An Invitation

At a time of mounting social and environmental crises, it becomes imperative for educators to reflect and reconsider the aims and purposes of education. Beyond its immediate functions to serve pre-established expectations or providing formal training in a competitive market, we consider education as a relational practice and a place of encounter within a community of humans and more than human others. What images can we look towards to help us re- imagine the ways in which we conduct our work as educators? And what forms of research and teaching practices can support us in sustaining ourselves in this endeavour?

As a place that sits both within and outside the boundaries of the home, or the perimeter of the school, humans have long turned to gardens for sanctuary from the tumult that surrounds them, or for resistance and recuperation against conflict and destruction. Standing both as a metaphor and as a lived reality, the garden encapsulates a physical and intellectual space, which is both cultivated and untamable. In its essence, the garden becomes a place of suspension and interruption, where the desire to manage and control sits in tension with the necessity to slow down and to observe one’s own presence in the eyes of the other. Crossing the boundaries of multiple disciplinary frameworks, and at the same time exceeding them, the garden is a place where competing discourses come into play, and where differences are not resolved; they are lived out.

Our Event

Thursday 25th September 2025 celebrates the ‘STEAM’ garden, a transdisciplinary construct which integrates discourses and practices of Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics with those of the Arts, Design and Crafts. The exhibition opens with a talk from the visual artist Jane Wheeler in conversation with an interdisciplinary panel chaired by Professor Laura Colucci-Gray and Dr Kirsten Darling-McQuistan (Moray House School of Education and Sport) in conversation with Rob Briggs (Graystone Art Gallery), Professor Richard Andrews (MHSES), Dr Ramsey Affifi (MHSES). A collective artistic action will follow in the Moray House quad and continue in Charteris Land with the official opening of the exhibition of artworks and poetry readings by student teachers enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma of Primary Education.

Friday 26th September 2025 focuses on curricula and educational practices, inviting participants in a range of ateliers and workshops inspired by the STEAM garden and drawing on resources and materials developed during the SENSE. project. The aim is to bring a diverse community of people into conversation to inspire human thinking about life and mortality, order and power, and for educational research to nurture greater awareness of the ways in which we come to know the world.

For more information please see our Exhibition Guide here.

The event is organised by the Teacher Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy Hub and Sustainability in Education Research Group, with funding from the Robertson Endowment Trust, UK Innovate and Horizon Europe Project SENSE. The New European Roadmap to STEAM Education 2022-2025.

Invitation to the STEAM Garden / STEAM Gardens by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0