Professor Laura Colucci-Gray's Inaugural Lecture: Coming to our senses: the role of science education in an...

Recent news is showing spaceship Artemis II on track for the far side of the Moon, the first attempt to exit Earth’s orbit since the last Apollo mission in 1972. The Earth is once again projected on screens; and as humans celebrate their achievements in the hubris of going further and further away in space, I am reminded of the words of the astronomer Carl Sagan and his poetry alerting to: “look again, at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us”. And in thinking about the cruelties propelled by the inhabitants of this pixel, the dot keeps reminding us that we all live here: “On a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam”. How could we have forgotten?

In this talk I will keep asking this question as I recount my research journey over the years in seeking to develop practice-experiments in science education to engage the human capacity for attention. Derived from the Latin ‘attendere’, attention is not only the capacity to direct oneself towards something, but also the capacity to wait, and let something/somebody unfold.

I will suggest this capacity is strongly connected to movement and sensorial perception, often side-lined in modern teaching to favour logico-argumentative practices. Drawing evidence together from funded projects exploring attentive capacities across digital and outdoor environments, such as school grounds and school gardens, I propose that this approach to science education may open up opportunities for rethinking curricula as expansive inquiries, and to reappraise what sustainability might mean, if some-thing at all, in our education.