Pedagogy with a Heartbeat

Abstract

We recognize the transformative power of affect as a social and political project and the relevance of emotions to education and that it is neurobiologically impossible to take in science if you don’t care about it. Understanding that we are not separate from the biosphere and recognizing the interdependency with all life on our planet we cannot disentangle human-nature encounters. We see citizen science with a transformative potential to redress privileged irresponsibility and to create, through impactful encounters, response-ability. It offers a way of learning that reverses elite notions of science. Encounters with water are encounters with emotion. Keeping science in laboratories and libraries confirms privileged irresponsibility. Human-non-human entanglement inside and outside classroom learning, attunement, or what Latour refers to as an expansive notion of relatedness to specific contexts, offers ways of learning that reverse elite notions of science. We have seen how watery spaces and images move back and forth caring-with - through human bodies – river to school, school to river and that the e-motional is fluid and is a becoming with. Citizen science presents us with an opportunity to care-with, to promote response-ability and to open the heart to science where art and science collide through a pedagogy of the heart.