**4. Discussion: transdisciplinary artification in visual borderlands**

This section is a discussion about the students learning gathered from 2015 to 2019. All student learning was seen to embody a crossing of the borders between their scientific and artful inquiry lenses. Their artworks can be described as, being visual borderlands, occupied by signs from across our socio-semiotic world. In these spaces, the signs from different epistemologies intersect or intertwine as the students make links from their different lifeworlds. From informal learning to their school formal learning, they draw on personal experiences and the vast world of digital media. This has been a key finding of the longitudinal inquiry and audience responses to each exhibition, all spoke to being able to see both art and science learning. In this chapter, one of the key research findings is that artified visual pedagogies can both transverse and/or facilitate meaning-making across art-science spaces. Visual borderlands are the spaces occupied by the adaptive process of artification. Artification enables the students to embed the traditional humanist world of perception, observation, and illustration with the contemporary algorithmic world of curated digital scientific images. Both can be combined via different pedagogical practices from different subject fields, and as they combine, new ways of thinking and doing emerge to answer real-world inquiry questions.

These key findings are exemplified through the artefactual evidence of both Aynsley and Charlotte. It presents the concept of transdisciplinary visual borderlands learning, and it is argued that the examples presented in this chapter are evidence of how artification processes fit within a transdisciplinary learning construct. A construct where students apply two or more knowledge and skill areas to support their inquiry. The learning experiences have been interpreted by the researcher as being spaces that extend the experience to an encounter with being as becoming, to self as 'different social formations through very different assemblages, both artistic and scientific. This can be understood as knowing-in-being when learning in a transdisciplinary space. All learning carries transformational potential that is deeply embedded in the personal and 'consists in genuine learning from signs in the folding experience' ([61], p. 116). It entails folding acts that for Aynsley commence from the inside as embodied or dependent of percepts and affects [17] which are then folded with scientific understandings from the outside. Charlotte commenced from events in the personal, but her learning as an experiment commenced through the gathering of outward or scientific evidence which she subsequently folded on the inside in the formation of her own concepts grounded in her unique lifeworld experiences. The learning journeys of both are made up of expressive and shifting knowledge relationships. It is possible to see how both Charlotte and Aynsley take on ideas about the world and humanity and fold them deeply into their own sense of self; beyond being a visual art student to the consideration of a science-linked identity [10].

The learning artefacts of Aynsley and Charlotte are entwined with both traditional dichotomies of art/science, nature/culture, natural/artificial, incorporeality/materiality, subjectivity/objectivity, sense/effect, or body/thought and all collide in the performing of their unique learning. Importantly, all of these dichotomies can potentially disassemble and realign, as they intersect and intertwine as a new learning assemblage. Within an arts-based research paradigm, Aynsley and Charlotte were permitted to re-imagine how to learn, to de-territorise the art-science dichotomy. It is not as a crossing over from art to science or vice versa, but an opening up of liminal border assemblages full of possibilities. Indeed, no

science was taught at all by the fine art lecturer with an assessment brief to consider only the development of visual artmaking skills and the clarity of the student conceptual visual communication. This left any scientific inquiry to be driven by the student's past learning about reasoning in and through scientific imaging acts and they were free to imagine any assemblage of a combination of sign systems that best communicated their learning and ideas to an audience. Indeed, some students who had traditionally rejected the sciences were surprised by how much science they had actually learnt.

Beyond the key finding, that contemporary transdisciplinary art-science learning occurs at visual borderlands that facilitate the adaptive process of artification was the identification within the research that:

Science communication is now a significant field of research for science educators and that the artistic visual skills it embeds need to be considered by teachers when requiring students to represent their learning in the digital age.

Ways of knowing in science education must address the communicative goals of scientific images and teach students that all images are created for a particular audience. In so doing they teach students that the world of scientific images is indeed open to interpretation.

Learning emergent in visual borderlands is made up of different assemblages with a range of concepts and forms, dependent on the life world and perceptual focus of the student. The world of signs occupies these spaces and all images within this space are fluid. Each observer (student or teacher) will find new and unique connections or interpretations when they encounter the signs generated in learning.

Artification occurs in-knowledge generation and transversely operates across the visual borderlands of transdisciplinary knowledge. This is true for both visual sociocultural communication as it is for scientific communication.

Transdisciplinary learning is a place where the semiotic and cognitive work of image construction is now centred. Transdisciplinary learning disassembles epistemic boundaries or de-territorises knowledge and allows the imagination to enter all reasoning as science education is increasingly transformed by artified scientific media communication. This argument does not diminish the significant fundamental knowledge learnt within visual art education. Visual art education is a unique form of material knowing and communication. Its contemporary pedagogies reside within a post-structural understanding of knowledge construction offering insights into how the imagination and material knowing are active in personal meaning-making.

Science educators must now engage with the idea that visual reasoning as performative action is now the connecting pedagogy in all epistemic fields. The phenomena of fluid and online visual media communicative practices in youth today should be triggering for educationalists in these COVID times that the new consumption rituals for learning are being re-shaped by multiple manipulations and applications of imaged technologies. The visual habits of knowledge acquisition and production for concepts and communication increasingly contain unique perceptions, affectively, aesthetically, and spontaneously communicated as imaging actions. Art is now being presented as not subject to epistemological boundaries but requiring an expanded ontology [25]. The challenge that now faces teachers wishing to pursue transdisciplinary learning in their schools is that the world of assessment still essentially resides in an outcomes-driven curriculum, which embeds goal-centred planning, normalized images, and text-dominated assessment in the curriculum. This is a focus of future research with teachers.
