New Perspectives in Science Education

Nowadays, the idea is deeply rooted that arts and science are drastically different areas of knowledge without any interrelation. This thought is even reinforced from the academic context, since university degrees and syllabus are characterized by the division of knowledge into "science" or "art" disciplines. However, recent research is increasingly highlighting that knowledge advances when the boundaries among sciences are crossed. In fact, new research areas and new professions are growing in the intersection of disciplines ascribed to “arts” and “science”, as a result of the need to provide creative solutions to the ethical and scientific challenges that our technological and globalised world has to face. Within this framework, in this paper, the results of the project entitled “Arts+Science” funded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) will be expounded. The aim of the project was to visualise recent research, new areas of knowledge and professions emerging in the intersection of “arts” and “science”, thereby transmitting the idea that interdisciplinarity is crucial to cope with the complexities of today’s society. The research team of the project was made up of more than 30 researchers from 8 Spanish universities whose investigations used interdisciplinary instruments and knowledge from fields such as linguistics, medicine, mathematics, technology, psychology, law, and pedagogy among others. The project was addressed to primary and secondary school students and pre-service teachers, and the members of the research team went to the educational centres to impart masterclasses about their interdisciplinary research (neurolinguistics, generative grammar and artificial intelligence, natural language processing in personal assistance such as Siri, data mining, forensic linguistics, computational linguistics, technology for social good, speech recognition, digital textualities, statistics and education, etc.). During the academic year 2021-2022, 53 educational centres were visited with an audience of 1,700 students. To support accessibility to the contents of the masterclasses, a website was designed (https://cienciasmasletrasfecyt.es/) with 25 video-based lessons (type TED talks), pictures, texts and one virtual exhibition with 22 posters, which were also printed for the “Arts+Science” travelling exhibition that visited different location in 7 Spanish provinces with 12,000 visitors. The experience was very gratifying both for the research team and for the receiving participating centres and contributed to help generate an informed opinion in society about science and, especially, about the need for interdisciplinarity training and research to understand the current challenges and offer problem-based solutions.