CAEPR Visiting Fellow Professor Shirley Brice Heath delivered a public lecture on 23 February entitled 'Artful Science: Rethinking how the young learn'.This lecture was part of the TOYOTA-ANU Public Lecture Series. An audio podcast, transcript and slides from the lecture are now available here.

Anthropologists who study socialisation tend to do so in order to compare modes and values of child-rearing or to examine the role of language in child-rearing. Rarely have anthropologists attended to the ways in which children learn to discern, appreciate, and take part in forms of artful representation. Anthropologists have given only slightly more attention to the extent to which children and young people learn key science concepts and representational modes in their own cultural settings. This lecture examines commonalities in the learning of art and science, the role of language in such learning, and the extent to which focused observation has been central to understanding and engaging in both art and science and language learning across cultures.