**1. Introduction**

*"Imagination is more important than Knowledge" Albert Einstein*

*"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?"*

*"Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" (T.S. Eliot, The Rock)*

The complexity of our current worldly condition - an entangled, relational set of human and environmental predicaments such as climate change, digital revolution, environmental degradation and the rise of zoonotic pandemics - requires new conceptual understandings of the world and consequently, different framings of education and schooling. Braidotti ([1], p. 1181) terms this contemporary phenomenon as the 'posthuman predicament'; a convergence of multiple technological, ecological and democratic challenges which, although often dealt with separately, need to be understood as connected and intra-acting. Posthumanism as referred to here is essentially a final call to '…mark the end of the self-reverential arrogance of a dominant Eurocentric notion of the human, and to open new perspectives' ([2], p. 3). The *post* means 'after' humanism, acknowledging the benefits of humanism (particularly around struggles for equity via identity-related civil action), but recognising the limitations of it regarding the reification of what is typically encoded as 'Man': that is, white, male, European, able-bodied, neurotypical, straight and so on. Posthuman thinking thus requires us to go beyond, or *after* humanism as we augment and reposition the voices of those overlooked and oppressed by Enlightenment ideas of 'humanity.' It also turns towards the body as an important and often overlooked site of learning, calling us to start our understanding from our own situated, embodied contexts in acts of the politics of location [3] which do not universalise but understand both teachers and students as individuals with facing different, often intersectional, modes of oppression.

Despite the irrefutable complexities of current times, the compartmentalised way in which educational disciplines are currently taught within English education continues to reflect humanistic, Cartesian binaries and dualisms which fail to account for our predicament, or to create new systems of knowledge which allow us to deal with the various issues differently. The siloed nature of education is further entrenched via neo-liberal practices of measurement, comparison and competition which do not allow for complexity and nuance in either practice or judgement. The emphasis is on pedagogical activities which will have a significant impact on students' measurable outcomes; not those that impact individuals emotionally or relationally [4]. Within these spaces it is difficult (and in fact counter-cultural) for teachers to find room for consideration of deeper ontological or epistemological questions around education in the current times. Alongside this sits a culture of anti-intellectualism, whereby subjects such as art, literature and science are downgraded into the kind of knowledges that can be memorised and regurgitated to suit prescribed tests rather than studied deeply and meaningfully. Thinking, in an age of academic and expert distrust, is seen as the practice of the elite (that is, the preserve of those at the higher echelons of the educational system); yet we are in a time that calls for new ideas and approaches to complex ethical dilemmas more than ever. 'Think, we must' as said Virginia Woolf ([5], p. 60); but in accelerated educational consumer cultures of product, customer and service, time and space for these activities is increasingly eroded.

Practices such as interdisciplinarity, which work towards the integration of differing knowledges and draw on diverse ontological approaches to embrace multiple perspectives can be helpful in allowing new ideas and worldly understandings to be foregrounded. However, as a practice interdisciplinary education can also be seen as pre-supposing and cementing the very disciplinary differences it purports to disrupt. Nina Lykke therefore suggests that we need to move beyond disciplines entirely by embracing *postdisciplinarity*, a term which '… refers to more transgressive ways of producing academic knowledge which destabilise, deconstruct and disrupt the

#### *Thinking, Alternatively: The Application of Art, Philosophy and Holistic Practice in the Teaching… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.114039*

hegemony of distinct disciplines and the classic academic divides between human, social, technical, medical and natural sciences'. (Nina Lykke [6], p. 333). Whilst the current constraints of 'education-as-usual' may restrict teachers' ability to truly move beyond disciplines in this way, we argue in this chapter that trans-disciplinarity - the synthesis of subjects and removal of boundaries through the transversal merging of science, arts and humanities - can help us to reimagine 'subjects.'

In this chapter we explore the challenges and opportunities for working in transdisciplinary ways across STEM subjects, focusing particularly on the role of art and philosophy. Drawing on posthuman thinking and the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Dewey and others, we consider philosophy to be an active and creative practice which can work to open new ontological positions and modes of thought. We then consider how art can work with science, not being employed as a tool in the service of understanding scientific concepts and ideas, but to reimagine what science is, what it can do, and to break down nature/culture binaries. In doing so we aim to show how transdisciplinary educational practice can aid human and non-human well-being, through reframed relations both within and without the classroom. We draw on a range of practical examples from practice in order to illustrate our ideas, not in a prescriptive sense but as a jumping-off point for educators' own innovations and experiments.

Also embedded across this chapter are quotations, stories and reflections from creative narratives, poetry and biography. In this way we emulate the practices we espouse by breaking the disciplinary silos entrenched within academic writing. This approach is diffractive, in that it allows us to read things through other things; in the same way that a pebble when thrown into water with a second pebble will cause the waves to intersect, so interrupting academic writing with creative texts will allow new readings, ideas and patterns of thought to emerge [7]. Diffractive writing, in a similar way to interdisciplinary pedagogy, allows us to be affected in different ways. In adopting this approach, we also encourage readers to take 'lines of flight' [8] in their thinking; we therefore pose the following questions to you, our reader. What other connections can you make, and what other texts or work of art can you connect to the ideas shared here?
