Cultivating primary creativities in STEAM gardens

Confronted with current global climatic challenges, educationalists are tasked to educate children for the future; however, the nature and quality of such education is contested, sitting at the interface between vertical discourses of education for economic growth, and horizontal discourses advocating education meeting children’s fundamental rights and needs. STEAM is a newly emerging construct aiming to bridge such apparent dichotomies through forms of contextualised and interdisciplinary learning. Specifically, this chapter will focus on the specific idea of STEAM gardens as a hybrid curriculum construct emerging from the confluence of children’s geographies, contemporary studies on cognition, and scholarship from arts and design. Drawing on current experiences in Scotland, this chapter will describe STEAM gardens as a new form of pedagogical innovation which re-positions knowledge and curriculum as inextricably linked to ‘space-making’, whereby ‘gardening’ resumes and exemplified modes of learning which are both academic and experiential, cognitive and sensorial, individual and relational.