Dialogues Without Words: Multispecies and Multimattered Creativity in Maker Education

Abstract

In response to the tendency of making to control and harness the material world, we propose the ‘creative pluriverse,’ which can fit many worlds, as a framework to design and study the possibility of multispecies and multimattered creativity. We ground this concept in process philosophies, theories of embodied cognition, and ecological materialism to advance a posthumanist conception of creative making. Using a design-based research approach, we reimagine making, particularly biomaking with fungi, as a ‘dialogue without words’ that nurtures didactic tensions and relations between learners and other-than-human entities and elements. By examining a series of dialogues–between a boy, a tree, clay, and fungi–we observe instances of learning through multispecies creative production and discuss implications for learning design in hybrid pluriverse worlds.