Encounters with a Narwhal: Revitalising Science Education’s Capacity to Affect and Be Affected

Abstract

Informal science education has always placed considerable importance on the emotional and physical aspects of learning science. In contrast, however, science education in formal contexts and in research tends to favour largely disembodied accounts of both teaching and learning. These commonly place an emphasis on knowledge, language and culture more than experiences, embodiments and affect. In this chapter, we explore teaching and learning of science as an embodied phenomenon. This hinges on a body’s capacity to affect and be affected. Learning science, in these terms, is learning to be affected by science as well as learning to affect science. We take efficacious pedagogy as a purposeful framing of different encounters enhancing this capacity. We apply this unusual perspective to describe the first author’s pedagogical entanglements with a preserved narwhal (within a particular museum setting). We conclude with considerations of how these encounters—and more generally science education (theory and practices)—might learn to ‘live better’ with charismatic endangered creatures in the era of the anthropocene marked by rapid ecological declines. Our general argument is that we need much more talk of embodied affects in science education and this can have far reaching consequences for science education in all settings.

Encountering a Narwhal in The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada

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