Species portraits as a means of crossing boundaries to other life forms​

Beskrivelse

Abstract and extended summary
The aim of this study is to identify aspects of nature connectedness in the personal experiences of participants while engaging with the natural world. In this contribution we will introduce the concept of aesthetic species portraits as a method for facilitating an experienced personal connection between human and non-human life forms in their natural environment. We report qualitative fieldwork in the form of interviews, video recordings, photographs and creative work from a summer school held at a rewilding project area in Denmark. During a four-day intervention pre-service science teachers and science educators participated in co-creation of art-based artifacts using aesthetic methods of representation of species encountered in the area. We employed four young passionate experts to introduce the pre-service science teachers to the high diversity environment focusing on its natural inhabitants. This introduction created an immersive engagement with place. During the next days we chose subjects among the encountered species and created portraits. We identified the key themes in our data using an abductive thematic analysis with intercoder reliability checks. We discuss empirical findings from our intervention in the light of the concept of nature connectedness. We found that the process of co-creation, the immersive nature of the intervention and the personal encounters with species had transformative effects on the participant’s perception of nature.

Keywords: Affective dimensions, Field experience, Pre-service teacher education

Introduction
“Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity
with the more than human world. I’ve never met an ecologist who
came to the field for the love of data or for the wonder of a p-value.
These are just ways we have of crossing the species boundary, of
slipping off our human skin and wearing fins or feathers or foliage,
trying to know others as fully as we can.” (Kimmerer 2020, p. 252)

Science education focuses increasingly on aesthetic learning processes, particularly in relation to education for sustainable development (Heras et al. 2017). The concept of nature connectedness has been proposed by psychological research as a prerequisite of environmental engagement. In these contexts, aesthetics often enters the science teaching discourse as part of STEAM pedagogy, introducing aesthetics as concept from the humanities aimed at increasing participation and engagement (Peppler and Wohlwend 2018).

Nature connectedness is regarded as an emotional driver and has been suggested to be independent of the cognitive dimensions of science (Lumber et al. 2017). However, both aesthetics and the concept of nature connectedness have deep historical roots within the field of biology.

The natural historians who inspired Darwin and seeded the development of modern biology as a scientific field had a deep aesthetic involvement in their fields of research: In 1805, Alexander von Humboldt published his groundbreaking work on the relation between climate, elevation and botany under the title “Naturgemälde” – painting of nature – and in 1899 Ernst Häckel meticulously described numerous species new to science in his book “Kunstformen der Natur” – artforms of nature.

The concept of nature connectedness can be traced back to the ecologist E. O. Wilson’s book “Biophilia” from 1984, in which he argues that biology, as a field of science, offers an approach to understanding the living world that aligns with our innate tendency to affiliate with other organisms. Wilson invites the naturalist approach, field biology, as a formula to reengage with the natural world: “To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained” (Wilson 1984, p. 147). The perspective offered by biology allows observation of other life forms as subjects formed by the same natural processes as the observer themselves: A subject-to-subject encounter, so to speak, since humans are, biologically, one species among many, with our capacities of logic and reflection being one adaptive outcome among all the adaptations outlining the various species of our biosphere.

We explore species portraits as a way of engaging with other life forms, in which aesthetic representation of a species is interwoven with the aim of understanding the life forms we encountered. The aim was to identify aspects of nature connectedness in the personal experiences of participants while engaging with the natural world.

RQ: How does the facilitated species encounters help direct the focus of participants towards knowing a species as a non-human subject?

We will explore this research question through empirical data from a summer school held in the summer of 2024 at an unmanaged natural area in Denmark.

Method
We obtained our data from a four-day intervention during a summer school with the title: “Species, experiences and aesthetics”. The course enlisted 12 pre-service biology teachers, two early career in-service biology teachers, and three teacher educators (with a disciplinary background in biology) participating in designing species portrait activities. We took inspiration for co-creation and co-design from Sanders and Stappers (2008).

We collected qualitative data in the form of interviews, photographs, video recordings and creative artifacts produced during the summer school. At the end of the second and third day of the course, we presented portraits at a “vernissage” event where participants introduced their exhibited portrait, described meeting their species, how they chose their creative media, and the process of constructing the portrait.

Tekstfelt 1, TekstfeltIn this contribution we report an analysis of a 55-minute video sequence recorded while co-creating a definition outlining the concept ’species portrait’ (video 1), as well as two group interviews with participants at the end of the course, lasting 23 minutes (interview 1) and 40 minutes (interview 2). Interviews were semi-structured, following a simple interview guide based on the course title: Respondents were invited to reflect on species they had encountered and portrayed, experiences they had encountered and their view on the aesthetic processes they had engaged in.

While co-creating the concept definition, one of the authors of this contribution wrote keywords from the dialogue on a flip-over, creating an open coding of points emerging from the conversation. A picture of the flip-over is shown in figure 1. From these codes the authors employed a thematic analysis and developed a coding scheme (Braun and Clarke 2006). Using these themes and codes from the flip-over to code, sequentially, video 1, interview 1 and interview 2, we broke down and reassembled our code structure through an abductive analysis (Brinkmann 2014), which allowed us to recognize and include patterns emerging throughout the coding process.

Findings
Throughout the dialogue in the videos, the motif of sensory experiences emerged as a recurrent and dominant theme when describing species encounters: Respondents reported having engaged their senses in new ways, and they referred to the sensory experience of their particular species. Reports of the encountered species were highly affective, using a vocabulary of deeply personal connections, in several cases in relation to species encountered for the first time.

When asked about their experiences during the course, time and immersion became recurrent elements: Respondents reported a wide range of situations of solitude, absorption, increased awareness and meticulous studies of their chosen species. Many of the experiences reported were intimately related to place, indicating immersive engagement.

Table 1 outlines main themes emerging through our abductive analysis of the interviews, exemplified through selected participant quotes.

Selected quotes

Sensory engagement - Vanessa:”Well, I thought it was a bit crazy, that the bees had actual scents […] they smelled like onions or… lemon. And then how you were able to get up that close. I think it was crazy, getting that close to a tiny little animal, such a tiny little bee”

Time, place, immersion - Erica: “Well, this is connected to the dung. So, well, the scarabs. I simply find them cute. I didn’t know a thing about them. It’s not that I am that knowledgeable now, but this, to sit and paint them. I ended up – because I was sketching, I think I drew the same one five times or so. And then you become… it’s a really good way to learn to identify the species”

Affective species descriptions - Birk: “I think it has resulted in a much more personal affection for specifically the species you went after. You have really been chasing them for a reason, and personally I really want to learn more about them, and I think it is super interesting to capture them in a creative, an aesthetic fashion, making it more, I don’t know, personal. That is cool”.

Transformative experiences - Bjørn: “O told me about sundew, so I thought […] I will go hunting for this one. And I couldn’t find my way, and I got lost, and I was alone, and it was sort of magic to come down there and see how, well, like, the bog was there, the quaking bog was there and you had to go out there, and you could feel how it was, like, suspended, and it was embraced by the forest. And there were these tiny sundews, and I was all alone, and I nearly shed a tear, actually.”

Discussion and conclusion
We were able to mediate species encounters in a particularly rich natural environment, facilitated by young enthusiastic species specialists, and our participants were able to let these initial impressions grow and mature through a generous, curriculum free and immersive aesthetic engagement with their surroundings. But while this intervention does not reflect a common school reality, it did allow us to explore the potential offered by what Wilson called “the naturalist approach” (Wilson 1984). Our participants did not arrive with a deep knowledge of field biology, but the saturated experience of an inhabited environment, and their aesthetic engagement with particular species initiated transformative processes.

Bjørn, a participant describing his own science teacher identity as “sort of a molecular biologist and physiologist by nature, so I never really delved into the species thing” ended up being so affected by an encounter with sundew, that he “nearly shed a tear”, while Erica described going from “not knowing a thing” about scarabs to spending a whole day with repeated sketching of one scarab, and concluding that she “just found them cute” (full quotes in table 1).

In spite of their self-declared low initial level of knowledge about field biology or species, and the lack of any assessment of knowledge or specified requirements of biological facts in the aesthetic products, participants embedded many perspectives of biological knowledge in their portrayals of species, from morphological details through life cycles and habitat requirements to effects of the species on ecosystem dynamics. In the interviews, several participants expressed enthusiasm not just for the species itself, but also for the knowledge gained while working on the portrayal. The cognitive side of learning about the species emerged as interwoven with the affective connection, the aesthetics of the creative process and the awareness of the subject of the portrait as a life form in its own right. In the words of Birk: “I really want to learn more about them, and I think it is super interesting to capture them in a creative, an aesthetic fashion, making it more, I don’t know, personal. That is cool” (full quote in table 1)

A professional field biologist could be considered to be engaging in, as our opening quote from Kimmerer (2020) reads, “crossing species boundaries” by finding significant patterns in scientific data describing other species. This level of insight is not readily available in a school science setting, or even in the educational setting of a teacher training program. Our species portraits can be considered short-cuts for creating this transcendent experience of a personal bond to a non-human life form in its natural environment.

Aesthetics has an inherently transcendental aspect in that it communicates affect and emotion from one human to another. The natural sciences, on the other hand, allow us to attempt understanding non-human life forms as subjects in their own right, thus representing another type of transcendence. Bringing the two together adds depth to the concept of nature connectedness by qualifying emotional attachment with curiosity and a desire for knowledge: Science can help us understand who they are, and aesthetics can help us feel that understanding is important.

We see indications of this transformative process in our participants’ perception of nature, as reflected through the interviews.

References
Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology 3, 2, 77-101.

Brinkmann, S. (2014). Doing without data. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6) 720–725.

Heras, M., Galafassi, D., Oteros-Rozas, E., Ravera, F., Berraquero-Díaz, L., & Ruiz-Mallén, I. (2021). Realising potentials for arts-based sustainability science. Sustainability Science, 16(6), 1875-1889. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-01002-0

Kimmerer, R. W. (2020). Braiding Sweetgrass. Penguin Books.

Lumber, R., Richardson, M., & Sheffield, D. (2017). Beyond knowing nature: Contact, emotion, compassion, meaning, and beauty are pathways to nature connection. PLOS ONE, 12(5), e0177186. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0177186

Peppler, K., & Wohlwend, K. (2018). Theorizing the nexus of STEAM practice. Arts Education Policy Review, 119(2), 88-99.

Sanders, E. B. N. & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. Co-Design, 4:1, 5-18, DOI: 10.1080/15710880701875068

Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. The President and Fellows of Harward College.

Periode	29 aug. 2025
Begivenhedstitel	ESERA 2025: Embracing Transitions in Science Education
Begivenhedstype	Konference
Placering	København, DanmarkVis på kort