**5. Final considerations**

This chapter argues that visual reasoning (both material and digital) as performative action is now the connecting pedagogy in all epistemic fields. Its artified visual pedagogies can both transverse and/or facilitate meaning-making across art-science visual material and media borderlands in the creation of transdisciplinary 'sciencelinked identities' [10]. Science educators must now engage with the idea that current education dogma and policy gives significant value to vocational and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education over the significant contribution of the arts and all their expressive and communicative forms. Its policy rhetoric speaks to creativity and transdisciplinary futures without acknowledging the non-linear, non-hierarchical, unstable, shifting, and mobile ways knowledge emerges today within both contemporary visual communication and science education.

There is a new science communication project being driven out by a recognition of the multiple lenses through which scientific images are created, interpreted, and communicated across expanding audiences and into popular digital media. Science learning requires a shift away from the objectivist learning position to a space that reconnects the world of signs beyond disciplinary boundaries [61]. This is also true of discipline boundaries within science education. It is images that infiltrate all epistemic fields of knowledge, and the work of images is capable of making the connections across and towards new knowledge constructs. The art-science inquiry on how gifted visualisers encountered and communicated their learning cross semiotic epistemological boundaries in this chapter demonstrates student capacities to use the world of images and be imaginative knowledge generators. Awareness of the complexity of images and their role in learning, assessment, and communication in science now speaks to the skill of visual performative competency where students are scientific, critical, and imaginative thinkers and communicators.
