Keywords

Introduction and Background

I write this chapter at a time of considerable turmoil in the political, social and economic landscape, certainly in the United Kingdom (UK) but arguably across continents more generally (Monbiot, 2023). There is a strong argument, which I shall weave through this chapter, that education has a significant role to play in not only engaging young people in determining their own future but also the future of the planet itself. I argue that it is only by taking this broader, radical and more futures-oriented view that education might simultaneously steer and respond to the wicked problems that humanity currently faces. Wicked problems are those that are difficult to define and inherently challenging in finding any universally acceptable solutions (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Generally, they are symptoms or results of multiple, contingent and conflicting issues that can be used to emphasise the limitations of reductionist approaches in addressing complex social and ecological problems (Lönngren & van Poeck, 2021). Typical examples addressed in academic literature include poverty, urban renewal, equality, migration, climate change and environmental resource planning (Weber & Khademian, 2008). Writers such as Patricia MacCormack (2016) discuss how posthuman ethics creates ‘new, imaginative ways of understanding relations between lives’ and how these new relations ‘offer liberty and a contemplation of the practices of power’ (MacCormack, 2016, p. 1).

Our current education system relies upon a backward facing curriculum and pedagogy that is largely designed to cope with a linear history (Kallick & Zmuda, 2017; Osberg, 2018)—that is, if the past is understood then there might be a good chance that future predictions will follow. Predictions and predictability have in the past at best been constructed to help invent a better future, or at least to try and avoid what is seen as an undesirable one but at worst, and all too frequently, it colonises ‘the future from the perspective of someone’s normative vision of a good future’ (Osberg, 2018, p. 18) in an undemocratic way through imposition. There is an increasing recognition that certainty about the future is difficult to ascertain (Facer, 2011), to say the least, and as Batty (2020, p. 739), an architect and town planner, says, ‘the future is an unknown book, and this suggests that there is no such thing as an accurate prediction, anywhere, at any time’. In addition, Batty (p. 740) quotes Margaret Attwood (2020) as saying, ‘We live in such unpredictable times that you’d have to be an idiot to try to predict definitively the outcomes of some of the chaos and strangeness that we see developing around us.’ Facer (2011, p. 5) contends that ‘it is less to do with divining the future’ and more to do with ‘making visible the materials—ideas, aspirations, emerging developments and historical conditions—from which better futures might be built’.

In a world that is changing rapidly, and which is progressively more difficult to predict accurately, our reliance on an education which just hands over knowledge from teacher to student in an uncritical and unquestioning way becomes less valid and increasingly unhelpful (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2022). We base our major world systems, such as education, health and economics on the hope that these catastrophic events are infrequent and yet the evidence suggests that not only will they become ubiquitous but also much more unpredictable (Whiting, 2020). Our education systems rely upon, and assume, stability as opposed to potential flux and turbulence. McKinsey and Co., an international firm of management consultants, advise that the world is undergoing increasingly rapid and unprecedented change. Consequently, catastrophic events will become more frequent and unpredictable and climate change and geopolitical uncertainty will all play major roles (Nauck et al., 2021). Attempts at control will always be disrupted and yet it is, ironically, those ‘ruptions’, as we choose to call them in this book, which provide the potential spaces and impetus for creativity (Chappell et al., 2024).

The recent COVID-19 pandemic, for example, caused disruption on a global scale at every level. Supposing, therefore, the impact of COVID-19 was interpreted as ruptive rather than disruptive—as not just an interruption or disturbance to the normal way of doing things but as creative ruption—a breach or rupture—that acts as a dynamic catalyst of change. My argument is that unexpected and emergent opportunities for innovation, such as happened during COVID-19, should be researched, and tested further and the best should be built upon, not discarded. Instead of life going back to an assumed normal (whatever that may mean) COVID-19 might have been seen as a call to make radical and lasting changes. Periods of radical change could be seen as an emergent and creative opportunity (Chappell, 2018) to accept a different educational and global future, a tipping point (Lenton et al., 2008), and perhaps even more importantly as a radically changed attitude and approach to the Earth crisis.

If education is accepted as a means of preparing for the future and providing the skills, attitudes and confidence in young people which will best equip them to face it (Claxton, 2010), it is vital to adopt a creative, futures thinking mentality to provide the optimal ethical educational environments which will allow young people to survive, or better still flourish, mentally, physically and economically (Facer, 2011). It might be argued that our current educational system is ill-equipped to do so (Fielding & Moss, 2011) and insufficiently fleet of foot to adapt and change to growing uncertainty. It is this very uncertainty that provokes anxiety in young people, currently eco-anxiety (Brophy et al., 2022), but potentially it may become a more generalised futures-anxiety as life feels much more turbulent and unsettled. It is, therefore, important to examine the fundamentals of education—initially philosophically and, building on this, by different ways of seeing and being through a radically changed pedagogy (Osberg & Biesta, 2021). It is important to steer from futures-anxiety to futures-positivity by working with young people to provide different alternatives for building empowerment: democratic, ethical, personal, creative, philosophical and political.

I argue that strategies for creative ruptions are at the heart of this transformation. In these periods of turmoil and uncertainty these strategic moments sometimes reveal intense creativity (Chappell, 2018) and intensely novel and unique responses to new situations. Creativity is one of the ways in which to engage with the possible—‘experiencing what is present (the here and now) through the lenses of what is absent (the not-yet-here)’ (Glaveanu, 2017, p. 171). Emerging into this rich seam of creativity is a focus on process philosophy within which:

speculative concepts can twine with ecological theorizations of creativity with research creation, posthuman and more-than-human ethical commitments, and calls for an anti-capitalist politics of rethinking creativity for the planet rather than profit. (Harris & Roussell, 2022, p. 427)

Radically creative thinking and action are contentious propositions in a schooling system which has determinedly defended linear notions of learning, pre-determined outcome measures and has favoured compliance over challenge. In my experience, mathematics, English and science, important as they undoubtedly are, have been afforded greater prestige than the arts (BBC, 2015); the centring of the so-called academic subjects has been favoured over the practical and experiential; the actions of the mind have had undue attention as opposed to the sensory experiences of the whole body; and the centring of the human over and above the importance of the other-than-human and material aspects of our environments (Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013) has been a dominant feature of an education system which is failing to rise to the challenge of a complex and increasingly unknown future. In contrast, for example, Todd et al. (2021) highlight the sensory dimensions of human experience and the ways in which the body and the senses should be deeply involved in pedagogy; Halverson and Sawyer (2022) provoke conversations about arts in education counting for more than just add-ons to make science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) learning more appealing to students; Stewart et al. (2019) claim that the arts can transform STEM teaching and learning by highlighting creativity, innovation and problem solving as core practices (Chappell et al., 2019).

Therefore, this is a vital window of opportunity to rethink our understandings of epistemology such that we move away from an instrumentalist and linear approach to one which accepts complexity and uncertainty. This supports the idea of alternative educational futures which contest that ‘schools remain organised around a conception of time privileging predictability and stability, assuming that it can be controlled and managed’ and adopt the idea that ‘educational temporalities should rather be conceived through order and disorder’ (Alhadeff-Jones, 2018, p. 27).

Aesthetics and Ecology in Action

The importance of aesthetics and ecology as building blocks of educational experience, and subsequently the concept of aesthoecology, arose from my experiences of many years in educational environments as a teacher and in school and college leadership roles, including principalship. On moving into higher education and research I took the opportunity to analyse what it was that was pre-eminent in creating schools that worked for all (Turner, 2019).

Inherent in my suggestion that aesthetics and ecology are vital components in promoting educational richness was that these ingredients actively elicit the emergence of meaning rather than just being concerned with the transfer of meaning from teacher to student. Fundamentally, and I pursue this in greater detail later in the chapter, I interpret aesthetics as perception and how the world is viewed, our sensorium, on many different levels, in space and in time. The sensorium might be defined as ‘the total character of the sensory environment which together includes sensation, perception, and the interaction of information about the world around us’ (Duncum, 2012, p.183). However, it seems apparent that our own individual perception makes little sense unless it is intimately connected to the material and animate entities of the world beyond our own body (Berleant, 2010; Ingold, 2022), and to be in dialogue with the world. This may be other people, other organisms and/or, for example, the architecture (natural or otherwise) of our immediate environment—the places and spaces of temporal existence. This I interpret as our ecology. Consequently, I relate the sensory and affective dimension, the aesthetic, with the environmental dimension, the ecological (Turner and Hall, 2024). I contend these work in a symbiotic relationship thus forming the aesthoecological dimension of our being.

To illustrate this, I draw upon my experience, for example, of the development of an art gallery at the heart of an expanding community collegeFootnote 1 within which I was the principal. Staff from the arts faculty requested that money for building projects be put aside to develop a gallery rather than other types of arts facility. Instead of just seeking better facilities for their timetabled teaching, they wanted to experiment. They felt that a gallery used by all would lead to various interesting developments, but they did not have specific outcomes in mind. This presented as an opportunity to exploit the new—to create spaces in which the new could arise spontaneously, and outcomes, rather than being pre-determined and measurable, remained open-ended, speculative and exploratory. This represents the notion of emergence (Osberg et al., 2008) which became a central feature when I was considering the importance of both the aesthetic and ecological foundations of education.

The understanding and adoption of emergence as central to learning requires a different mind-set and range of skills from the teacher and from schools, and a high degree of empathy with students and the spaces and materials with which they work. This is not an exclusive strategy but might be considered as complementary to other pedagogical approaches. The idea of creating a gallery was contentious because there was also a view that money could have been spent in more conventional ways to produce more standardised teaching spaces. However, conventional ways of being rarely produce creative change and so there are times when it is appropriate, albeit risky, to do things differently.

The raison d’etre of a gallery is to give the arts a high profile but it has the potential to do much more than that. Potentially, it becomes a space for transdisciplinarity to flourish, creating spaces for the harmonious integration of different disciplines (Nicolescu, 2010). The arts would be valuable to all other faculty areas, not an isolated subject (Hall & Turner, 2021). It might engender a culture in which the arts became an intrinsic part of what were seen as the academic subject areas. It would contribute to greater morale amongst students who would have their work displayed, it would encourage greater use of graphics, pictures and drawing to convey information in non-written ways, it would value cross-discipline discourse, dialogue and debate and it would enhance community involvement (Cultural Learning Alliance, 2023). No-one knew exactly how this would unfold but above all it was exciting, creative and new. It was not about attainment targets decided on beforehand, it was about values and affectivity—an immersive aesthetic experience within a creative, ecological space of what-might-be.

It was within these sorts of educational experiments that lay the potential and importance of various combinations and associations between aesthetics and ecology. The associations became so strong and intimate that the symbiotic relationship suggested an amalgam between them—an aesthoecology. Apart from the more holistic philosophy and practice of aesthetics and ecology combining concepts of affective anticipation, liminality and emergence became intrinsically and extrinsically apparent. I examine each of these characteristics in relation to the art gallery in detail.

Affective Anticipation, Liminality and Emergence

On entering most formal spaces in educational contexts there is an expectation of how to be in those surroundings, a presumed understanding of what is to happen and a normative pattern of events. It has become assumed that good practice is for certain models of behaviour to be followed—an understanding of the plan, and a set of aims and objectives from both student and teacher alike. If you go into a lecture theatre or classroom you are expected to be relatively quiet, find a seat, prepare yourself for what is to come and be attentive. All perfectly fine for certain types of events but often the unexpected, the unanticipated and the novel are powerful learning triggers. Rather than being disruptive, which can be seen as negative and unhelpful, they might instead be interpreted as ruptive events—a change and a cleaving from the norm which produces a creative and aesthoecological opportunity.

Entering any space for the first time creates an overall feeling of heightened anticipation. The senses are on alert as a new territory is encountered made up from other people, the material surroundings, new shapes, sounds, smells and things to touch. Understanding the differences there are in the way people perceive and relate to the complexity of the environment is important in understanding the potential of assemblages (DeLanda, 2016) in effecting and affecting their behavioural ecology. The term assemblage is a philosophical approach which frames social complexity through fluidity and connectivity. It proposes that people do not act exclusively by themselves, but instead human action requires complex social and material interaction. Each of the elements contributing to this ecology are referred to by Bennett (2010) as actants, and she speculates on the question of their role in political activity.

The emotions and general sensitivity produce a state of affective anticipation (Osberg, 2018; Turner, 2019). On entering the gallery, the hope was that the eye would be drawn to the exhibits. What was the theme and what were the questions the artefacts asked of the observer? Did they tell a particular story, if so, who’s story? Did the artefact produce an emotional response? Were they of people, places, events, catastrophes, wildlife? Feelings, emotions and general affective state induced by the room, the exhibition and the people, are important factors in how feelings are oriented and the ways in which interaction takes place.

For example, in its extreme form one becomes aware of affective anticipation in working with children with autism who often have very heightened sensitivities. The following description of intense sensory immersion exemplifies the affectivity and connectivity of people, spaces and things. While it is possible to empathise with those who experience the extremes of sensitivity it is not possible to be that person, but an ethical space can be shared (Ermine, 2007)—that which respects individuation and diversity, sentience and materiality alike. A mother of two children with autism describes in the book, George and Sam, their first day at school and their sensitivity to the school environment:

[S]trip lights flicker, radiators hum, the chatter of other children is bewildering and incomprehensible. The walls are covered in a confusing jumble of colour and sparkle. Classrooms are rearranged – you’ve just got used to one layout when you have to start all over again. Smells of cooking or cleaning fluid, or even the teacher’s perfume, are overpowering. You can’t take in the teacher’s instructions – she talks too fast, and her earrings jangle. (Moore, 2004, p. 177 from Turner, 2019 p. 60)

Students and staff, on entering the college gallery for the first time, reported that the newness of the surroundings, the plethora of emotions and feelings it might elicit, and its success came from the idea that it was a shared space in which there was no right or wrong way to be. Paramount was respect for other people’s space so that everyone could experience it in their own way and in so doing appreciate individuality. The notion of aesthoecology is exemplified through deeply recognising the affective nature of the experience; by acknowledging the importance and influence of the surroundings, both animate and inanimate; and, how to relate ethically to that space. By ethically, I mean respecting the space, being aware of one’s place in it and the rights of others who are also there, have been there or will be there (Bozalek et al., 2022). To have your own centrality displaced is an ethical and empathetic positioning.

Therefore, the significance of affective anticipation is that it prepares us for a perception of the world as continually unfolding, and as a persistent positioning of the not-yet thus leaving space for the indeterminate and for creative ruption. Osberg (2018, p. 14) refers to this as a space of the ‘not-yet-possible, one which cannot yet be imagined’. Affective education is used as a term to describe significant dimensions of the educational process concerned with the feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions of individuals within their inter- and intra-personal relationships. An inter-relationship, the ecological position, is that which connects to the environmental situation, awareness of the world around and the development of empathy (Matravers, 2017) towards each other and to the planet in its entirety. My definition of an intra-relationship, in this context, is an awareness of one’s own feelings, emotions and sensitivities. Awareness is a key element of affectivity and represents the aesthetic position.

The time leading up to the development of the gallery was a prime example of a period of affective anticipation. A period of intense creativity and envisioning, of curiosity and critical awareness of what this development might yield and excitement (tinged by trepidation) for the future. It held the possibility of change which went much more widely than the gallery itself influencing perceptions of what might-be, nothing definitive but calling to future possibilities.

If it is accepted that this space, in this case the gallery, is full of possibility the reality of which is tentatively or eagerly anticipated, there is an awareness of a space where change might happen, but that change is importantly unpredictable. It depends on many factors. Liminal zones (Barradell & Kennedy-Jones, 2015; Conroy, 2004), as these types of spaces might be considered to be, are those within which the new can arise spontaneously—they are entered through and across boundaries, and they keep the future open. In the case of the gallery, in retrospect, the idea was to produce what I now philosophically recognise as a liminal space—open-ended voids of opportunity where outcomes were not predictable. This relies on a spontaneity of action in which students and staff interact with each other and with the material contents of the space—an aesthoecological relationship. Liminality represents the importance of transition from one state to another and the idea of spaces of appearance (Chave, 2021).

These spaces might be considered as a—‘a point in time and state of being’ (Barradell & Kennedy-Jones, 2015, p. 541–542). Liminality represents spaces or contact zones, in which there is a meeting of ideas, cultures and thoughts, which provide entry and exit points between zones of experience or understanding (Conroy, 2004; Turner, 1969). This theorises the gallery space very well. The space is entered with anticipation, there is no particular expectation, and there is an opportunity for new experiences through interaction. The nature of a community college is that it would often have members of the public in the gallery alongside children, young people and teachers from other schools. Parents and governors were regular visitors. This interaction could be very rich and varied—no-one knowing quite what to expect in terms of their learning experience. Generally, the atmosphere would be informal, but it also gave opportunity for more formal situations arising from the exhibits—discussion, drawing, role play, dance or music. It was always interesting to learn about personal experience of the moment, transition points from one state of understanding to another.

This transition is reliant on an affective way of being—a liminal state of openness and receptivity to change or, as MacCormack and Gardner (2018, p. 11) suggest, ‘affects are not concrete entities but rather self-constituting interfaces that generate both interiority and exteriority through affective encounters’. Consequently, the temporal dimension of aesthoecology constitutes recurring series of threshold moments in which, at any one point in time, understanding is in flux. I argue that this change state is not predictable or teleological but emerges from the experiences and playfulness of the moment and entails being on the edge of awareness and in sensitive anticipation of the next event. These important transitional moments move change on to a different ontological level and are largely transformational, irreversible moments which could be interpreted as a series of ruptive events.

Emergence arises from the irreversible crossing of the threshold representing the exit points from the liminal zone—points in which the new arises spontaneously. This suggests an epistemology in which ‘knowledge does not bring us closer to what is already present but, rather, moves us into a new reality which is incalculable from what came before’ (Osberg & Biesta, 2007, p. 46).

The Concept of Aesthoecology

Creatively conceived innovations such as these encouraged me to engage with concepts of aesthetics and ecology as important dimensions for influencing futures thinking in education. They became handles with which I could grasp the immense complexity of any given moment and conceptualise the myriad interactions that are at work in educational environments. Aesthetics was the medium through which body, mind and space became symbiotically alive through the senses—the affective and relative dimension of being, one with another.

In the context of the gallery, the aesthetic experience comes from the interaction with spaces, objects, people, architecture, light, dark and colour. It was important that the space offered a range of sensory stimuli at different times of the day to maximise interaction and to raise curiosity. This might, of course, be said of any space within an educational setting but when there is the intent to provide a space designed to maximise these qualities the opportunities for experimentation become far greater and can be changed on a regular basis. In fact, that is one of the stimulating features of galleries—to be a provocation of the senses.

Aesthetics can be broadly divided into three philosophical areas all of which conceptually and intimately overlap (Levinson, 2005). The first, and perhaps the most generally understood as aesthetics, is the practice of the arts and the process and production of an artistic object. The gallery was clearly able to contribute to this aspect of aesthetics. By curating different exhibitions, by highlighting different aspects of the work of a range of curriculum areas and by introducing students and others to a range of visual stimuli there was an opportunity to hone the critical senses and stimulate contemplative wonder.

The latter is interestingly explored through the recent book Wonder and Education in which it is proposed that wonder is ‘object centered’; it ‘entails an epistemic element in the form of surprise, puzzlement, perplexity or yet another form’; it ‘entails an intensification of the present’; and ‘it contains the suggestion or promise of a new, deeper or more comprehensive meaning.’ (Schinkel, 2022, p. 49). Wonder has a futures orientation—anticipation of what might emerge. All of these qualities are so central to education and yet can get very lost in many pedagogical approaches. The gallery was not only able to contribute to these practices but to spread awareness of these values and practices within and across the curriculum. It was important that the gallery was seen to belong to everyone and to be used as a resource to influence major pedagogical change.

The second characteristic of aesthetics is in the appreciation of the property or feature of things, such as an artefact or landscape, a stone, a person or an idea. This might, in the broadest sense, be defined as the beauty of something. This, too, is incorporated above. The third is an affective way of being, drawing on a sensitivity derived from our sensorium in order to create a personal understanding of the world—to understand it as it is experienced—and to value that personal positioning.

All three of these dimensions of aesthetics—the artistic, the beautiful and the sensitive—I see as being intimately entangled with the concept of affective education. It encapsulates the ethical, the care-ful, the creative and the wise inherent in the affective consciousness of being a person. Affectivity asks questions of our adaptability, our reactivity, our risk taking and our relationships (Abram, 2017; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010), each of which is essential to consider in creatively ruptive contexts—those situations, as in the gallery, in which the new and unexpected is to be welcomed and honed into epistemological opportunities.

These contexts are spaces which might best be described as the ecological situation—the temporal, the spatial and the entangled—‘an infinitely complex, woven fabric that connects all things in its intricate weave’ (Lent, 2022, p. 116). This interplay represents a continuous, conscious and dynamic process—perceiving and connecting—aesthetics and ecology—making sense of things as an ethical and intimate relationship involving humans, other than humans and the material surroundings. Morton (2012) refers to this as an entanglement—an ethical attitude that constitutes ‘coexistentialism’ (p. 47).

With aesthetics very often, as described above, the focus is arrested by an individual object or artefact. Our educational ecology, however, is how these personal experiences are connected to that of others (human and other-than-human), to our material world, to our cultural heritage and more broadly to our past and our anticipated future. Being in the gallery provides opportunities for personal contemplation as well as for communicating with others through dialogue. This captures the importance of inter- and intra-connectivity between the animate and non-animate elements of the world and the transience of individuality which acts as a precursor to important questions about the centrality of Homo sapiens and the distorted anthropocentric positioning of our culture. It is this ‘habitual inattentiveness that is complicit in our colonial appropriation of the more-than-human-world’ (Booth, 2021, p. 221) which has led us to the major global predicaments that our society now faces. This must now raise serious questions about the suitability of our current educational systems to confront these challenges and to prepare young people for the future they are facing. These experiences are opportunities for the emergent and ruptive to occur.

Assuming that is the case I develop the idea, following my arguments of mutuality, that aesthetics and ecology play a vital part together rather than apart. If they are acting as a symbiotic relationship, for example, I propose that this has substantial relevance to education and futures thinking. It creates a conceptual framework, or more fluidly a mesh or web, which captures much of what might be expected as education’s purpose in a futures context. The importance of symbiosis has been recognised in contemporary biology, for example, in replacing the previously established position of individuality (Margulis, 1981). A symbiotic relationship is not just a combining of the characteristics of two entities; rather, in their combination, something new and unique emerges. Hence, the concept of aesthoecology came into being to provide a more appropriate language, an aesthoecological literacy, within which ideas and perceptions of creative and ruptive education could be discussed and enacted. I propose that it is a highly relevant and helpful concept which contributes to the language of creative and ethical educational futures.

Conclusion

Aesthoecology is an onto-epistemology that gives us a new and dynamic insight into being and knowing. The theory of aesthoecology has ‘interesting and important implications for the ways in which educators, researchers and societies perceive education’ (Hall & Turner, 2024) and, consequently, it ‘adds value to an understanding of our global scale of existence and the impact, individually and collectively, we have on the future’ (Turner, 2019, p. 163).

I think it is very important, even essential, that as educationalists we can move from the conceptual (ideation) to the concrete (realisation) and back again, allowing each to infuse the other with the richness of practice. Only then can these ways of being enter the consciousness of practitioners. I use the example of the development of an art gallery in a community college but there are other examples which I could have used in which the focus was also on creative ruption of the status quo—to enable students and others to see things differently—and to provide opportunities for futures thinking. The philosophy of aesthoecology is applicable to all contexts of educational futures.

I refer to aesthoecology not as a discipline or as a history but as a specific way of identifying thinking about education: a pivotal (political) balance between forms of perception, thought, production and action. By political I mean that this sequence might be considered a dissensus (Ranciere, 2010), or a conflict, because collectively there is an opportunity to disrupt the status quo and to creatively re-order power relationships in the same way that ruption is a dissensus. Politics has an inherently aesthoecological dimension and aesthoecology an inherently political one.

Consequently, aesthoecology represents an affective sensitivity within a dynamic inter- and intra- set of relationships; the opening of spaces within which connections can occur and productive action can emerge. This is aesthoecology at work, the melding of our sensitivity and awareness (the aesthetic of education) with our immediate and distant surroundings (the ecology of education) resulting very often in outcomes which are unpredictable but rich in their potential. In onto-epistemological terms, an ecological practice of engagement is part of the aesthetic of enhancing by questioning norms, finding new perspectives and challenging us to act, to embrace change and, wherever possible to seek the cracks, fissures and spaces through which creative ruptions may occur.