Decolonising Primary Teacher Education through Embodied and Sensory Approaches in STEAM Education

Overview & Synopsis

Decolonisation in Higher Education has become an increasing concern, spurring reviews across curricula, policy, and research practices. In teacher education, this calls for re-affirmation of the ability of students to act as their own subjects, with the capacity to attend to diverse ways of knowing and to speak back to the overt system of modernity that obliterates, categorises, and divides humans from more-than-humans. Set in Scotland, a country with recent openings towards decolonial perspectives, this paper explores a two-day teaching experience involving 41 students enrolled in an Initial Teacher Education programme. Moving from traditional workshops to steam ateliers, students were invited into a series of arts-based inquiries, including soil painting, body portraits, and a final exhibition. Drawing on the decolonial methodology of palimpsest, data points to approaches to knowing that re-centre the body through encounters with materiality, transgress centralising discourses, and open possibilities for crafting new narratives in teacher education.