a concept that originates in 
science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy to describe a state or 
condition in which human life is inseparable from nature, thus disrupting claims of 
human exceptionalism or “man as the measure of all things” (Haraway, 2016). This 
philosophical stance impacts on the way of handling the literature by departing from 
cumulative knowledge exercises and architectural metaphors of “finding the gap,” in 
order to propose, instead, a revisiting of value assumptions underpinning knowledge 
claims, and to operate discursive moves along different viewpoints. As Haraway 
(2016, p. 12) reminds us: “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with,” so 
the literature is not used as a means to consolidate a singular truth, but to disclose 
and enact differential readings which push against the hierarchy of the normative, 
exclusionary, and taken for granted: “it matters what matters we use to think other 
matters with; and it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with” (Haraway, 
2016, p. 12). Across the different fields of music, science, math, and creativity educa-
tion we introduce both the consolidated view and the posthumanist turn to de/re-
territorialize education.
De/Re-Territorializing Music Education
Music is a creative subject and inherently a making subject. We make music 
together, we make composition, and we make sounds. Music making is such a ubiq-
uitous term in music education that there is little critique and consideration of what 
the term “making” actually relates to. It is widely accepted that “Music-making of all 
kinds . . . should be at the centre of the music curriculum” (Elliott, 2005, p. 7). Yet, 
we constantly live with the trouble caused by this, whereby not all making is consid-
ered equal. Learning through making is difficult to explain explicitly, and difficult to 
record and assess (Allsup, 2016; Fautley, 2015; Regelski, 2016).
Definitions and explorations of the term making in music education are often 
absent or narrow. As a result, a number of interlinked critiques of how making is 
considered and enacted in music education can be drawn. One such critique is that 
making is perceived as a “tool.” Here the medium (music) and the materials (instru-
ments, sheet music, environment, etc.) are used to achieve an already planned out-
come through a linear process. This is an outcome-driven view of making, in which 
the focus is on “a prescribed, even ‘right’ sound, rather than offering opportunities for 
rich, divergent sound exploration” (Hill, 2018, p. 54). Allsup (2016) explicitly argues 
against this kind of music making by suggesting that there is a distinction between 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  173
students as “making, not merely doing . . . [where they are] not merely executing the 
master’s bidding” (p. 103).
This aligns closely with another form of making in music education as a “sound 
demonstration” of learning, a presentation of knowing through doing. Here, again, 
making is used to provide a means by which learning can be made explicit, as a 
sounded signal of completion. In practice, this view emphasizes fluency and accuracy 
(of performance) as a way of judging success or, within a composition context, the 
inclusion of expected conventions, ideas, or stylistic clichés. As Thibeault (2015) 
notes, there is an inherent tension between music education practices that promote 
the achievement of a polished product, something that is final, and an inclusive 
music education, which requires different values and design.
Making is also often aligned with developing discrete musical skills (see Fautley, 
2018; Fautley & Murphy, 2016). As Allsup (2016, p. 16) argues, “We have a problem 
of backward design,” where achievement and accomplishment are “located in the 
mastery of observable and measurable skills” which are pre-known, building progres-
sively towards a level of difficulty or standardized notion of what proficiency involves. 
This “rule learning” focuses attention on controlled forms of making, towards stan-
dardization, reification, and abstraction (Spruce, 2012; Regelski, 2016) at the expense 
of making as entangled with self, or context.
Underpinning all these practices of making in music education are notions of 
human exceptionalism and control (Haraway, 2016, p. 30), of matter as inert in the 
making process, and of individualism in making. A posthumanist reading can invite 
a new reading of the democratic ideal in music education, re-seeing making as “mak-
ing with,” giving distributed power and presence to all those involved in the making: 
bodies, materials, spaces, feelings (Braidotti, 2019b). This creates a shift from con-
trolled making to “making with” as a dynamic response, rooted not only in a telling 
of past events, but staying in the present, exploring how the materials and relation-
ships make with us at this moment in time. This making allows ideas and actions to 
surface in the in-between of form and matter, humans and environments. It is about 
staying with what happens (Haraway, 2016), rather than pushing aside the unex-
pected, complex, or divergent as unimportant.
De/Re-Territorializing Science and Math Education
Like music, science is also a creative and a making endeavor. Primarily concerned 
with understanding the world, science has notoriously engaged in making models 
and figurative representations of the world, thus shaping culture and cosmologies. 
However, the dominance of the economic, neoliberal discourse in education in recent 
years has favored its more instrumental purpose, and creativity in science is often 
bound up with neoliberal discourses serving economic imperatives (Adams, 2013; 
Ball, 2016; Davies & Bansel, 2007).
Characteristically, debates on the meaning of scientific literacy are underpinned 
by age-old conceptions about the universality of science, which have served capitalist 
and colonial endeavors and have been translated into prescriptive ideas of curriculum 
174  Review of Research in Education, 46
in education (Davis, 1996) whereby creativity is seen by teachers as additional at best 
or as a privilege (Hetherington et al., 2020). By the same token, the science curricu-
lum in schools, built upon what was deemed solid and prestigious, has been riddled 
with longstanding problems about what to include and what to exclude, as scientific 
research and social demands keep changing over time, posing new problems and new 
priorities for teachers and students to address. Such a reductionist purpose is at odds 
with an understanding of science education that promotes citizens’ action and par-
ticipation in science as well as in society (Colucci-Gray et al., 2013; Colucci-Gray & 
Camino, 2014; Krasny et al., 2011). For example, science education can promote 
participation in science by: (1) building awareness of the impacts of science and tech-
nology on different communities; (2) questioning the values underpinning particular 
research and development agendas; and (3) enabling pupils to make use of science 
and technological knowledge to meet their own needs (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 
2009).
Similar tensions can be seen in mathematics education, holding fast to the “detem-
poralised idea of mathematics . . . detached from human time and experience” (Davis 
& Hersch, as cited in Davis, 1996, p. 59). More than any other subject in the sci-
ences, mathematics is held up as the epitome of pure abstracted knowledge, reducing 
and imposing structure on an amorphous and objectified reality. Such ideas continue 
to pervade the field of mathematics education, shaping the practices of teachers 
(Davis et al., 2020).
While prescription is writing that occurs in advance and aims to converge to what 
is deemed the ideal, proscription is open to what is different, divergent, and what 
may be made possible (Davis, 1996). Significant developments in science education 
which strive for an understanding of science and mathematical knowledge from a 
proscriptive, enactive, and posthumanist stance have sprung from an attention to the 
materiality of learning.
For example, a socio-materialist view of the science laboratory informed by femi-
nist new materialism (Barad, 2007) as advanced by Hetherington et al. (2018) cri-
tiques the widely used protocol-based experiments designed to demonstrate an 
established truth and favors the dialogical and material nature of learning in science. 
Such an approach ranges from greater emphasis on reflecting on the setup of an 
experiment to redesigning and reconfiguring the experiment by refocusing on mate-
riality and aesthetics (Takeuki et al., 2020). Going beyond the science lab, place-
based approaches emphasize sensorial and embodied experiences as the prime locus 
of learning and cognition (Gray & Colucci-Gray, 2019).
Also in math education, greater attention is given to the embodied lineage of 
mathematical thinking, such as taking measurements or carrying weights. Sensory 
encounters enable us to draw relational engagements with an ecology of materials as 
“one measures a bowl with water, or water with rocks, or rocks with hardness” (De 
Freitas & Sinclair, 2020, p. 100796). Mathematics education is therefore well and 
truly emplaced in embodied activities as modalities that are “bound together” in an 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  175
ecology of practice, which Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 31) referred to as “minor” 
gestures.
Rather than conceiving of mathematics learning as the rule and the norm, a 
“minor” (or nomadic) account distributes itself in space, thus creating an opportunity 
for entirely different measurements to emerge (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2016). In this 
way, humans and non-humans partake in the same way in the process of knowing; 
not by taking a position from above or from outside but by engaging in practices 
through which “the world is differently articulated and accounted for” (Barad, 2007, 
p. 149).
In sum, the reading of literatures across the three fields of music, science, and 
mathematics education signals that a shift is indeed in operation: from understanding 
subjects as bodies of knowledge to re-viewing knowledge as distributed across social, 
embodied, and material relations (Taylor & Ivinson, 2013). We now turn to the field 
of creativity education to identify potential lines of fracture, intersection, or align-
ment that will integrate the transdisciplinary inquiry assemblage.
De/Re-Territorializing Creativity
In contemporary society where students interact with media and technologies in 
everyday experiences, multiple creativities and innovation skills have gained increas-
ing importance. Reid and Petocz (2004) argue that the concept of creativity varies 
from discipline to discipline, hence the need to pluralize the conception as multiple. 
The word creativities addresses and acknowledges different and diverse enactments. 
These are both emerging and continuously re-made through material enactments 
which are co-authored together. This authoring of diverse creativities arises in and 
permeates everything at the level of classroom practice. The evidence of multiple 
creativities can offer differentiations specific to language, mathematics, science, 
music, and art that are interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, collaborative, communal, 
digital, every day, spatial, environmental, and pedagogical (Burnard & Haddon, 
2015). In the field of education, creativities are not reducible to simply “innovation”; 
in the field of business, the meaning of creativity is sometimes taken as “entrepre-
neurship”; in the disciplines of mathematics and science, creativity is equated with 
“problem solving”; and in the discipline of music, creativity can include “composi-
tional,” “improvisational,” and “performance” creativities. The role that creativity can 
play in learning has long been considered by educational scholars such as Craft’s 
(2011) “possibility thinking” or Beghetto’s (2016) “creative learning” and “mini-c” 
constructs. There are meta-analyses that empirically demonstrate a relationship 
between creativity and academic achievement and creative learning in the classroom 
(Gajda, Beghetto et al., 2017; Gajda, Karwowski et al., 2017). It has been argued that 
creativity can foster learners’ original thinking, increase their engagement in the 
learning process, and boost their motivation (Kaufman, 2016; Kaufman & Sternberg, 
2010); it has also been identified as an important component of problem-solving and 
cognitive skills (Plucker et al., 2004). The incorporation of creativity into curricula is 
176  Review of Research in Education, 46
an increasingly popular topic in the field of education (e.g., Amabile, 1996; Craft, 
2011) as well as in various other fields (Bloom & Dole, 2018; Csikszentmihalyi & 
Wolfe, 2014). Creative pedagogy refers to teaching that enhances creative develop-
ment via three interrelated elements: creative teaching, teaching for creativity, and 
creative learning (Lin, 2011). Cremin et al. (2006) argue that three core elements of 
creative pedagogy must be present if it is to facilitate the development of creativity: 
standing back; providing opportunities for learners to initiate activities or make 
choices; and giving them time and space to develop new ideas. Creativity has also 
been described as the ability of individuals to create novel and valuable ideas or 
thoughts, and to analyze, polish, and assess their own or existing ideas to increase 
creative efforts and routinely produce creative results (Perkins & Simmons, 1988). 
What constitutes a creative person was further elaborated by Robinson (2015), who 
stated that the skill of creativity enables individuals to think at their own pace, to 
identify and solve crucial problems. Viewing creativity as a cultural and systemic 
value, Zhao (2012), a thought leader on creativity, entrepreneurship, and entrepre-
neurial students, argues that the jobs of the 21st century will need workers who have 
flexibility, adaptability, innovativeness, and creativity.
Gardner (2006) argued that a creative person questions the status quo and is not 
afraid of failure when challenging accepted ideas. Williamson (2011) highlights that:
a creative act is the production of a solution to a novel imperfectly defined problem, and, whether in 
science or the arts, this requires the clear definition of the problem and the view of a best answer as 
identified by the problem solver. (p. 42)
While his findings are insightful, his argument perpetuates the old binary that 
“science aims to explain natural observable processes in the world while the arts aim 
to interpret the world through the expression of the artist” (p. 42). MacKinnon 
(2005) outlines three different types of creativity. The first is artistic creativity, which 
includes the creative person’s inner perceptions, needs, and inspirations. The second 
is scientific creativity or technological creativity and it deals with novel solutions to 
problems of the environment but demonstrates little personality of the creator. The 
third is known as hybrid creativity and it is found in fields such as architecture, which 
demonstrate novel solutions to the problem as well as the personality of the creator. 
Arguably, this creative hybridity has been attempted in recent pedagogical innova-
tions such as maker education. While creating spaces for problem-solving, cross-dis-
cipline, and creative activity within and beyond educational settings (Schad & Jones 
2020, p. 70), the maker movement is significantly underpinned by constructionist 
and constructivist frameworks. This alignment focuses attention on the cognitive, 
learning gains from making, recognizing that “many of the conversations on the 
maker movement are framed around improved motivation, positive attitude towards 
STEM subjects, and improved learning outcomes in specific content areas” (Schad & 
Jones 2020, p. 70), and that the discourses and practices of aesthetics and the arts 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  177
continue to be suppressed, and the material continues to be viewed as inert objects or 
artifacts (May & Clapp, 2017).
If transdisciplinarity, as we argue throughout this chapter, is the means by which 
new research practices can ensure change, and if the work of educators is to creatively 
apply the latest education research and thinking, transcending paralyzing policy, then 
how can we reformulate change agendas to democratize creative educational experi-
ences? How can we inspire educators and policy makers to mobilize new models of 
authoring change? And how do we learn to support and scaffold new ways of know-
ing, being, and doing, to enhance children’s distinctive and diverse styles of creativi-
ties? Research has shown that children’s imaginative renderings of knowing, seeing, 
thinking, and doing are very different to those of adults (Barrett & Tafuri, 2012; 
Burnard & Younker, 2008; Hickey-Moody et al., 2021; Murris, 2016; Murris et al., 
2021). How can we create quick and nimble change solutions and alternative ways 
into new subject disciplines, and new ways of working collaboratively at the indi-
vidual and collective level? These are exceptionally important questions that require 
significant shifts in current theorizing and practice in education.
Why Posthumanism Matters in Creativity Education
Socio-material accounts bring up the possibility of new readings of creativity that 
address the development of the subject, or how one becomes in relation with others. 
Posthumanist scholars such as Barad (2007), MacLure (2013), St. Pierre (2020) and 
Braidotti (2016) encourage us as researchers and educators to take up the concepts of 
“entanglement,” “transdisciplinarity,” and “intra-action” to track down the very many 
ways that humans are enfolded within and intercede in hybridized creativities. We 
also seek to problematize—and keep troubling—the ontological and epistemological 
perspectives that separate subject and object, thus shifting creativity from the intel-
lectual realm and centering the democratizing of creativities in dynamic processes of 
being and becoming. We aim to work towards a conception of dialogue whereby 
participants are simultaneously students and teachers: “a collective knowing and 
doing: an ecology of practices” (Haraway, 2016, p. 34). So, drawing on the synthesis 
provided by Braidotti (2016), we draw upon three main “slits” of diffractive analysis: 
(1) the notion of matter as vibrant, or inventive life, stressing the self-organizing force 
of all living systems (Fraser, 2006, as cited in Braidotti, 2016); (2) a posthumanist 
performativity to define human and non-human interactions; and (3) a living ecol-
ogy, which transcends the notion of power as the masculine, white body, to recover 
the notion of power as potential, that is, the unfolding and becoming of the subject 
in relations.
This position on knowing puts creativity at the service of democratic participation 
by enabling the inclusion of diversity and difference, of languages, and modes of 
knowing and being. That is how creativity may fuel “curiosity” in learning: not in the 
sense of uncovering a reality out there, but as a way to critique the politics of the vis-
ible, enabling a redistribution of what is seen and heard in a learning environment, 
178  Review of Research in Education, 46
understood as an assemblage of physical, emotional, psychological, and affective 
forces (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 400). As Coole and Frost (2010) advance, 
materiality is plural, open, complex, uneven, and contingent: new materialist ontolo-
gies “understand materiality in a relational, emergent sense” (p. 29), with a focus that 
extends from globalization to issues of identity.
From this perspective, we are not simply trying to democratize creativity beyond 
individualized concerns. Instead, we are seeing creativity as the realm of ethical 
inquiry (Braidotti, 2019b): as the ability to see through different eyes; interrupting 
patterns of exploitation; forging alertness to the political and cultural dimensions 
of the educational space; and enabling children and their teachers to explore the 
unknown and unexpected. We now turn to evidence from posthumanist readings 
across three projects involving transdisciplinary creativities in STEAM 
configurations.
PART 2: THE EVIDEnCE FRoM THREE PRojECTS
In this section we interrogate the notion of transdisciplinarity and reinforce the 
notion that transdisciplinarity is at the core of democratizing creative educational 
experiences. A central, overarching question guides the diffractive analysis across all 
three projects: “How do science and arts teach together and enact democratizing 
creative educational experiences?” As we undertake a diffractive reading of the evi-
dence from a posthumanist stance, we look at and interpret the empirical materials 
through different viewpoints, aided by the posthumanist literature that is offered here 
as reading with and again without (Haraway, 2016; Jackson & Mazzei, 2013).
In analyzing the evidence collated by the authors working across different educa-
tional contexts in the three studies,1 we capture the deterritorialization of disciplines, 
and how transdisciplinarity is performed and galvanized through diffraction. The 
three studies were selected and brought together here to speak to one another as they 
bring together experiences across international contexts (the United Kingdom and 
South Africa); across academic and practical subjects (music, math, visual arts, sci-
ence, and gardening) and across different student populations: further education, 
teacher education, and primary education. Following Cole (2021), the three studies 
were not selected for comparison according to features determined at the outset. 
Rather, they are offered here as experiences in which we—as authors—have been 
personally involved, in the frame of a science that “is open to the changes and pertur-
bations of the real” (p. 103). The diversity of subjects and participants enables us to 
explore a wide range of diffractive possibilities of educational discourses centered on 
representationalism, which underpin our dissatisfaction with the traditional proposi-
tion of “STEM plus arts,” and the search for radical methodological innovations.
As explained earlier, diffraction understands phenomena as inherently different 
and differing in terms of time, space, and matter, but also as deeply relational. 
Different to analysis which is informed by a set of identifiable categories or themes, 
the potential of diffraction is explored as movement, relational intensity, and affective 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  179
difference (Rotas, 2015), as part of sensorial ecologies of embodied practices. The 
same can be said for its troubling of the outdated hegemony of siloed disciplines with 
their “either/or” logic (Braidotti, 2019b, p. 39). In a similar vein, by using diffraction 
we refrain from trying to justify our projects as tools for more creative or effective 
mastery of concepts and skills; instead, we wish to add detail about the new science 
(Cole, 2021) and how this can help us uncover new and different dimensions of what 
it means to be educated.
First Project: Re-Territorializing Music Through Transdisciplinary 
Improvisation
In the first project, working with music student teachers, we identify and theorize 
a posthumanist transdisciplinary pedagogy of “making with” (Cooke, 2020). 
Exploring “teaching as improvising” challenged habitual relationships between 
humans and non-humans, explored and extended ways of knowing, and disrupted 
disciplinary assumptions about the passivity of instruments and materials through 
emerging notions of vibrant matter. De-coupling the term “improvising” from our 
music education context also allowed the materiality of science and the materiality of 
music to meet, re-territorializing the term “improvising” and our experiences of it 
and, as a result, allowed “making” to be done differently.
Initially, the “pluriversality” (Perry, 2021) of the term improvising—and similarly 
of the term “instruments”—was not immediately and explicitly recognized by the 
group of music student teachers, where some noted an initial discomfort with the 
term, linked to their previous experiences of musical improvisation. Therefore, the 
project involved exploring together, revealing connectivities, generating opportuni-
ties to traverse disciplinary boundaries in order to keep the term and our understand-
ings of it dynamic and fluid. Through this constant movement we were re-experiencing 
and repositioning our bodies, our assumptions, and our relationships with each other 
and our material world.
In the course of the project this posthumanist transdisciplinary exploring created 
a diffractive “melting pot” of different improvising practices and experiences. These 
different forms of improvising emerged from literature, experiences of the group in 
the project’s workshops, experiences of the group when teaching in schools, seren-
dipitous events which caught our attention during the project, and past experiences. 
They included theatre improvisation (with the roles of accepting, blocking, and sta-
tus play), contact improvisation dance (paying attention to the role of touch, and 
ideas of moving/feeling with), natural world processes (noticing variation in response 
to environment and material relationships), artistic perspectives (particularly fauvist, 
cubist, and sculptural works of improvisation), and experiences of early childhood 
(noticing play as improvising and children’s body–matter relationships). Allowing 
these posthumanist transdisciplinary experiences to diffract with our music discipline 
views of improvising was to diffractively “make with” each other a different under-
standing of the term, which was not only a linguistic construct, but a different “lived,” 
180  Review of Research in Education, 46
experienced, felt, and embodied understanding. It was not a deterritorialization as a 
destructive shift away from our disciplinary knowledges and experiences, but a con-
structive remaking, a re-territorializing, to find new experiences, words, and relation-
ships, which all provided generative ways to democratically and creatively re-view our 
practices of teaching, teacher education, and music education.
A significant part of the retelling of improvisation was the intra-action of our bod-
ies and materials, where neither was inseparable from the other and neither was hier-
archically superior. This was most explicitly seen when we improvised with playdough. 
The initial contact or entanglement with the material was sometimes hesitant, some-
times bold, but always an exploration together (see Figure 1). What can my hands 
and you, “the playdough,” make together? What will you allow me to make? What 
will I allow you, “the playdough,” to become?
Some of the group moved quickly onto trying to make a form, trying to impose 
themselves into or onto the material, with a hylomorphic view (Ingold, 2009) of 
making and our relationship with the material world. However, our experiences were 
not an easy story of inert matter (hylo) yielding to the human-designed form (mor-
phic). There were many moments of improvising the body–matter relationship where 
FIguRE 1
“Playing out” of Body–Matter Intra-Actions
  
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  181
the initial plans did not work as expected, where different approaches or strategies 
were needed, or where forms had to develop into new ideas.
Our transdisciplinary exploring of improvising in physical, touchful, playful, 
material entanglements made us pay attention to the inseparability of improvising 
within body–matter relationships. In these relationships neither human nor more-
than-human materials could dominate or impose themselves on the improvising, 
which was a becoming together in vulnerable, creative, democratic intra-action. This 
raised significant questions for us as music student teachers and teacher educators 
about the role of materials, the role of bodies, and the role of exploratory making in 
our classrooms. It “troubled” notions of the teacher as facilitating making practices 
with already expected outcomes, and the separability of teacher/pupils, pupils/mate-
rials, teacher/materials in making. Instead, it asked us to re-territorialize making in 
music education as mutualistic and dialogic, where we are all entangled in vulnerable 
relationships of making with each other (Braidotti, 2019a; Haraway, 2016).
A second retelling of improvising through our transdisciplinary exploring was our 
in-the-moment attentionality to voices. This was not just an audible “hearing” of 
spoken (or written) words, but instead was a re-hearing of voice in improvising as 
equally belonging to humans and materials. Developing Trausan-Matu’s (2020) argu-
ment for a polyphonic view of collaborating in relationships, where there are many 
“interanimating voices” (p. 455), our experiences of verbal, musical, and material 
improvising incorporated polyphonic “intra-animating” voices. This was most explic-
itly seen in a sequence of musical improvisation (see Figure 2) in which a pen emerged 
into the space.
The pen, as synonymous with classroom environments, was “already part of the 
dialogue” (Hetherington & Wegerif, 2018, p. 31); however, changing the use of the 
pen to being an active voice in the improvising was not only to change its role, but to 
interfere with perceptions of who or what is allowed in the musical space (Allsup, 
2016). The voice of the pen was not separated or isolated but was intra-animated by 
bodies, by its entanglement with the other voices in the improvising, by touch and by 
sight. It was “animated” not only by the sound it produced within the group of music 
student teachers at the front of the room, but through its ability to pull the attention 
of the other group in the room towards its voice. In becoming part of the vocal 
polyphony, it changed the story of “voice,” “instrument,” and “sound,” queering pre-
vious expectations, routinized behaviors, and concepts of what was expected, what 
was allowed, and what voices were privileged in the space.
This retelling of voice within improvising as one of polyphony between human, 
material, bodily voices—each contributing and making us pay attention—raised 
questions about our teaching practices. It asked us to consider what voices we privi-
lege over others in our classrooms. Which voices do we allow to be intra-animated, or 
do we block some from “voicing” themselves as part of making? What are the impli-
cations of intra-animating voices for notions of agency and student voice in decision 
making within the classroom?
This troubling of our existing disciplinary notions of improvising was not to dis-
miss them, letting go of our disciplinary experiences and understandings of 
182  Review of Research in Education, 46
improvising. Rather, it was a significant enhancement, an entanglement which led to 
deeper, more attentive understandings of our practices and the creative, generative 
power of allowing improvising to be understood in more-than-disciplinary-expected 
ways. Evidence from this example points to the first dimension of a reconceived form 
of education and of being educated—as first outlined by Biesta (2020)—that is, 
moving away from students as the object of education to being subjects of their own 
action. The first level of evidence provided here is thus a re-ordering of priorities 
made visible in music making by the shift from an act of delivery (of the script, or the 
composition) and mastery of the materials/instruments, to a place of understanding 
the difference that students can make in their own entangled being, being attentive 
and attending to the demands of a world in the making.
Second Project: Re-Territorializing Math and Arts Through Mathartworks
The second study features the diffractive reading of one of 200 drawings of the 
meeting of mathematics and visual art (what we called “mathartworks”) created by 
secondary school students (Fenyvesi et al., 2019). This example will bring into focus 
the contribution of transdisciplinary creativity.
Euclid’s statement: I made it clear that Mathematics could have a positive or negative impact. A few examples 
of how we experience Math daily are measurements of our clothing; which is why you will see the right side has 
measurements that are in centimetres which is used to measure clothes. Clothes require accurate calculations 
together with the fact that our bodies are asymmetrical; which you see, the left side does not look like the right 
side. The simplicity which is how the effect of maths has been ignored and neglected. It shows the reality of 
FIguRE 2
Intra-Animate Improvising Voices
  
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  183
Mathematics, that even though it is interesting and effective, Mathematics could prove to be stressful especially 
for stressed teenagers who have other interests. His head is slightly bowed to show the negative impact. The hands 
which cover the face are an indication of frustration. The answers to the equations represent that there is always 
a solution. I placed the equations on different places to show that there are different ways to get the answer. The 
two sides have different shading as indication to the positive (simple art, no shading) and negative (complicated 
side with shading) influence of the subject on a person. I call it “The Stressed Vitruvian Man.” It’s a modern 
version of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man with his arms open and legs spread out.
This young man’s drawing (Figure 3) focuses on himself, his hair, his hands and 
his body, and shares how he thinks of and experiences the consequences of mathe-
matics education. It seems that this young man’s understanding of learning is based 
on an essentialist view where he is judged (and seen here to be judging himself ) in 
relation to his own mathematical development and progression, and status (or lack 
of ) as a mathematician. The monotonality reflects different shades of black with 
strong cultural references. The bi-tonal hands are productive of difference that comes 
to matter, with cultural associations of anxiety, emotions, and bodily reactions which 
connect and take action with/in his body. He communicates stress, solemnness, and 
seriousness. Does this produce a view that normalizes young people in accordance 
with dominant views on mathematical development?
This young man seems not to separate mathematics from art. He seems to be 
thinking with and through the relational nature of mathematical concepts, expres-
sion, and form. We also see that the human body is the seat of mathematical knowl-
edge. Euclid’s art reveals that he is a knowledge producer: He is making with 
mathematics and art. We connect with a young man and his creative educational 
experience of mathematics and art, which is inscribed on his body.
What else is going on here? Karen Barad (2007) argues that you cannot isolate 
knowing from being, since they are mutually implicated. We see this clearly in this 
drawing (Figure 3), which is putting to work a mediated image of Leonardo da Vinci’s 
Vitruvian man. We see a close material-discursive relationship, displaying what 
appears to be more than a subject–object divide. As Karen Barad states, “knowing is 
a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part” (2007, p. 185, 
emphasis added). We connect with a young man. We connect with the math equa-
tions inscribed on his body, from his body, through his body. We see the math doing 
something to him, stressing him out, closing him down. All of these are overlapping 
forces. They are entangled with/in his body, clothes, gestures, and emotions in the 
production of his realities as he becomes The stressed Vitruvian man. With his head 
held and almost hidden between his hands, with just a tiny peephole to see through, 
his divided body and divided encounter with mathematics materializes in the careful 
pencil shading. Barad (2007, p. 91) states very clearly that the point is not that know-
ing has material consequences, but “practices of knowing are specific material engage-
ments that participate in (re)configuring the world.”
What do we hear in the commentary about the learner questioning and experienc-
ing feelings, ideas, shifts in consciousness, and an imagining of different realities? 
Could he be trying to suspend disbelief and work in fictional contexts using a range of 
184  Review of Research in Education, 46
mathematics devices, dilemmas, and demands? Could this be an expression of deep 
understandings about the need to enact and embody mathematics learning and about 
his making the familiar strange inside the art “work”? Euclid is thinking with and 
through mathematics and art and making new patterns of thought (superimposi-
tions), deconstructing power-producing binaries (mind–body, mathematics–art) and 
showing how these disciplines overlap and change in themselves in intra-action, being 
concerned with what they do and how they are connected and co-constituted.
This sample of drawings that we called mathartworks (Figure 4) provides further 
evidence of making with mathematics and art; the power of the other to act to its 
fullest degree in transdisciplinary creativity. Mapping the posthuman within educa-
tion research and within education settings is a complicated and lively endeavor. This 
project aligns with the previous enquiry in raising a new awareness of the dominant 
discursive and material forces at play in music, mathematics, and art. These have the 
power to transform or reconfigure a new transdisciplinary field, where disciplines can 
be integrated, making a multiplicity of connections while enacting a creative educa-
tional experience of another’s reality. Returning to our evidence of a new form of 
education, diffraction pointed to a re-purposing of math as a tool for description (as 
FIguRE 3
The Stressed Vitruvian Man by Euclid
Note. Euclid is a male, aged 16 years, in Grade 11 at a private school that facilitates learners from less 
privileged backgrounds and thus has a socio-economically varied environment. Artwork entered into the 
2018 MathArt Competition; reproduced with permission.
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  185
the anthropometrics of body features, race, and gender) and to a process of interpre-
tative freedom about one’s being and one’s presence in the world.
FIguRE 4
A Sample of other Mathartworks Drawings
Note. Left top “Cutting apart the tessellations” by Sibangan Matsa; right top “Proportionally equal” by 
Jemma Fourie; middle left “My universe is an illusion” by Simon Botha; middle right “From ‘Power’ 
to ‘Sweetness’ to ‘Sight’” by Faye Breytenbach; bottom left “What I see” by Kyla Kirton; bottom 
right “Vitruin duality” by Catherine Geithrie. Artwork entered into the 2018 MathArt Competition; 
reproduced with permission.
186  Review of Research in Education, 46
Third Project: Re-Territorializing Science Through the Act of Cultivation:  
The STEAM garden
In the third project, in a very different context, primary school children redefined 
the politics of space in the school grounds through being involved in a food-growing 
project (Gray et al., 2019). This diffractive analysis of curricular discourses through 
children’s experiences uncovers the underlying problem of how to justify this as an 
activity of value for both children and teachers. The project was originally set up 
“from above,” thanks to funding made available by the city council’s plans to support 
communities in areas of economic deprivation in the city. Largely seen as infrastruc-
ture, the garden was set up in the school as a space for material production (e.g., 
food), although there is also evidence that gardens have been used as a means to 
improve children’s learning across different areas of the curriculum (Ohly et al., 2016; 
Passy et al., 2010).
In recounting this project, however, we are concerned with gardens as heteroge-
neous assemblages where arts, sciences, and human and non-human agencies meet. 
As Deleuze and Guattari indicated, assemblages develop in unpredictable ways 
around actions and events, “in a kind of chaotic network of habitual and non-habit-
ual connections, always in flux, always reassembling in different ways” (Potts, 2004, 
cited in Fox & Alldred, 2015, p. 401), and work like “machines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 
1988, p. 4) that do something, produce something. This notion of “production”—
that being the production of material biomass or the production of learning gains—
was diffracted in the garden space through divergent discursive lines, from the linear 
model of extraction/accumulation (of resources, or learning) to the exploration and 
impetus of the rhizomatic (whereby resources and learning are distributed over a 
material/relational ecology). Here we provide a selection of “instances” retracing the 
events and illustrating the enactment of transdisciplinary creativities.
The Plants Need Water
It was an unusually dry spring after the seeds had been sown in the garden, and 
children were allocated a day of the week to go out into the garden and water. It soon 
became clear that the plants were calling for more. The watering of the plants was a 
high-stakes matter for the children, which superseded normal curricular commit-
ments. As predicated by Braidotti (2016, p. 159), we should look not at what entities 
are, but at their material effects—what they do. As the plants were stretching out and 
growing into the garden space, growing also was the preoccupation and care of the 
children who were tasked to repurpose old plastic milk bottles as improvised watering 
cans. This was a manifestation of a classic form of scientific creativity—as expressed 
in design and problem solving (Zhao, 2012)—and a familiar dimension of STEAM 
practices whereby the “arts” stand for the creative impetus, the playful ability to stim-
ulate different ways of seeing, put at the service of an engineering or scientific prob-
lem. However, from a socio-material perspective, this type of engagement with the 
craft of making and design also re-focused the attention of children and their teachers 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  187
onto the “demands” made by the plants and the socio-material affordances of the 
learning environment. In the garden, the agency of the children and the agency of the 
plants, the weather, and the soil intra-acted to produce a new educational and hetero-
geneous assemblage whereby each element contributed to the making of the others. 
As Haraway maintains, learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together 
on a damaged earth requires sympoiesis, not simply making new things, but “mak-
ing-with.” “What is at stake. . .is a theory of ecological relationality that takes seri-
ously organisms’ practices, their inventions, and experimenting crafting interspecies 
lives and worlds . . . an ecology inspired by the feminist ethic of response-ability” 
(2016, p. 168).
The Act of Cultivation
As the plants continued to grow, so did the children’s status in the school, from 
pupils and learners to children-gardeners-cultivators. In the acquisition of skilled 
practice there was a cultivation of an acquaintance, of a relationship of familiarity, 
of kinship. Figure 5 shows the features of the ecology of mutual experimentation 
where species met through attentionality, affective connections, entanglements, and 
FIguRE 5
Learning Ecology in the School garden
Note. Photograph used with permission from parents and children and ethical approval granted by 
Aberdeen University Ethics Committee for the project “From Oil to Soil.”
188  Review of Research in Education, 46
significant ruptures with previous patterns of linear production. Children and 
teachers learnt from and with each other, and they all learnt with and from the living 
organisms taking form in the garden. A garden is therefore not simply a space of 
inert matter waiting for humans’ creativity to impose a design or a shape, as in tra-
ditional conceptions of science and mathematical knowledge (see Davis, 1996). The 
very act of cultivation of the garden depends on its existing “wild” nature, that is, the 
agential capacity of matter; the web of microorganisms and insects in the air and in 
the soil, and the seasonality and quality of the earth. As Miller (1993, p. 72) states, 
“The garden matters to people because it mediates between various ‘oppositions that 
define human experience’, such as ‘man and nature’ or ‘action and contemplation.’” 
In that sense, gardens are not simply an education about specific plant species and 
the rate at which they may be grown, but are also an education about ourselves, how 
we grow, how we learn, and the qualities we can develop.
Similarly, in its becoming, the garden ecology is not simply science, or geography, 
or horticulture. Rather, it is a living assemblage. So, too, is the artfulness of the 
human cultivators in their differential abilities to touch and gauge; to measure them-
selves up or down to the size of their plants, bringing forth a new aesthetic of the 
“sensible” and the “tangible” (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2020), whereby the biology of 
living bodies and the tactility of math meet. Rupturing through the hard and rational 
lines of disciplinary silos of formal learning spaces, the garden is an enactment of the 
distributed and interlacing agential aesthetic of “all kinds of practitioners, not only 
the humans” (Haraway, 2016, p. 168).
A posthumanist reading of STEAM in the garden thus points to a different conception of the body in 
learning. Traditionally conceived as a passive receiver of stimuli and information, or as a passive transducer 
of knowledge through linguistic symbols, in the STEAM garden all bodies—human and non-human—
were reconfigured by means of their mutual relations of attending and being attended to. In this 
entanglement lay the opportunity for a third educational turn that speaks back to the previous projects of 
making and of freedom: that of retracting from mechanical/linear causality in growing as well as in 
learning to embrace the act of freedom. In posthuman terms, this means turning away from the 
representationalist epistemology of conventional science learning whereby authoritative voices directs 
children’s attention to a pre-set curriculum (for example, naming the parts of the plants; following 
laboratory instructions) in order to transform the act of pointing into the ability to show and to respond 
to what matters and whose needs matter. This understanding of the role of the body in education resonates 
with conceptions of knowledge as embedded in action: Knowing is not separate from doings and such 
doings are not separate from the relational web that both assembles and disassembles. Such creative, 
posthumanist enactments are also expressions of the radical democratization of human and non-human 
relations. As Haraway (2008) argues, “to hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to 
pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that is tied to polite greeting, to constituting 
the polis, where and when species meet.” (p. 19)
We conclude by offering some recommendations that researchers, educators, and 
policy and curriculum writers may consider in co-authoring transdisciplinary educa-
tion as the key practice of democratizing creative educational experiences.
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  189
PART 3: nEW InSIgHTS AnD nEW DIRECTIonS  
FoR RE-VISIonIng CREATIVE EDuCATIonAL ExPERIEnCES
Painting, a music composition, a new way of seeing and relating to mathematics 
and science, cannot be confined to the discipline of one artist or the perspective of 
one beholder. The historicized practices of a creative person who acts alone in a 
particular domain-specific creativity form part of a broader assemblage and mate-
riality of human and non-human components, where concepts of making and 
makers require re-seeing as making with and makers with. So, what are the features 
of the thinking and practice being advanced by these kinds of posthumanist, 
de-territorializing practices? How might this way of working de-territorialize sub-
ject learning systems?
Making With
Across the three projects, the act of de-territorializing invited a new cartography 
of knowing: moving away from subject silos and subject hierarchies to an ecology of 
relations and one of proportions, understood as pro-portions (de Freitas & Sinclair, 
2020), where each subject played an equal and mutually supporting role in the enact-
ment of creativity and learning. Such proportionate and relational understanding of 
knowing was evidenced in the example of the Stressed Vitruvian Man where the meet-
ing of visual art, the materials, and the math acted in sympoiesis—“making with” one 
another in rendering the troubled and yet powerful folding-unfolding of the self and 
the world. Similarly, in the music improvisation example, the extended tactile and 
sensorial experiences re-configured music making through an ecology of material, 
relational, and embodied practice. Such an ecology expanded in the STEAM garden, 
which was not simply a growing space, but emerged as an enactment of arts and sci-
ences; the pro-portion of forms, patterns, and colors went hand in hand with the 
more intensive mathematical properties of size and volume, and the extensive engi-
neering qualities of height, bendiness, and sturdiness of plants and the children’s own 
bodies, as mutually entangled. Across all examples, we have given evidence of the 
power of transdisciplinarity to reconfigure subjects as “creative enactments” propelled 
by the properties of the “sensible”: not that which is customary, normative, and ratio-
nal, but that which can be “perceived” as it enters the realm of our sensibility 
(Braidotti, 2019b).
Relational (nondualist) understanding of Arts and Sciences
In conventional understandings of STEAM as STEM plus arts, the arts are largely 
conceived as alternative modalities for transferring and presenting content, often 
without much attention to the particular ways in which content can be interpreted 
and understood in the arts. Through the evidence provided across the three projects, 
we have endeavored to show the power of arts and sciences “teaching” together; not 
in an additive or cumulative way, nor as an individual act of making to further 
190  Review of Research in Education, 46
individual content knowledge, as can be seen in some forms of maker education, but 
instead as a dialectic, each one offering the opportunity for a different type of “atten-
tionality,” a way to “pay attention” and “to make sense” of the sensible. This creative 
inquiry is truly transdisciplinary in that the mathematics “would not work” without 
the art, the music “would not sound” without body–matter entanglements, and the 
biology “would not work” without the plants’ own aesthetics. The material agency 
and “vibrant matter” (Braidotti, 2019b, p. 41) of the learning ecology transcended 
dualities and divisions across subjects, along with their baggage of exclusionary, 
status-driven practices. Both across the sciences and posthumanist philosophy there 
is a recognition of the necessity of democratizing knowledge by “expertizing democ-
racy” (Carrozza, 2015). In this sense, this chapter makes an important contribution 
by firmly locating creative educational experiences as enactments of skilled practices 
of democratizing education. This contribution introduces a radical break from previ-
ous literatures on creativity, and pedagogical practices of making, by widening and 
pluralizing away from one-world, conceptual views of creativity to a multiplicity of 
mutually entangled and co-constituting but distinct and multiple creativities. Just as 
Howard Gardner (1983) proposed multiple intelligences, we have pluralized creativi-
ties which can be bounded by subject disciplines, but also engendered through differ-
ent practices in and across the interrelationships between sciences and the arts 
(Burnard & Colucci-Gray, 2020; Fenyvesi et al., 2020; Sawyer, 2003). Such transdis-
ciplinarity speaks directly to Glaveneau (2018), who asked which creativity are we 
educating for? The answer offered by this chapter is a creativity stemming from an 
ontological stance of attentionality and vulnerability, where we democratically allow 
ourselves and others to “make with one another” in complex entanglements.
ConCLuSIonS
The environmental crisis has exposed the materiality of non-human life as central, 
both as vulnerable but also as a productive and vital force (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 
2016). In this chapter we have provided evidence across three projects of new, future-
making transdisciplinary ways of entangling subject disciplines, not simply as pro-
duction and acquisition (of biomass; knowledges or skills) but as important activities 
of creation—with the potential to make a real difference on one’s life and one’s com-
munity. We have also evidenced the role of subjectivity in learning: not restricted to 
particular schools, contexts, individuals or subject silos, but rather as a co-operative 
trans-species effort that takes place transversally, displacing binaries.
We have evidenced the effects of destabilizing the ways in which knowledge about 
creative educational experiences has been traditionally construed in conventional 
readings of STEAM. Specifically, we moved away from the imagery of the “pipeline 
model” of education as a linear progression of acquisition of increasing levels of 
abstract knowledge (Colucci-Gray et al., 2019). Instead, we have evidenced a phe-
nomenological understanding of knowing and learning which is construed “horizon-
tally,” by re-instating sense experience as a prime locus of learning about ourselves 
Burnard et al.: Transdisciplinarity  191
and our surroundings (Johnson, 2007); a prime locus of understanding our depen-
dence on others, human and non-human (Haraway, 2016). In this view the relation-
ship between arts and sciences changes from one of alternate subservience to one of 
close and integrated correspondence, serving the learner by training faculties of per-
ception, attentive observation, and haptic and affective participation in unfolding 
phenomena “in-the-world” (Dahlin, 2003, p. 80). While our evidence drew on three 
specific projects, posthumanizing creativity is in fact a stance on knowing and being 
which could and should permeate formal curricula and classroom experiences at all 
levels. For example, in science, we propose a shift from the cognitive to the sensorial/
affective domains to inquire into life forms and how they are related both amongst 
and intra-species. Seeking out patterns and textures connecting the branching of a 
tree with the human bronchi provides the opportunity to deconstruct binaries 
(human–non-human), or categories (plants–animals), and in so doing democratize 
one’s observational capacities by giving meaning to everyday experiences. Similarly, 
such an approach further democratizes the creativity of working with data. Beyond 
what is normally considered the realm of mathematics or science, a posthumanizing 
approach to data would also include the shape of sound, in its intensity and textures 
that can be modeled and shaped like the making with playdough in one of our exam-
ples. Again, we suggest that such a playful, aesthetics approach further democratizes 
conventional perceptions of music education, which may open one’s sensorial capac-
ity to perceive music as the intra-actions of sound waves diffracted through bodies 
and materials. Going further, this approach can be extrapolated into other subjects 
such as geography and art and design, which can be reconfigured as sites for drawing 
out connections between landscapes and sounds, colors, and shapes, by hybridizing 
artistic and scientific methods to expand on one’s ability to see worlds anew by cut-
ting-together-apart. Such modalities sit at the core of the resulting discourses of 
inclusion/exclusion, participation/alienation from the process of co-production of 
futures (Braidotti, 2019b).
The democratizing of creativities will thus go hand in hand with profound 
questions about the democratic quality of the educational process which include: 
(1) What if the “making-with” could cut across all pedagogies and disciplines as a 
posthumanist ethical practice, generating new transdisciplinary vocabularies and 
embodied enactments that free up possibilities for focusing on the commonality 
of difference? (2) What if decentering the human becomes an experimental pro-
cess that challenges and transforms the formulaic mantra of “what works” and 
“what speaks” to only some? (3) What if these alternative visions produce affective 
flows that release/unlock and democratize co-authoring of learning, stemming 
from the intra-acting agencies of teaching sciences and arts together as transdisci-
plinarity? and (4) What if there is no bifurcation of “mind” and “body” and the 
Cartesian privileging of mind over the matter, but rather the re-visioning and 
democratizing of creativities that inspire and engage with new vocabularies for 
destabilizing anthropocentric exceptionalism? (Braidotti, 2016).
192  Review of Research in Education, 46
Importantly, the implications for practice include: (1) Doing the co-authoring of 
how we come to learn transdisciplinarity together; (2) Seeing transdsciplinarity as 
intra-actively co-constitutive of the material-discursive practices of diverse creativi-
ties; and (3) Focusing on objects and bodies, space and time, as vital materialities 
which become manifestations of their own agency and vital players through which 
the democratizing creative educational experiences gets done.
With evidence provided across the three projects we have given a hint of a new 
form of education, brought forward through a reconfiguration of practices and a 
re-purposing of inquiry: from describing to enacting, from discovering and labelling 
to co-authoring and making-with, paying attention to ours and others’ lives, as they 
come to matter. Yet, we also note that—for all projects—diffraction also meant inter-
ruption of discourses and suspension of expectations in order to allow for openness 
and vulnerability to what might emerge. Arguably, this is the most practical sugges-
tion we are able to offer here. Teachers should allow time and space for such explora-
tions and interruptions and should actively engage in “making with” and co-authoring 
new ways of doing and knowing, with each other and with their students.
Hence, here we celebrate the conceptual elasticity that feminist new materialism 
offers in a quest not to find, nor seek, solutions but, rather, to generate new ways to 
think about transdisciplinary pedagogies as practices of democratizing creative edu-
cational experiences.
noTE
1 Respectively from initial teacher education in the United Kingdom, detailed in Cooke 
(2020); further education in South Africa, detailed in Fenyvesi et al. (2019); and primary 
school education in the United Kingdom, detailed in Gray et al. (2019).
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AuTHoRS
PAMELA BURNARD is professor of arts, creativities and educations at the Faculty of 
Education, University of Cambridge, UK.
LAURA COLUCCI-GRAY is a senior lecturer in science and sustainability education at 
Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh.
CAROLYN COOKE is a lecturer at the Open University (UK) who has recently completed 
her PhD exploring music student teachers’ experiences of improvisation as a radical appa-
ratus for troubling enlightenment epistemology.