Interacting with nature in and through boundary crossing learning: A case of bioart-making

ABSTRACT Background The ongoing transformation of the interplay between human beings and nature calls for new ways of learning. Although established educational practices merging sciences and arts have been studied before, the focus has been mainly on science or technology-discipline-orientated aspects. More research is needed on the characteristics of learning that address nature and the biological through art-based practices. Methods Utilizing a case study approach, a week-long multidisciplinary project developed around bioart-making, and implemented in a Finnish upper secondary school, was scrutinized. The main data consisted of transcribed participant interviews and textual and visual material from a project blog. The data were analyzed using qualitative theory-driven content analysis to describe and understand the cross-boundary processes and human-nature interactions taking place within the project. Findings Bioart-making constituted as a boundary object bringing together different understandings of nature. Identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation processes on different levels emerged as a part of and as an outcome of bioart-making. In and through these, learners interacted with nature through intertwined events of material-experiential utilization, cognitive knowledge-building, emotional connecting, and philosophical reflection. Contribution This paper advances the theoretical discussion on integrative art-based practices’ potential, especially in relation to learning that addresses nature and the biological.


Introduction
The advances in science and technology and global crises as well as efforts toward sustainability are forcing us to see our place in the biosphere and our interaction with nature in a new way.Consequently, this calls for new ways to learn and design learning.Through this paper, we wish to contribute to the discussion on these new ways by turning to bioart (Anker, 2015;Berger et al., 2020;Mitchell, 2010;Terranova, 2016).Escaping clear-cut definitions, bioart is typically defined as an artistic practice that merges arts and natural sciences and utilizes scientific methods for artistic purposes (e.g.Anker, 2015;Berger et al., 2020;Mitchell, 2010;Terranova, 2016).Furthermore, bioartistic work is often associated with a philosophical inquiry into the social and cultural paradigms concerning our relationship with nature (Anker, 2015;Dumitriu, 2016;Yetisen et al., 2015).
In this article, we focus on learning in and through bioart.Therefore, to specifically reframe bioartistic practices as sites for learning and to emphasize learning-by-making ethos, we will henceforth refer to them through the term bioart-making.In doing so, we look at bioart from a distinctive viewpoint and see it as a form of maker-centered learning (e.g.Clapp et al., 2017) that employs the tools and techniques of sciences in varying ways and in different stages of making and creates artifacts in and through a dialogue with more-than-human phenomena that belong to our biophysical environment (Ljokkoi & Slotte Dufva, 2020).Aligning with the potentials of makercentered learning (Clapp et al., 2017), makerspaces (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014b), and traditions of art-integration, the present study adopts a sociocultural stance.This means that it observes learning as active participation, knowledge creation, skill acquisition, and identity building that takes place in and through complex networks of actors, affordances, interactions, and activities.
There is a strong body of research on integrative practices, such as sciart (e.g., Sleigh & Craske, 2017), artscience (e.g., Edwards, 2008), or STEAM (Science-Technology-Arts-Maths) (e.g.Liao, 2016;Pinkel, 2016) that combine sciences and creative processes through making.Yet, while art-based practices' inherent links with constructionist viewpoints in making have been widely acknowledged, several authors (Halverson, 2021;Lakind, 2017;Ljokkoi & Slotte Dufva, 2020;Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019) have outlined that the actual artbound processes and outcomes are still often disregarded.Oftentimes, the final artifacts and skill-building related to the STEM disciplines take precedence over them.This is even more apparent in learning that addresses nature and the biological.This realm is still mostly addressed within the boundaries of life science disciplines, environmental education, and different nature-based initiatives.Consequently, the emphasis is most often on conceptual understanding or skill building specifically framed through natural sciences (Dickinson, 2013;Zylstra et al., 2019).
We address this gap by scrutinizing a week-long open-ended project where students engaged in a series of bioart-making activities in the form of an artistic inquiry (Marshal & D'Adamo, 2011) on nature.These progressed from instructed assembly tasks to creating personally meaningful and artistically expressive photos and prints and took place at the boundaries of art and science practices.The project was implemented in close cooperation with teachers, a practicing bioartist, and a natural sciences researcher, thus expanding the perimeters of both disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
This paper aims to explore the potentials of bioart-making by focusing on cross-boundary processes and human-nature interactions emerging in the project.This is done through an analysis in which we draw from two distinct theoretical framings, namely boundary crossing and nature-human connection.In the notion of boundary crossing, we turn to the understandings presented by Akkerman and Bakker (2011) and developed further into a multi-level boundary crossing framework by Akkerman and Bruining (2016).In our attempt to understand the ways nature and the biological are interacted with in the integrated practices of bioart-making in the project, we apply the concept of human-nature connection as defined and developed further by Ives et al (2017Ives et al ( , 2018)).
Through our case study, we describe how the cross-boundary learning processes emerging as a part and as an outcome of bioart-making invite and allow learners to interact with nature holistically through activities that featured material-experiential, knowledge-based, and emotional-contemplative aspects.Drawing from our analysis and existing literature, we suggest how this kind of learning might be meaningful when navigating in complex societies where the meanings of nature and the biological are in flux.Moreover, we advance the theoretical discussion on new ways of learning by bridging art-based practices in learning, such as (bio)art-making, with the conversations on biological and human-nature interaction.

Boundary-crossing
Although learning always requires the crossing of boundaries in some form, education research has traditionally focused on phenomena taking place within the confines of disciplinary and institutional boundaries.Yet, through the widening understanding in several areas of inquiry, especially in the Learning Sciences, the focus has turned to what the potential boundaries and the crossing of them could provide for learning (e.g., Rienties & Tempelaar, 2018).These understandings concerning the potential of boundaries for learning are in line with the larger concepts of boundaries and boundary crossing that have raised a high level of interest in the social sciences over the past decades.Akkerman and Bakker (2011, p. 139) have described boundaries as "sociocultural differences that give rise to discontinuities in action and interaction."Moreover, Akkerman (2011) has pointed out that when explicated as such, boundaries generate sites for learning by inviting those involved to explore new perspectives.This makes boundaries fluid and dynamic spaces that can be understood as dialogical resources between the familiar and the unfamiliar (Akkerman, 2011).Thus, boundaries in learning can be seen as what Hecht and Crowley (2020) call ecotones: transitional spaces that are often characterized by tension, but also by novelty and innovation by allowing objects and people to both touch upon and traverse them (Ryberg et al., 2021).
The crossing of boundaries, whether in the context of learning or some other phenomenon, is often described as taking place through either key individuals known as brokers (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Akkerman & Bruining, 2016) or other entities that have become known as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989).Brokers are persons that have the capacity to bridge different sites or elements (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011).Their role of working simultaneously across different domains is seen as challenging but crucial, especially in configurations where new forms of dialogue are being established (Akkerman & Bruining, 2016).As Wienroth and Goldschmidt (2017) have pointed out, in art-science collaboration, in particular, the role of a broker and the acts of facilitation are crucial.Through thorough brokering that is informed by the power relations concerning the disciplines, it can be guaranteed that all participants are respected for who they are and what their skills are and that the scientific content is not overdriving the process (Wienroth and Goldschmidt, 2017).
Similarly, boundary objects are seen as interpretatively flexible arrangements, tools, or artifacts that allow multiple perspectives and different groups or individuals to work together.By doing this, they make boundaries visible but also create possibilities to cross them (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011).In order to be successful, boundary objects have to be malleable enough to enable the bridging of different practices but at the same time allow each participant to maintain their autonomy (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Star & Griesemer, 1989;Trompette & Vinck, 2009).As Trompette and Vinck (2009) point out, it is through abstract or concrete boundary objects that actors of distinctive social worlds can work out their differences and seek agreement on their respective viewpoints.
From this perspective, we see bioart-making as a potential boundary object, inviting spheres of sciences and arts as well as several actors and institutions to cooperate, thus generating a learning ecosystem across and around itself.Drawing from Hecht and Crowley's (2020) understandings we see learning ecosystems as being dynamic, non-linear as well as unpredictable, and having no center.Therefore, instead of emphasizing individual actors, our focus turns to the relational learning processes between and among the elements and boundaries of the system.As Leigh Star (2010) has concluded, boundary objects come into being through the very processes and actions that they prompt.
In inspecting the learning processes taking place on boundaries, we have chosen to attend to the four dialogical mechanisms identified and defined by Akkerman and Bakker (2011).These are identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation.In the identification processes, participants come to define and redefine how the intersecting practices possibly resemble and differ from one another.In processes of coordination, those involved seek means and procedures that allow diverse domains to find mutual grounds for cooperation.While identification processes are tightly linked to a need to legitimize coexistence that the dialogical (re)definition of distinct practices allow, coordinating processes require communicative connections between different perspectives and entail translation efforts between intersecting worlds or actors.Hence, the potential of coordination lies in overcoming the boundaries that are being reconstructed through the identification processes.
Furthermore, boundary crossing can trigger processes of reflection.They develop around mutual acknowledgment of the different perspectives participants or intersecting practices bring in.Therefore, they often entail adopting another's perspective to look at one's own practices, that is both perspective making and perspective taking.The fourth type of learning mechanism identified by Akkerman and Bakker (2011) is known as transformation processes.They refer to profound changes in existing practices or even the creation of new ones.This often requires the hybridization of perspectives and crystallization of varying ideas into one.Although being linked to each other, Akkerman and Bakker (2011) make explicit that the four mechanisms are not hierarchical or sequential.One does not automatically lead to another and for example transformation should not always be seen as the most desirable outcome of boundary crossing practices.Akkerman and Bruining (2016) have developed the boundary crossing perspective further by introducing a multilevel boundary crossing framework following Rogoff et al. (2002).It is an analytic tool for describing in more detail the activities unfolding or changes occurring through different boundary crossing settings.The framework acknowledges and considers boundary crossing as taking place simultaneously on institutional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal levels.Boundary crossing occurs: (i) on an institutional level, when action or interaction is initiated between distinct organizations or organizational units; (ii) on an interpersonal level, when specific individuals or groups of people from different practices work together; and (iii) on an intrapersonal level, when people inhabit simultaneously different roles and participate in distinct practices.
As stated earlier, in this study we inspect bioart-making in a setting where institutional and interpersonal boundaries were explicitly crossed.Thus, by building on the theories described above, we hope to interpret the interactions taking place between the participating institutions, and also between actors or sets of actors representing them.Moreover, we aim to identify possible intrapersonal negotiations the actors are faced with in an inherently cross-boundary setting.

Addressing nature through art, making, and bioart-making
The growing interest in the acknowledged learning potential of boundaries and intersecting practices has led to the integration of different disciplines, especially those of sciences and arts, in a variety of formal and informal learning settings, as well as at different levels of education.As stated earlier, in many instances, this integration takes place through widely established concepts, such STEAM, sciart, or artscience (Edwards, 2008).Furthermore, relatively often, the collision of sciences and art in education is aimed at building and supporting scientific or technical creativity and thus facilitating the production of novel scientific and technical knowledge or thinking (Guyotte et al., 2014;Halverson & Sawyer, 2022;Land, 2013;Madden et al., 2013;Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019;van Rijsbergen & de Rooij, 2019).
There is a growing interest in examining the position of art concerning its implications and potential for learning, especially through making (Halverson, 2021;Halverson & Sawyer, 2022;Lindberg et al., 2020;May & Clapp, 2017;Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, 2022).Prior research (e.g., Lindberg et al., 2020) shows how the maker approach can serve as a fruitful platform for combining arts with sciences and technology in ways that serve the objectives of all the fields involved.However, there is a tendency to view arts and the creative process of artmaking as subservient to traditional STEM disciplines (Halverson, 2021;Halverson & Sawyer, 2022;Lindberg et al., 2020;Ljokkoi & Slotte Dufva, 2020;Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019).It has been claimed that artistic and creative features are often added to the learning equation as a way to merely enhance students' interests in traditional, and often more valued "hard" disciplines or to add appealing visualizations, design, or crafting features to the learning of them (Ljokkoi & Slotte Dufva, 2020;Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019).However, as has been pointed out (Halverson & Sawyer, 2022;Ljokkoi & Slotte Dufva, 2020) this kind of approach does not make use of art's full potential in learning.
As Halverson (2021) points out, instead of thinking of art education through its disciplinary outcomes, we should focus on inspecting and reimagining how art practices could inform learning design and teaching at large.Ljokkoi and Slotte Dufva (2020) claim that artmaking processes enable embracing experiential, epistemological, and ethical facets of the studied phenomena both theoretically and in a concrete way, as well as providing "a better comprehension of the complex state of the current world."[197].Halverson (2021) sees that learning in and through art practices allows for the process, with the representation creation, identity building and cooperation it entails and produces, to be acknowledged as an outcome.This process over product understanding has been acknowledged as an integral part of many creative maker-centered practices (e.g., Marshal & D'Adamo, 2011;Pöllanen, 2009).Moreover, it is in line with the epistemologies of wider artbased research frameworks (e.g., Eisner, 2007;McNiff, 1998).Correspondingly, learning in and through art can be framed as a form of creative research process on real-life phenomena where the focus is not on the final artifacts, but on a non-linear and open-ended exploration that invites for the construction of new knowledge and understanding as well as identity building (Eisner, 2007;Halverson, 2021;Marshal & D'Adamo, 2011;McNiff, 1998;Pöllanen, 2009).Understood through this framing, artmaking in education can take a form of artistic inquiry that emphasizes the processes of creation over discipline-specific skills and interprets learner-produced artifacts first and foremost as "a springboard for learning and evidence of learning" (Marshal & D'Adamo, 2011).
As pointed out, there is also an increasing call for a more expanded view of nature and our relationship with nature in education and learning.Specifically, there is a demand for learning that involves, for example, emotion, aesthetic experiences, compassion, and contact (Ljokkoi & Slotte Dufva, 2020;Lumber et al., 2017;Raatikainen et al., 2020;Zylstra et al., 2019).It has been noted that bringing arts into learning that addresses nature, environment and the biological might give space for an expanded understandings of nature or the naturehuman relationship.For example, Raatikainen et al. (2020) argue that art-based practices enable the unpacking of prevailing societal and cultural conceptions of nature and can thus support transformation toward sustainability.Furthermore, Lumber et al. (2017) claim that mere knowledge-based engagement with nature might not lead to a deeper connection with nature whereas activities that involve the values of biophilia through "contact, meaning, emotion, compassion and beauty" could possibly do that.Similarly, Muhr (2020) claims that integrating arts into environmental education could function as another important lever in connecting learners with nature and invites further empirical exploration of, for example, arts-based research and practices as well as collaborating with practicing artists.
In our attempt to gain a better understanding of bioart-making's potentials we turn to Ives et al. (2017) who have theorized different types of interventions entailing human-nature connection.Through their systematic review of existing literature, they have proposed (Ives et al., 2017(Ives et al., , 2018) ) a typology of five classes of human-nature connection.: 1) material (e.g., about extracting resources from nature), 2) experiential (e.g., about direct interaction with nature), 3) cognitive (e.g., about knowledge and attitudes toward nature), 4) emotional (e.g., feelings toward nature) and 5) philosophical (e.g., about one's own or humanity's relationship with nature).Each of these dimensions is thought to operate along a spectrum ranging from external connecting (physical interaction) to internal connecting (worldviews, emotions) and to have different impacts on the continuum from the individual to a larger societal scale.Moreover, Ives et al. (2018) propose a mechanism of system leverage points, through which interventions concerning these five classes might bring about system change toward sustainability.In this framing, external connections, such as material and experiential, are more likely to have an impact on system parameters, whereas more internal connections, such as emotional and philosophical, are thought to have the potential to bring about deeper, transformative changes in underlying goals and values.
We expand the human-nature connection typology to examine the human-nature interactions emerging in and through bioart-making processes and in relation to learning.In doing so, we aim to address also the dialogical interactions taking place between learners and more-than-human organisms and invited or initiated by bioart-making and the related artistic inquiry.

Research task and research questions
Our study aims to understand and discuss bioart-making and its potentials through a scrutiny of a week-long bioart project implemented in a Finnish upper secondary school.It seeks to give a nuanced description and analysis of bioart-making as cross-boundary learning.Furthermore, our study wishes to expound on the human-nature interactions emerging in and through bioart-making.To do so, we employ a case-study approach (Simons, 2009;Thomas & Myers, 2015), and to this end, our research questions are: Q1.How is bioart-making understood in terms of boundary crossing in a bioart project of a Finnish upper secondary school?

Q2.
In what ways do upper secondary school learners interact with nature in and through bioart-making in the bioart project?

Context
Our case study describes and analyses a week-long upper-secondary school learning project designed around bioart-making.The project was implemented in the spring of 2019 in a Finnish upper secondary school of arts and music.It took place under a larger educational development project that was targeted at in-service teachers and sought to promote interdisciplinary learning on phenomena linked to the vast field of forest bioeconomy through the building of boundary crossing institutional networks.Moreover, it followed the tradition of and was linked to a series of design-based research projects aimed at examining as well as developing pedagogical models, practices, and environments to tackle the challenges posed by 21st-century skill requirements (e.g., Vartiainen et al., 2022).The foundation of these projects lies in the involvement of teachers, learners, domain experts, and researchers to both plan as well as execute interventions that build networks over formal school boundaries and communities (Vartiainen et al., 2012).They share the basic idea of approaching global phenomena in line with local developmental needs, resources, and expertise.
In this project, the participating in-service teachers were provided with expert resources on various bioeconomy-related topics and viewpoints along with pedagogical support in developing participatory and open-ended learning.In the preliminary phases of the development project, the second and the third author of this paper, both researchers and teacher-educators, were responsible for the pedagogical facilitation.At first, this entailed mapping the needs, interests, and wishes of the participating in-service teachers in addition to presenting and discussing research-based examples of similar interventions and their pedagogical basis.Later in the project, they commented on each institution's subproject plans and facilitated the mapping of available resources and building of networks but were not directly involved in the actual implementation phase.The pedagogical support was not discipline-specific and aimed at enabling participating teachers to plan and execute interventions within their home institutions.
Although supported by the larger project organization and its pedagogical experts, each participating institution had the freedom to choose and develop an approach that suited their own interests.In the investigated subproject, the focus was on bioart-making.The theme was co-ideated by a group of teachers, of whom two art teachers, Heidi and Kerttu,1 were eventually involved in the planning and implementation of the project.Bioart as an artform and as a site for learning was new to the teachers and the project organization.Therefore, further support and expertise were sought from a practicing bioartist and an alumnus, Tarmo, experienced in building artscience collaboration.Moreover, collaboration with a natural sciences institution and a researcher, Heikki, was established with the help of the development project staff.
The intervention under scrutiny was integrated into a locally organized upper secondary education project week that featured different learning projects lasting five school days.This allowed the project objectives to be rather loosely defined in terms of disciplinary knowledge and skills.The project week was built around varying themes crossing disciplinary boundaries, thus following the national upper secondary education curriculum that emphasizes phenomenon-based learning and transversal competencies (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2020).Students at each upper secondary school in the municipality were required to participate in a project of their choice in their home institution.Thus, the six students participating in the bioart-making project did so voluntarily.The participating students had no prior experience in bioart-making.

Activities
The activities learners engaged in during the bioart-making project progressed from orientation and assembly tasks to creative artistic expressions corresponding their collective and individual trajectories.The project week began with an orientation and an assembly-type introductory activity of building do-it-yourself macro photography rigs using acrylic sheets, butterfly nuts, and magnifying lenses to enable students' and teachers' personal mobile devices to function as mobile microscopes.The activity augmented students' personal apparatus in a way that enabled them to work independently and to see new functions for the applications with which they were already familiar with (see Figure 1).These mobile phone-photography-rig assemblages functioned as students' main tools throughout the rest of the project.The assembly exercise was followed by an activity in which learners collected specimens around the upper secondary school premises.Then, with the help of Tarmo and the teachers, learners learned to inspect these specimens with their self-made tools and to document their findings with their smartphones.
The physical learning environment of the project expanded as the group headed to a local forest museum.Tarmo's lecture on bioart's history as an art form gave the learners an overview of work of and media used by the most prominent international bioartists.Moreover, it encouraged learners to look at their own and art's relationship with the biosphere through the lens of a bioartist.After this, the students ventured into more independent specimen collecting and inspection in the museum and its outdoor areas, as well as photo documentation of their remarks and insights.
In the following days, the learning environment expanded even further.At a laboratory of a local natural sciences research institution the students met and started to work with the researcher Heikki.The students were acquainted with an authentic research laboratory setting with its conventions, and practices.Moreover, to provide a basic understanding of the scientific research and development work done in the laboratory, the students were given an introductory lecture on tree genetics, vegetative propagation of spruce, and micro-propagation.After this, the students were allowed to engage in small-scale experiments with professional research techniques in the lab and to document their investigation of, for example, spruce seed embryos with their devices.As a way of tuning into the topic from yet another viewpoint, students were given a chance to "listen" to plants.This meant experimenting with sensor microphones and devices that converted the fluctuations of electrical conductivity of plants into audio signals.The experiments were followed by a reflective discussion on ecology, ethics, and aesthetics within the context of the project.
Also, the participants convened at the research institution with other school groups participating in the larger development project.Heikki gave a guided tour of the institution's premises and introduced all groups to the institution's research practices and the bioart-making project participants presented their works in progress to the other groups.On another visit to the local forest museum, the students were introduced to forest-related art through another practicing artist.Moreover, they became acquainted with forest bioeconomy themes and sustainable use of natural resources with a help of a museum expert.The field trip also included a speech and Q&A session by a local entrepreneur discussing nature-based tourism and humannature connections.
On the final day of the project, the gathered materials and results of the artistic inquiry were processed further with photo editing and printing.Thus, the students were set and scaffolded with a task to produce final artifacts based on their experiments and investigations.These artifacts featured artistically expressive, tactile photos and posters to be displayed in the upper secondary school gallery and a blog showcasing students' creations and texts reflecting the bioart-making process.The final artifacts were developed in line with the learners' interests, and with the assistance of participating teachers.
Throughout, the activities took the form of experimentation, exploration, inspiration-seeking and creative process-documentation that can be conceptualized as artistic inquiry (Marshal & D'Adamo, 2011).Students were reminded, prompted, and encouraged to collect material and seek inspiration for their artwork with the help of both familiar and novel technologies.Accordingly, with the help of their devices and guided by their own interest, students inspected, explored, and documented their immediate environment, especially the features of the biosphere not visible to the naked eye.The objects of this exploration ranged from macro to micro level and included living organisms, such as plants, fungi, lichen, worms, and insects but also minerals and water (see Figure 2).During the process, the learners were invited to discuss and reflect on what they experienced, felt, and observed.Thus, compared to scientific inquiry, emphasis was on the creative process of investigation and subsequent, emergent insights and feelings instead of reaching outcomes through hypothesis testing.

Data and methods
The main data set of the present study consists of student, teacher and domain expert interviews as well as written and visual entries from the project blog.The blog entry data comprises logs of each day of the project and written and visual documentation of respective activities.The interview data was generated through semi-structured interviews with participating students (N = 2), participating art teachers (N = 2), and participating domain experts (N = 2) at the end of the project.The two students, Joona and Toni as well as the art teachers Heidi and Kerttu were interviewed together to support further reflection on the topics.Individual interviews were conducted respectively with the two domain experts: Tarmo the bioartist and Heikki the researcher.Tarmo had prior experience in organizing art-science collaboration projects and he represented a government-funded art institution.Heikki did not have prior experience in art-science collaboration, and he represented a local branch office of a nationwide research institution.All the interviews were between 40-60 minutes in duration and they were conducted face-to-face.The questions dealt with the activities as well as perceived outcomes of the project, possible ethical questions faced, and larger themes of sustainable futures and the interviewee's own as well as bioart's possible role in sustainable futures.The interviews were recorded and fully transcribed using pseudonyms for further analysis.In addition to the blog and interview data, teacher-produced idea papers concerning the project activities, the final project plan, and schedules were used as additional data to provide a contextual understanding of the project.Prior to the data collection, research permit agreements were signed with the municipal school authorities.Moreover, written, and signed consents from research participants themselves or their legal guardians were acquired.Furthermore, following the guidelines of the National Board on Research Integrity (Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK, 2019), Finnish Data Protection Act (Data Protection Act, 2018) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU), 2016), the participants and their legal guardians were informed about their rights and the purposes of personal data processing with a written privacy notice.
To answer RQ1 in line with the research task, the main data set consisting of the interview data and the written and visual blog entries was first analyzed to map out different stakeholders, their roles, aims, tasks, and ways of relating to the shared work in the bioart-making project.Then, the data was examined further utilizing theory-driven content analysis.The operationalization of the analysis was based on a multilevel boundary crossing framework developed by Akkerman and Bruining (2016) for identifying learning mechanisms at different levels.Firstly, units contributing to the understanding of bioart-making were identified along with instances of dialogical boundary crossing in those parts of the data that described or were related to the project, its activities, or reflections thereof.This was done through an iterative reading process and parallel initial coding using ATLAS.ti software for qualitative analysis.
When units of meaning describing or reflecting bioart-making as a whole and dialogical boundary crossing instances were identified, they were inspected further to understand the level of boundary crossing at play.At this stage, the iterative reading was paralleled with deductive coding following a structured analysis matrix developed based on Akkerman & Bruining's (2016) framework (Table 1).The instances were coded accordingly following the code matrix's categorization frame of learning mechanism typology into learning through identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation.The coded meaning units and their contexts were then subjected to a further inspection aiming at drawing a nuanced understanding of these interactions and their possible interconnections.This multilevel analysis facilitated the mapping out bioart-making in terms of cross-boundary learning as it emerged in the bioart project.
To answer RQ2 concerning the way learners interacted with nature within the project, another analysis round was carried out.First, the units of meaning, where any kind of human-nature interaction as a part of or related to the project's activities, were identified.These were then scrutinized further with the aim of determining the type of the identified human-nature interaction.The units were coded accordingly (Table 2) based on a human-nature connection conceptualization proposed by Ives et al. (2017) and developed further by Ives et al. (2018) through several iterative readings.Moreover, when material, experiential, cognitive, emotional, and philosophical interactions were identified, further scrutiny of their interconnections was carried out in relation to the proposed system leverage point continuum of human-nature interventions (Ives et al. (2018)).All analysis and coding rounds were conducted by the first author of the paper.The initial findings were then subjected to further discussion with other authors until mutual agreement on them was reached.In the following, we present the findings based on the research questions.First, we give an overview of the emerging learning ecosystem and attend to bioart-making as a potential boundary object.Then, we report the emerging dialogical learning processes we were able to identify on different levels.After this, we turn our attention to the different types of learner-nature interactions as they took place in and through bioart-making and accompanying dialogical learning processes.

CROSSING BOUNDARIES THROUGH BIOART-MAKING
In the bioart project, domain expert involvement and varying domainspecific locations were evidently central to the activities, and thus, the project established cooperation between several organizations, practices and individuals.In other words, the project unfolded as a crossboundary case that operated simultaneously on institutional and interpersonal levels (Akkerman & Bruining, 2016).The main institutions involved in the project were, first, the upper secondary school that carried the main responsibility for implementing the bioart project, second, a government-funded art institution that provided expertise and knowhow through the domain expert Tarmo; and third, a government-funded research institution that provided physical learning environments and expertise through the lectures and guidance from the domain expert Heikki.Furthermore, a local foundation-based museum and a local tourism enterprise participated by providing lectures and Q&A sessions as well as physical environments for the students' artistic exploration.
Within the project, new partnerships across different organizations were established and realized via interpersonal connections between the project participants.The cooperation with the expert organizations was manifested mainly through student and teacher visits to their premises and domain expert lectures and was therefore in large parts knowledge-based.However, the interaction with the art institution and the research institution manifested through cooperation with Tarmo and Heikki was more applied in nature featuring both hands-on activities and emergent reflective discussions.Yet, the interaction with all institutions involved direct learner engagement.This enabled the learners to utilize several sources in the exploratory process of bioart-making through knowledge-building, reflection, and ideation.Therefore, the crossing of physical and social institutional boundaries and the accompanying hands-on activities enabled by bioart-making provided learners with maker-centered learning experiences (Clapp et al., 2017) that challenged them to negotiate varying perspectives to nature and to apply knowledge and affordances from different practices in their artistic inquiry.

Bioart-making as a boundary object
In the initial project plan compiled by teachers and Tarmo, the process of bioart-making was defined as"an exploration of do-it-yourself microscopy and the worlds residing at the boundaries of art and science."It aimed to encourage the participants to explore features of their local environments and biosphere beyond their initial senses with the help of a self-made mobile device extension and by using artistic inquiry method.This approach was further described as an "embodied, experiential, and open-ended activity" where neither the outcomes nor the final forms of the produced artifacts could be defined in advance.The emphasis was described to be in learning by making, thinking skills, and "broadening horizons." Despite of the co-ideated and shared starting point, bioart-making itself surfaced as a equivocal and rather malleable construct.Although some experiences regarding bioart-making in the project were shared, the objectives, nuances, motivations to participate in it, as well as bioart-making's overall implications, were all subject to a wider array of interpretations.Teachers Heidi and Kerttu reflected on how bioart-making is slowly beginning to be recognized in Finnish upper secondary education.They acknowledged bioart-making's potential in bringing forth complex topics with no right or wrong answers, but also in providing technological and scientific tools for art education, especially media art.Correspondingly, regarding the actual bioart-making activities in the project, both teachers highlighted the importance of learners having the possibility to get acquainted with different technologies.Moreover, they concluded that especially through the project's photo rig assembly activities, students learned in practice how to augment familiar devices for art practices and for seeing things that could not else be seen.
However, the process of getting familiar with new technologies was described to be rather slow.In retrospect, Heidi and Kerttu reflected on a slight frustration at how much time was spent on familiarizing the learners with the devices and their features as well as on free exploration promoted strongly by Tarmo.Kerttu suspected that only the last day of the project and the final artifacts rendered the processes of the project visible to the students.Yet, both teachers agreed that, for students, the emphasis and extended time devoted on introductory exercises ensured having plenty of time to merely marvel and wonder at new phenomena.This was thought to be meaningful in an otherwise hectic school schedule, that in Heidi's words, rarely allows focusing on one thing for a long period of time.
The students did not share the teachers' frustration at the free, exploratory activities.Whereas they too acknowledged the importance of stopping to marvel at emerging phenomena.Also, in student's views it expanded to more metaphorical ways of seeing one's environment from a new angle especially by drawing both information and inspiration from the afforded sources of different participant organizations.As Toni remarked, this was done "on the fly", guided by emergent interest without a ready-made plan to seek certain kind of knowledge.But once new ideas emerged, they were discussed further with other participants.Elaborating on this feature, Toni and Joona added that all domain experts as well as the affordances enabled by them, especially technology, played a role in the process by new understandings about different aspects of nature.Both felt that some of the novel technologies and concepts encountered throughout the project were somewhat challenging.Yet, they described the overall process positively as "low threshold" learning that provided tools and ideas for gaining new insights and knowledge.Moreover, the students felt that the project featured tasks that accommodated a wide range of learners thus allowing everyone to participate on their preferred level, either basic or more advanced: Joona: In my opinion it [the activities not being too demanding] was fun, since there were a lot of, or there were some, kind of more complex [laughs a little] machines or like . . .Toni: And things to understand.Joona: . . .and like, kind of microscopes.Yeah, technology that we could use.But I did not know how, so I did easier things.So, even though it was low threshold [learning], if one wanted to learn more or already had the skills, you could do [more advanced] things.Also, Heikki recognized how the bioart-making process in the project allowed drawing from multiple perspectives by acknowledging how the learners appeared to have grasped the idea that nature can be approached from a variety of angles.Heikki declared: "I think that the students quite well grasped [the idea] that there are many ways to talk about these things [the use of natural resources] and that these matters are not so black-and-white and that there are many viewpoints and that they are a lot more complex . . .."Moreover, he was delighted by the thoughtful and deep conversations provoked by the project activities.He suspected that especially the consecutive days of working freely together broke the ice and encouraged the students to express their insights more bravely.However, while stressing bioart's potential to attend to different viewpoints, Heikki still adopted a rather instrumentalizing angle.He reflected on bioartistic work as a means of scientific communication and, for example, conveying information to bigger audiences in a way that scientific writing cannot by stating: Heikki: Maybe it is in this, expressing things to big masses.In my view, that is the most central impact [of bioart].The impact of getting people to think, to see things from different angles . . .and different angles . . .And I'd say that it is that, well that this bioart, well, it speaks to very large audiences, or art in general.Like, if we, for instance think of music, like who doesn't listen to music?Not everyone necessarily reads scientific journals, but it is possible to reach very large target groups and [big amounts of] people though art.
Conversely, the students Toni and Joona depicted bioart foremost as an ecological form of artmaking, possibly provoking pro-environmental thinking for example through the use of biomaterials and creating digital and immaterial artifacts.Furthermore, Tarmo's viewpoint on bioart was that of a professional artist engaging in bioartistic work.He saw bioart as a way of creating something new, exploring new lines of thought, and literally crossing boundaries.Consequently, for example, his interpretation of bioart's possible roles in building sustainable futures echoed those of art's role in society as a whole: The idea [of bioart] is to open and explore new spheres.And perhaps build like, not necessarily a promotional future, but kind of a dystopia-utopia conjunction.To warn about pitfalls and to explore new things, but to open new possibilities and to occasionally be completely profitless.Art's strength is that we don't need to be that design-oriented, but as an artist, our openings can be completely bizarre.We can sail along the edges of thinking horizons.Innovations usually take place there, in the borderlines, not in the centers, organizational centers.So, art's force is to be within oddities, thus its benefits are not necessarily immediate.
As for the project's bioart-making activities, Tarmo emphasized the importance of delving into the boundaries of science and art through a concrete hands-on approach and cooperation.Despite the short time scale of the project, he felt that the project and its bioart-making activities enabled students and other participants to "expand their horizons" through the socio-ethical discussion that they stirred.Moreover, Tarmo underlined that one of the most important outcomes of the project was to scaffold students toward "artistic dialogue that is based on scientific knowledge", as he put it.He elaborated on this by explaining how in the project, learners engaged in artmaking processes using technology, but in a dialogue with nature and scientific knowledge.These processes, in Tarmo's view, had the ability to expand the learners' overall understandings of nature, science as well as art.
As seen here, bioart-making as a whole and in relation to the project activities entailed shared but also allowed varying and differently emphasized interpretations.Features that were considered important by some of the participants caused frustration to others.Yet, participants were able to enter the shared work from their own domain-specific or personally meaningful orientations.Thus, it appears that bioart-making in the project did not necessitate reaching a clear consensus, but instead allowed multiple simultaneous understandings.This parallels with the previous theoretical understandings of boundary objects as adaptable configurations that foster overcoming boundaries while maintaining each participants' autonomy (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Star & Griesemer, 1989;Trompette & Vinck, 2009).
The teachers referred to the final artifacts as a means to rendering the project's processes visible.However, all other participants reflected on the project's outcomes mostly in terms of emerging interaction.To better understand this and the boundary object of bioart-making, we next attend to the cross-boundary processes taking place between the different participants of the project.

Coordinating shared work and identifying boundaries to be crossed
The initial boundary-crossing connections between the participating institutions laid the foundation and perimeters of the project.Thus, many of the guiding measures entailing coordination at an institutional level took place before the actual project began.They were realized interpersonally between the teachers, domain expert Tarmo, and domain expert Heikki through discussions and correspondence.Once the initial contacts were formed, especially Tarmo's role in introducing bioart-making to the research institution facilities though Heikki appeared to be crucial.Tarmo visited the research institution in advance to get acquainted with Heikki's work and the methods used in the institution's lab, and to familiarize Heikki with bioartistic work in general.In the interview, Tarmo explicated this process and the institutional boundaries faced in the project: Well, planning always has its challenges.Fortunately, I had visited this place [the research institution] in January, but there are always challenges, when novel practices are brought into, for example, research structures.A certain type of trust needs to be established.Firstly, that we would like to visit [their premises] and when would it be, and within what parameters and regulations.But I am fortunate enough to have prior experience on how this is done, and therefore I can bring them [novel practices] in quite painlessly.However, if one is not familiar with, for instance, scientific practices or scientific rhetoric or the ways objectives of scientific research are set, or the logics of lab practices, well then it can be quite a challenge.[. ..] one needs to have that kind of knowledge.It is expertise, that one knows how to work within the framework of the [particular] institution.
The excerpt shows how Tarmo acknowledged the coordinating and identification measures as a crucial starting point for any cross-boundary practice.Moreover, he emphasized having prior experience of similar work as an clear asset.Correspondingly, Heikki also reflected on identifying institutional boundaries and the process of negotiation and coordination when trying to establish connections and collaboration prior to the shared work: Heikki: All involved [in the planning] expressed their wishes [on the bioartmaking activities in the research institution's premises] and I, being a bore, usually nixed those ideas.Those, that I did not dare to allow to be carried out here.
Interviewer: Was there a lot that was not allowed?Heikki: Well, not really in this bioart.Like, they wanted to use those premises, like they wished to be able to work in our sterile laboratories, but I did not dare to let them work there, because there are flammable materials, and flames are used.So, in a way, it requires a bit longer orientation period to be able to work there safely.
As seen above, Tarmo, having prior experience in intersecting artistic and scientific practices, explicitly identified himself as a broker (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Akkerman & Bruining, 2016) and a contact base builder between cooperating institutions and domains.However, neither Tarmo's broker role nor the boundary between the scientific research sphere and the art-based objectives of the project was fully acknowledged by Heikki.Instead, he identified boundaries of certain lab practices in relation to bioartistic work.These boundaries surfaced through the coordination of the project activities.Moreover, Heikki emphasized his own role not as a broker, but as a boundary setter regarding what could be allowed on the premises of his home institution.What's more, the coordination between scientific and artistic practices emphasized by Heikki and Tarmo was missing entirely in the teachers' reflections.Instead, their insights regarding the coordination of the shared work touched upon the negotiation between the school and Tarmo's work.Both teachers acknowledged that Tarmo brought into the project a lot of depth, know-how, and expertise that neither of the teachers could have provided.However, his brokering activities regarding cooperation with the research institution went unacknowledged.
The participating students were not involved in the planning of the project.Therefore, they did not take part in the initial institutional coordination and identification of differences or similarities between institutional practices.Nevertheless, our analysis showed that they were able to come to identify distinctive features of and differences between one's own and other participating institutions' practices through the project activities.This identification emerged not as a precondition of the project's activities, but rather as a result of them.For example, Toni commented that one of the highlights of the week for him was to get acquainted with and learn to understand the practices of the participating research lab and institution: " . . . it was cool when they showed the places, the premises and the phases of work they need to carry out, and how meticulously they need to be done, and how margins need to be set and so on." Although the institutional identification and coordination materialized in many ways interpersonally between the participants, important and explicitly intrapersonal identification and coordination processes surfaced in the project.In these, the participants came to define and align their varying roles within the shared work (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Akkerman & Bruining, 2016).This was especially evident in the teachers' and Tarmo's negotiation on their respective roles within the project and its activities.According to both teachers and Tarmo himself, the overall structure of the project was in large parts provided by Tarmo, while the organizing tasks during the week were the teachers' responsibility.Tarmo declared that based on his earlier experiences he presented a basic framework that was then co-developed further with the teachers by finding mutual points of contact and shared objectives.This appeared to be agreed upon by the teachers.Yet, Tarmo's saw that his task was a foundation-laying work that could be carried on, expanded and developed further by the teachers once the project was over.
Moreover, Kerttu and Heidi underlined how Tarmo's close involvement and leading role, for example, in the assembly exercise in the beginning of the project, allowed both Kerttu and Heidi to align their own intrapersonal positions of a teacher and life-long learner.Heidi reflected on this and stated: "I liked the fact that in a way I was not in charge, but instead I was every now and then allowed to kind of adopt the role of a learner."She elaborated on this by remarking that it was also good for the students to see that sometimes teachers do not know what to do.Furthermore, this feature affected the intrapersonal coordination between students and teachers and was acknowledged by students Joona and Toni.They explicitly described Tarmo's role as the main executor of the project and the teachers' roles as those of assistants and learners, but also as crucial organizers responsible for the management of the project: Toni: Well, their [Heidi's and Kerttu's] role was to be, let's say, assistants or whatnot.That they instructed us according to what they knew about the project week, and on the other hand, they were also there for learning more about this bioart . . .[. ..]Moreover, they like helped us, like with school things, like how to operate according to school's norms outside of school and all that.[. ..]Joona: Within this topic [bioart] they [Heidi and Kerttu] were learners, but they knew, where to go, and they drove us there, and told us when to be where, and set the schedule for us, and kept the group together.And we always had a teacher with us, so no, this would not have been possible without our teachers.
It could be concluded that in many ways, the institutional and interpersonal coordination and identification processes within the bioart project took place conjointly.Moreover, they laid the foundation for the further dialogical processes and activities in the project.However, not all coordination activities were fully acknowledged by all participants.Especially Tarmo's broker role appeared to go unacknowledged, although it played a crucial role in building trust and identifying possibilities for shared work with Heikki and the natural sciences research institution.Moreover, the interpersonal coordination, especially between teachers and Tarmo, brough about possibilities for intrapersonal identification and coordination processes through which the students were able to negotiate the teachers' role in relation to the participating domain experts as well as the topic of the project.

Reflectively towards transformation
In many places, the above-described varying identification and coordination processes were linked to or sometimes initiated by cross-boundary processes of reflection (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Akkerman & Bruining, 2016).In these, the participants took up, and came to value each other's perspectives, but also learned to see their own understandings from a new angle.Within the project activities, reflective processes emerged often as discussions as a part of the project's hands-on activities.The students, domain experts and teachers alike described them as an essential part and one of the most prominent outcomes of the project.Moreover, as described earlier, in many places, the perspective-taking expanded to seeing one's environment from a renewed viewpoint both concretely and metaphorically.
Teachers Heidi and Kerttu remarked that the reflective moments unfolding around the project activities were often spontaneous and in large parts led and initiated by the students.Heidi pointed out how she felt that the students had a genuine need to discuss the issues related to nature from different angles.Heikki alluded to experiences of reaching at least some level of mutual understanding and appreciation of each other's views.Similarly, Tarmo emphasized how the dialogical exchange of ideas, opinions, and open discussion did not benefit only learners but possibly stirred discussion within the participating institutions.Yet, he acknowledged the fact that the perspectives of the non-expert students were to be understood differently than those of an expert: In a way, we need to remember that even though they [students] might have bit radical views, they are the ones changing this world in the future.In my opinion, it is very good to work like this and reflect on things.This way we teach the young to reflect and to discuss, to discuss openly with researchers.That there is no pressure, that one could not discuss something or open up about something.Obviously, the knowledge base is different: these are young people and others have worked with these issues for twenty something years.
Another example where the overall perspective-taking atmosphere was evident was in Heikki's attitude toward the first encounter between him and the students at the research institution's premises.Heikki acknowledged his unawareness of teachers' and students' prior understanding of his research field or lab work in general as a real challenge.However, instead of viewing this as a complete hindrance to cooperation, through the shared work Heikki engaged in a thorough reflection on his communication skills.This in turn resulted in Heikki seeing his own institutional and domain-specific practices from a new perspective and finding points to develop in his own work: Heikki: For me [it was a challenge], that I knew basically nothing about students' and teachers' levels of knowledge in regard to this lab work, so when organizing this whole thing it was challenging to conceive, how theoretically in depth we can address these issues, in order to form a whole where no one falls off the wagon [. ..]So, as to keep students and teachers interested, to provide a positive experience [. ..]Interviewer: Yes.Did you feel that you managed to find a level to work on then?
Heikki: Yes, well yes, I guess, but I got some feedback from my own presentation that it was a bit too technical and scientific.Some liked it, though, but for others it was . . .Well, it's always like this when you have an audience, and you try to explain things to several people.It might be that you manage to orient and engage one person in your topic, but another one does not quite understand.This is where I could develop myself, that I would learn to address young people and students better.So far, I have presented only to these scientific communities, and there to mostly biotechnical experts.One easily ends up using terms that a layperson or a young student does not understand.One should learn how to discuss these things in plain language.
Furthermore, Heikki concluded that overall, working together with the students helped him to understand the world from their perspective.Being able to shed light on the motivations and aims of his research field to a younger audience felt meaningful to him professionally.
The respectful attitude toward and a genuine aspiration to take up the students' perspectives, was evident elsewhere as well.Indeed, it appeared to be tightly linked to the participants' overall understandings of bioartmaking and the project as a whole.For example, as described earlier, despite feeling frustration over longer periods of time devoted to free exploration, the teachers Heidi and Kerttu looked at the situation from the students' perspective and therefore, grew to value this feature of the shared work.Similarly, Heikki communicated on several occasions, how he genuinely appreciated the students growing confidence to express their insights and the matters being discussed from several angles.Above all, having the possibility to see and discuss the process and the emergent understandings with different people as well as the project activities acknowledging varying knowledge and skills levels was apparently valued by the students themselves.
Furthermore, all dialogical processes led to and entangled with processes of transformation, where different practices, participants, and participant roles were merged in moments of collaborative work or projections of the future.In fact, all participants depicted meaningful moments of an effortless flow of shared work, deep conversations, and exchange of ideas between the participants.Tarmo depicted how he witnessed moments where through coordinative measures " . . .[shared] topics of interest were found, things started to happen" between the participants.However, he added that reaching this state had been preceded by moments of uneasiness and trying to acknowledge, understand, and get used to each other's ways of working, in other words, processes of coordination, identification as well as reflection.
Lastly, indications of transformation processes surfaced through the way participants, especially Kerttu, Heidi, and Tarmo, viewed the project and its activities as the beginning of something new.For example, Kerttu and Heidi reflected on how the practices of the project could be integrated into their teaching practices in the future.Likewise, Tarmo saw that the project and its activities had opened new connections that could be maintained and developed further in the future both between organizations and individuals.This implies that the bioart project had brought into being new venues where collaboration between different institutions and practices was possible.However, as for the students, the processes of transformation appeared to be linked to the way they found ways to work with nature and more-thanhuman organisms.To better understand this dialogue in the scrutinized project, we now turn our specific focus on learner-nature interaction emerging in and through the project's activities and processes.

Interacting with nature holistically
In many ways, the project and the accompanied bioart-making activities entailed working closely and therefore connecting with nature (Ives et al., 2017(Ives et al., , 2018)).To a large extent, the project's activities, namely collecting specimen, inspecting and photographing them with different technologies, "listening" to plants as well as familiarizing oneself with, for example, the tree propagation data in the research institution, all involved interacting with more-than-human organisms physically.Moreover, throughout these central activities of the project, living organisms were used as objects of and material for artistic inquiry.Thus, the interaction entailed physical contact and the extraction or utilization of tangible resources from nature and was therefore, very much both experiential as well as material.However, these explicitly material and experiential interactions were in many ways intertwined with and concurrent with cognitive, philosophical, and emotional features.
As described earlier, the project's activities invited students to focus on emergent understandings rather than constructing certain type of knowledge.Therefore, instead of relying on familiar modes of merely observing nature, for example, moss growing in the schoolyard, the DIY devices built by the students enabled them to approach natural phenomena from an angle of their own choice.The process was not guided by pre-set discipline-based objectives.Instead, it was predominantly led by the student's artistically motivated interest, free discovery or even affective experiences, such as moments of amazement and surprise.This shows in the way the focus of the students' photos was not necessarily on identifiable parts of the inspected objects or organisms but rather on patterns, resemblances, color combinations, and atmospheres, which would most likely be disregarded in a sciencediscipline-guided microscopy class.For instance, a photo of a spruce seedling taken at the research institution lab was a close-up inspection of the pattern formed by the seedling's needles, not an informative image representing the specimen (Figure 3).
The photos, their captions as well as students' reflections imply that the inspection of objects and organisms enabled by the DIY microscopes, macro photography rigs, and professional laboratory equipment was a highly aesthetic experience.Yet, some of the photos where the object was not fully identifiable, were captioned with informative texts explaining, for example, how the specific angle had been technically produced.This indicates a dialogue between experiential and cognitive interaction, juxtaposing aesthetic exploration and conventional naming practices.However, these explanatory captions can also be interpreted in terms of revelation when an unrecognizable form or shape is declared to be a part of a rather familiar object.This is the case, for example, in a student-produced close-up photo of pinecone scales (Figure 4).
However, some student-produced photo captions followed another path and focused on reenacting and reflecting the artistic exploration process and therefore providing more explicit accounts of experiential and emotional interaction.This is seen for example in a photo and caption where Lara describes having found "a fairytale land" (Figure 5).Whereas the photo itself does not necessarily imply deeper interaction with the moss that is inspected, Lara's insights point toward finding novel ways of looking at it.For example, instead of being required to identify the species or the parts of the moss plant, Lara was given permission to document her initial impressions, feelings and lines of thought provoked by the process as a meaningful outcome of the activity.
It appeared that these emotionally loaded experiential-material encounters were acknowledged and appreciated by the participating students.Toni paralleled looking at the collected specimen on a macro level to seeing his natural surroundings and life from a new angle: "Well, at least I learned to see life in a new light on this course so that you begin to view differently what for example a leaf or a tree or living thing really looks like [. . .]."Moreover, through the plant "listening" activity, the experientiality expanded beyond visual to other sensory modes.Joona described vividly his own experience of being immersed in the activity of converting plant fluctuations of electrical conductivity into audio signals: Yes, at the [research institution] we attached contact microphones on plants and then started to record it, but at the same time, I heard the sounds because they were amplified.It is strange to explain, but there was this plant, and well, I touched the plant, and the touch was amplified in sounds, so that there were these rattling noises, like I was touching the mic.And then there were flowers in that plant and a pistil and other plant parts, and when you touched them, you got a different sound.I spent there an hour or so because it just was so interesting [. . .]The excerpt also shows how the experiential event featured cognitive features as well.In the reflection of the actual act of interacting with the plant via auditory signals, Joona named plant parts, but also contemplated their difference through the different sounds they produce.Hence, here too, the material-experiential, cognitive, and emotional modes of interaction merged.
However, some instances took the cognitive interaction with nature even a step further.In concert with students' transforming experiences of and with nature, also their level of knowledge of natural phenomena, although not measured in any way, appears to have been affected.As mentioned earlier, both Joona and Toni mentioned gaining new knowledge, especially from domain experts and regarding nature, as a meaningful experience.Correspondingly, some of the blog posts and photo captions express that learners' understanding of natural phenomena was not limited to aesthetic appreciation.For example, Lara engaged in a thorough contemplation and pondered over humans' very direct contact with all kinds of organisms with an accompanying photo (Figure 6): Nature has a way to astonish us.For, Homo sapiens is a super organism.It means that within us lives an abundant selection of organisms and their cooperation is vital to us.Only one tenth of the cell tissue in us consists of our own cells, and the rest are bacterial cells.As organisms, we are a lot closer to nature than what the modern world lets us believe.
On the whole, ethical dilemmas and discussions concerning nature and more-than-human organisms arising from the project activities were acknowledged to be relevant by all the participants.According to the teachers, the ethical discussions deriving from inspecting living creatures, such as worms and insects, also expanded from the evaluation of the treatment of those individual beings to encompass wider questions of food production and consumption, thus crossing the boundaries of the project itself.This in turn led to both student and teacher reflections on merging roles of project participants and those of citizens and consumers in relation to nature.However, the ethical considerations had more immediate  consequences as well.Based on the discussions, some students seriously negotiated the types of organisms they chose to use in their artistic inquiries.Some made an explicit choice of interacting with plants only, because they felt that they had no right to remove any animals, no matter how small, from their natural habitat.
Moreover, the discussions on the human-nature divide and ethical issues concerning the use of either natural resources or living organisms as objects of the investigation were evident in the students', teachers', and domain experts' reflections in several other instances.For instance, Joona deliberated on being part of nature both in his audio experiments, but also in his overall reflections on the processes that went on during the project: As described above, the analysis of the human-nature interactions taking place in and through the bioart project and its bioart-making activities showed that they were able to encompass both the shallow and deep ends of the system leverage of nature connection interventions.However, in bioart-making, the different mechanisms appeared to be tightly intertwined and impacting each other.The material use of different organisms in the inquiries was tightly linked to experientiality via physical and different sensory experience, but also to cognitive connecting via new perspectives and increased understanding enabled by the project.Moreover, emotional connecting emerged through aesthetic appreciation and amazement, and philosophical interaction through the dialogical reflection and identification of for example ethical dilemmas.These in turn, guided the learners how to further proceed with their material interactions with nature within the project activities.
Because of the interlinks between the different types of interaction, in bioart-making, the external-internal spectrum as well as system of lever points (Ives et al., 2018) appeared to function in a less straightforward manner.As described, the students' material-experiential interactions with nature were permeated with and guided by philosophical, emotional, and cognitive aspects.Similarly, philosophical, emotional, and cognitive interactions emerged through the concrete material-experiential interaction of bioart-making.Therefore, all human-nature interactions emerging in and through the project's activities entailed both external and internal aspects.Consequently, the holistic human-nature interaction simultaneously touched upon both shallow and deep ends of the leverage thus potentially bringing about transformative as well as more shallow changes.

Discussion
At the beginning of this article, we framed bioart for learning purposes as bioart-making to emphasize its learning by making ethos.Moreover, we proposed bioart-making as a boundary object inviting science and art practices as well as several actors to cooperate, especially regarding questions of nature and the biological.We aimed at exploring the potentials of bioartmaking by focusing on cross-boundary processes and human-nature interactions emerging in and through an upper secondary school bioart project.
Regarding our first research question on understanding bioartmaking in terms of boundary crossing, the results show how bioartmaking in the project appeared to entail several features that have been identified as characteristics of boundary object (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Leigh Star, 2010;Star & Griesemer, 1989;Trompette & Vinck, 2009).Especially, bioart-making's apparent malleability in terms of orientations and interpretations allowed multiple voices regarding human-nature interaction to co-exist without the necessity of reaching a consensus.Akkerman et al. (2006) have recognized multivoicedness and diversity as features that rather open up than hinder dialogue if explicitly attended to.Correspondingly, in the bioart project, bioartmaking appeared to entail as well as be formed by the dialogical processes between participants on different levels (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011;Akkerman & Bruining, 2016).The processes of identifying differences between practices, and coordination of the cooperation as well as participant roles, enabled other processes to emerge, but also further contributed to the malleability of bioart-making.Moreover, processes of reflection and transformation appeared to permeate the coordination processes while the project participants regarded them also as the most important outcomes of the project.
Through these dialogical processes learners drew from different domains and affordances when progressing with their artistic inquiry and creating personally and culturally meaningful artifacts in dialogue with their environment and more-than-human organisms.Regarding our second research question, the findings thus further revealed that these processes allowed and invited participants to interact and connect with nature from a variety of viewpoints and in different ways (Ives et al., 2017(Ives et al., , 2018)).Many of these interactions entailed a physical contact with nature and the use of more-than -human organisms in artmaking.However, these material-experiential encounters prompted and were tightly intertwined with emotionalaesthetic experiences, cognitive knowledge-building as well as philosophical discussions.What is more, these interactions steered and impacted further material-experiential interactions.
We see that in bioart-making, the cross-boundary processes of reflection (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) unfolded as pivotal mechanisms that informed other dialogical processes on institutional, interpersonal as well as on intrapersonal levels (Akkerman & Bruining, 2016), but also the human-nature interaction within the activities.Firstly, it informed the identification and coordination processes brokered by Tarmo when building trust and foundations for the shared work between the institution.Secondly, in permeated the role negotiation and role identification between the teachers, Tarmo and the Students.Thirdly, it guided the coordination of the different activities.And lastly, through the reflective processes of sharing and discussing ideas, where the learners were first challenged with varying viewpoints and then encouraged to express their insights freely in a respectful atmosphere.It was through these processes that the hands-on activities of the artistic inquiry acquired new and deeper meanings.The material-experiential acts of using more-than-human organisms as a media or object of artmaking turned into negotiations of ethics.Similarly, the macro photography and microscopy exercises grew into emotionally loaded experiences of knowledge-building where the different understandings of nature were reflected against one's own place in the biosphere (Figure 7).
This raises the important question of how bioart-making is distinct from other forms of making-informed or cross-boundary modes of learning regarding nature.We argue that by inviting and accepting different views and practices to work in dialogue with more-thanhuman organisms in an open-ended cross-boundary process, bioartmaking affords learners an expanded access to the complex issues of nature and the biological.Artistic approaches in which processes are allowed to be emphasized over final products can help both pedagogues and learners to build on emergent themes and topics rather than relying on discipline-specific pre-set goals.Thusly, they might make way for diverse lines of thought and knowledge and trigger dialogical, reflectively oriented processes where differences are identified and coordinated without the need to reach a consensus on the inspected phenomena.This in turn, could enable hands-on material-experiential bioart-making activities to unfold as holistic interactions that encompass also cognitive, emotional, and philosophical aspects of nature thus expanding over the external-internal and shallow-deep spectrums proposed by Ives et al. (2017Ives et al. ( , 2018)).Accordingly, we see that bioart-making can steer learners beyond what Zylstra et al. (2019, p. 3) call the "materialist or scientific framing/naming lens" of nature and the biological.By evoking processes that simultaneously entail materialexperiential features and affective, cognitive as well as philosophical interaction, bioart-making can be seen to trigger "embodied, contemplative and reflective approaches that could motivate both personal as well as social change" (Zylstra et al., 2019, p. 3) or what Lumber et al. (2017) see as activities entailing "contact, meaning, emotion, compassion, and beauty" [21].
As Ito (2017) aptly points out, as biotechnical techniques become more widely available to everyone, there is even more urgent demand for open discussion on the implications of these advancements.Moreover, Kafai and Walker (2020) argue that the scientific and technological advancements are creating a paramount paradigm shift, where in biology, the focus is moving from merely observing nature, to also designing and redesigning it.Similarly, along with the visions of world-saving green technologies, a biotechnology that transforms the biological into a medium and material for design, is thought to be the driving force for progress in the 21st century (Ginsberg et al., 2014).Through our findings, we argue that in educational contexts, the important discussions on nature and the biological could be fostered for example through low-threshold bioart-making, where too, more-thanhuman organisms can be viewed both as medium and material.We suggest that tight integration of art practices and especially their strengths of processuality, identity exploration and collaboration (Halverson, 2021) can provide learners a space, community, and tools to imagine and negotiate their place in the biosphere.By simultaneously inquiring artistically (Marshal & D'Adamo, 2011), making critically (see Ratto, 2011), and negotiating contradicting views and angles though cross-boundary work, learners are allowed to expand their knowledge and skills, but above all, to process their own identity amongst it all.

Conclusions
Through our case study, we have addressed the research questions regarding the understanding of bioart-making in terms boundary crossing as well as human-nature interaction.Moreover, we have discussed the findings with regard to potentials of bioart-making and relevant literature.We believe that our paper offers limited, but meaningful insights into the prospects of crossboundary art-based practices in learning, especially in connection with nature and the biological.
The present case study on bioart-making offers a bounded attempt to capture one facet of a rather complex and resonant event unfolding in contingent circumstances.While focusing upon certain characteristics of the bioart-making workshop, our data did not allow for tracking or analyzing for example making trajectories of individual students or specific activities in detail.We see that these would merit further research as a means to conceptualize integrative creative practices and to provide more detailed understanding on the role they could play in learning.This, hopefully, provides an incentive for further studies of equivalent art-based cross-boundary interventions that recognize art's potential for learning not just by supporting the learning of other disciplines but also elevating and expanding learning at large.This points toward acknowledging processes as a meaningful outcome of learning as well as appreciating learners' emergent understandings holistically.
As is the case with qualitative case studies, ours has several limitations for broader conclusions.One of them is that the analysis is in large parts based on the participants' interpretations of the activities and interactions, rather than mere direct observations.However, by following Shenton (2004) we have adhered to several strategies for ensuring the quality and rigor of our research.To enhance credibility, the interview data has been complemented with other data sources, such as the project blog and project documents.Moreover, the interpretations were carefully discussed and reflected by all the researchers involved.To further ensure our study's confirmability, we have provided several data excerpts against which our analysis and findings can be evaluated.Moreover, to support transferability, we have provided a detailed description of the case study context, its design, data generation, and the methods used in the analysis.
As stated by Seitamaa-Hakkarainen ( 2022) we need more research on modes of learning that deploy creative processes to gain a better sense of what they might offer at different levels of education.In our view, this is especially urgent with interventions related to bioartmaking or other similar intersecting practices that explicitly attend to the questions of nature and the biological.They can inform us how to break out of the more established forms of learning and provide opportunities to address broader spectrums of human-nature interaction.Furthermore, they provide a deeper understanding of the possible implications our past, present, and future learning engagements with the biological might have for us.As the trajectories of human-nature interplay take new, even more complex directions, they need to be attended to by creative and open-ended modes of learning that challenge not only learners but also pedagogues, experts and participating institutions involved.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.A DIY photography rig.© a project participant, reproduced with permission.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Free exploration with the DIY photo rigs.© a project participant, reproduced with permission.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.An uncaptioned student-produced photo from a spruce seedling.© a project participant, reproduced with permission.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4.A student-produced photo captioned Pinecone.© a project participant, reproduced with permission.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5.A student-produced photo with a caption: "already on the second day, I found a fairy-tale land from the moss growing on the premises of [the participating organization]."© a project participant, reproduced with permission.

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Reflective processes informing and guiding cross-boundary processes and human-nature interaction in bioart-making.