Art and music as a teaching aid for STEM subjects

Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects have historically struggled to be inclusive and accessible to students from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, STEM subjects have often been rigid in their teaching structure, creating barriers to education for students with more complex learning needs. Recently, there has been an increased need for compassionate pedagogy and adaptive education practices to provide multi-modal learning experiences. Our STEM outreach course, Think Like A Scientist, has been running in a number of English prisons since 2019, and started in Canada in 2023. Our students in prison often have diverse learning needs and the classroom presents numerous barriers (sensory, communication, processing, and regulation). This particularly impacts those considered with forms of neurodivergence (e.g., autism, ADHD, OCD, dyslexia, etc). In our teaching in prison, we have been conscious of creating different educational access points that is not focussed on rote learning and reading text (which some students struggle with). In particular, we have been using creative practices, including art, poetry and music, as a teaching aid for geoscience subjects such as climate change. In this submission, we outline how we have created a collaborative space between artist and student to co-create unique art and music that stimulates learning and engagement. Although our outreach programme is tailored to the restrictive prison environment, the application of its core principles to education are fundamental EDI practices that could be beneficial to a wide audience. Our work aims to increase educational engagement for students under the neurodivergent umbrella, fostering a classroom environment that is inclusive and accessible to all.