Chapter 23 Hallå STEAM!
A Performative Recasting of History, Science, Art, Language and Education
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Abstract
This chapter tells the story of how some twenty-first-century intellectuals from Finland use moments of scientific history to reconnect contemporary culture to less known scientific and artistic contributions from the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ in Finland. With a commitment to multisensory exposition, these contemporary researchers launched the Hallå [Hello] STEAM program, a series of Swedish-Finnish STEAM learning days in Finnish schools, offering various STEAM (integrated science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) activities, partially based on historical connections between art and sciences in the Swedish-Finnish context. They took on the persona of eighteenth-century scholars, artists, clergy and more so they could provide Finnish schoolchildren an unusual experience of their own Finnish-Swedish intellectual history. An interview with one of the key figures of the Hallå STEAM company, Osmo Pekonen, is presented to highlight the story of a researcher working towards the goal of legitimacy but doing so against the grain of traditional research and dissemination practice. This educational approach is committed to sidestepping the colourless presentation of carefully formatted written words and graphs. This story too will be told in a form that fits the atypical Swedish-Finnish schooldays, as a play in several short acts.