Posthuman Pedagogy Research Articles

Towards posthuman climate change education

ABSTRACT Climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time, requiring significant responses from all aspects of society, including education. The prevailing responses to climate change tend towards treating the crisis as a predominantly scientific and managerial issue that requires technological solutions or behaviour changes. Correspondingly, climate change education (CCE) often focuses on teaching climate science and (predominantly individual) behaviour change. We argue that CCE, as part of a broader environmental and sustainability education (ESE), needs, in addition to a short-term damage limitation response, a simultaneous, longer-term, transformational approach that goes beyond critical humanism and engages with posthumanism. We explore ideas about human continuity with the more-than-human world, and the relationality and materiality of humans. Drawing on recent developments within posthuman pedagogies research, we consider how posthumanism might influence ESE/CCE, focussing on how two sustainability competency frameworks, UNESCO’s key competencies and the EU’s GreenComp, might be posthumanised.

Posthuman Pedagogy of the Common Worlds of Children and Animals – From Independence to Relationality

The author’s intent is to describe the concept of pedagogy of the common worlds of children and animals embedded in the framework of posthuman philosophy. In its assumptions, the child’s essence is tightly connected to non-human beings, individuals and forces, existing in the common worlds of life. Children and animals living in those worlds are not beings separated from one another, but relational and causative ones, affecting and influencing each other. The pedagogy of the common worlds of children and animals is broadly understood as an educational practice, which allows children to maintain non-hierarchical relations with animals during interspecies encounters. It offers children an unconventional way of discovering, exploring and acting, because it allows them not to learn “about” the world, but rather to learn together “with” the world. Staying in heterogeneous common worlds and establishing deep relations with them is hence connected with the need to care about the common good. It can provide people and non-human beings with a successful existence now and in the future.

The “Unruly” Snowflake: (Re)imagining School Readiness for Two-Year-Old Children

Engaging with Posthuman theories this article puts to work concepts of affect, bodies, and voice to reimagine an ordinary classroom event of making cards for families and carers. The article will outline how Human Capital Theory and neoliberal logic can reveal how specific ways of demonstrating learning are privileged in practice. To challenge the dominant discourse, and the binary of ready/not ready, this article makes a call for an intra-active posthuman pedagogy, so that time in space can be slowed down to follow the agentic rustles of material voices and bodies to (re)imagine school readiness.

Posthuman pedagogy: experiential education for an era of mutualism

Wildlife-human relations in the United States are predominantly influenced by Euro-American sociocultural dynamics and (neo)colonial legacies. Humans dominate nonhuman animals through violence, suffering, and death. Wildlife management as a practice is becoming increasingly criticized. Disagreement emerges from epistemological and ontological foundations and remains contentious in theory and practice. Environmental education reinforces the subjugation of nonhumans and particular individuals that are governed by human decision-making, and power assemblages. However, public values have shifted to a mutualism orientation where management practices are challenged by shifting moral standards of society that value the intrinsic rights, welfare, and agency of individual beings. We present two related case studies that showcase posthuman pedagogy and illustrate how ‘real-world’ field experiences can shape students’ ontologies and cosmologies. This work draws from the first author’s fieldwork on salmon-sea lion-human relations in the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest US. This includes over 120 semi-structured interviews, two deployments of the Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) model, participant observation, and archival data. We focus on four specific fieldwork moments captured by student reflection. Posthuman pedagogy allows educators and scholars to rest with the material relations that dictate the lives of nonhuman participants and provides pragmatic openings for more-than-human worlds.

Pre-Service Science Teachers’ Preparedness for Classroom Teaching: Exploring Aspects of Self-Efficacy and Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Sustainable Learning Environments

The technological reconfiguration of humanity and advancement requires initial teacher training (ITE) programs that create and enhance sustainable learning environments (SLEs) where teachers are prepared to embrace posthuman pedagogy to teach confidently. This case study aims to examine pre-service science teachers’ level of preparedness and teaching efficacy beliefs to teach in SLEs. The study findings revealed that teaching science requires content knowledge and an understanding of how to teach the content. Furthermore, education programs need to be responsive to the socio-economic demands and produce 21st-century-ready graduates. The participants’ teaching philosophy aims to promote SLEs where quality teaching will be prioritized. Without proper training, support and resources, this aspiration will remain a mirage. Maintaining responsive classrooms will thus be a challenge that continues to be an albatross to social change. This study has some implications for ITE programs, impacting the school curriculum and educational transformation.

Following lines in the landscape: Playing with a posthuman pedagogy in outdoor environmental education

AbstractSituated within a series of river journeys, this inquiry considers the role of material landscape in shaping learning possibilities and explores practices of reading landscapes diffractively. We consider ways we might pay attention to the ever-changing flux of places while experimenting with posthuman pedagogical praxis. Methodologically, we embrace the post-qualitative provocation to do research differently by enacting a new empiricism that does not ground the inquiry in a paradigmatic structure. In doing so, we rethink conventional notions of method and data as we create a series of short videos from footage recorded during canoeing journeys with tertiary outdoor environmental education students. These videos, along with a student poem, form the empirical materials in this project. Video allows us to closely analyse more-than-human entanglements, contemplating the diverse ways we can participate with and read landscapes in these contexts. We aim to provoke diffractive thought and elicit affective dimensions of material encounters, rather than offer representational findings. This project intends to open possibilities for post-qualitative research, inspired by posthuman and new materialist orientations.

Stewardship and beyond? Young people’s lived experience of conservation activities in school grounds

This article provides ethnographic insight into the more-than-human relationships enacted through young people’s participation in school grounds conservation activities. As a response to the escalating biodiversity crisis, conservation appears well-placed to facilitate young people’s development of an environmental ethic of care, and a capacity to work towards addressing environmental issues. Proponents of posthuman pedagogies, however, argue that the ‘stewardship’ perspective underlying these activities fails to achieve the radical shift in human-environment relations required in response to the Anthropocene, given its apparent reinforcement of a perceived human/nature binary, and narrow ‘solutions’-based approach. Considering these critiques, this article demonstrates that where there is openness to unplanned more-than-human encounters and the enactment of young people’s own ‘lived curricula’, conservation activities can nonetheless enable forms of ‘collective thinking with the more-than-human world’ that transcend any underlying ‘stewardship’ perspective. We therefore point to the potential role of conservation activities within posthuman responses to the Anthropocene, provided such openness is maintained.

Critical creatures: children as pioneers of posthuman pedagogies

PurposeThis paper addresses two main questions: What is taught about animal ethics in primary school and how. Are these messages challenged by the students and, in that case, how and why? This is discussed in the light of Critical Animal Pedagogies.Design/methodology/approachThe findings drawn upon in this paper are from a critical human-animal ethnographic study carried out in three Swedish primary schools between 2012 and 2017 using a case study approach of interviews, observation and intervention.FindingsThis paper suggests that children's subtle ways of resisting and negotiating their own space in the face of adultism, which is the power adults exercise over children, are an ongoing struggle which can both destabilize anthropocentrism and open up space for new pedagogical practice.Originality/valueThis paper explores the implications of and possibilities for teaching and learning given the positions of human children and non-human animals intersect, foremost exploring the agency of children in the school environment.

Situation report on indigeneity and education in India: retelling the Sabar story

This situation report centres on the inequalities confronted by Indigenous communities of India before centring on one “particularly-vulnerable tribal group” to show how this influences their participation in, and negotiation of, formal systems of education. Adivasis (literally, First Inhabitants, or Indigenous peoples) constitute over 8.6 million people of India’s population but remain invisibilised from conversations that concern them. The report thus seeks to emphasise the marginalised voice of the Hill Sabar peoples of Jharkhand, India, with a particular focus on their ways of “being,” “knowing” and “doing.” The situation report outlines insights into Sabar communities’ concepts, practices, perspectives and priorities of education underscored by their educational realities, ways of teaching and learning, and everyday accomplishments of Sabar education. Discussions then briefly centre on the significance of acknowledging “difference” in education and research; the ecology of education, engendering “new” ecologies of learning; and how Sabar knowledges may shape postcolonial, posthuman pedagogies.

Posthuman Knowledge

Posthuman Knowledge

Why is a live chicken banned from the kindergarten? Two lessons learned from teaching posthuman pedagogy to university students

The hierarchical human-centric paradigm has been criticized by various movements of posthuman philosophy because this paradigm forgets and dismisses nonhuman beings and entities: animals, nature, objects, and technology. When I developed a course called ‘Education and Adaptations of Animal Studies’ for university students in 2015, I learned two lessons in practice. First, many humans, pedagogues, and academics want to hold on to their anthropocentric worldview that separates them from other species. Second, in pedagogical practices humans prefer to avoid confronting the violence they do toward animals. In this article, I reflect on these two lessons learned and consider what they tell us about the dichotomies, anthropocentrism, and speciesism visible in pedagogical practices. I also discuss how posthuman pedagogy and posthuman ethics can help us ask uneasy questions that fracture the uncertain conception of human superiority.

Spinning Yarns: Affective Kinshipping as Posthuman Pedagogy

A ball of yarn unravels in rolls above desks, humming laptops, paper coffee cups, and human bodies. The yarn finds a hand amidst cheers and hoots. The yellow spool swiftly winds around a cookbook a...

Edu-crafting posthumanist adventures in/for higher education: A speculative musing

This final article, in a formal sense the ‘outro’ to this parallax special issue devoted to Posthuman Pedagogies: Reconceptualising Higher Education, muses on the contours of a posthuman imaginary ...

The Coal Beds of Generations X, Y, and Z: Syncing, Learning, and Propagating in the Age of the Posthuman

ABSTRACTIn this article I broaden the discussion of posthuman pedagogy by arguing that when humans and Artificial Intelligences (AIs) engage, they are not separate entities but are instead “in-phenomena” (K. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28[3] [2003]: 801–31). I contend that the division between humans and AI is artificial, and dispute the ontological separability of the two entities while they are in-phenomena. Instead, using anthropologist Tim Ingold’s notion of “correspondence-thinking,” I argue that humans and technology “sync up” and enter into “correspondence” (T. Ingold, “On Human Correspondence,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23[1] [2017a]: 9–27). By doing so, I contend that the human body enters a different ontological category, which I describe using the neologism “humAIn.” I take inspiration from philosopher and physicist Karen Barad, and using her approach to causality and agency, contend that the ontological gap between human and AI is collapsed during “intra-actions.” Thus, the blood-filled veins of the human body and the blinking light of the metallic body coordinate and operate in unison—they are in sync. To explore the transient state humans enter while syncing with AIs, I outline ethnographic research carried out with the “chatterbot” hosted in my smartphone. While syncing with the device, I consider collaborative learning, a modality that attends to the role of education in wider society, and think through the repercussions of syncing for human–AI civic life. I argue that humAIn entities generate a valuable quasi-synthetic resource—proto-data—and these are the new coal beds of generations X, Y, and Z.

The Coal Beds of Generations X, Y, and Z: Syncing, Learning, and Propagating in the Age of the Posthuman

ABSTRACT In this article I broaden the discussion of posthuman pedagogy by arguing that when humans and Artificial Intelligences (AIs) engage, they are not separate entities but are instead “in-phenomena” (K. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28[3] [2003]: 801–31). I contend that the division between humans and AI is artificial, and dispute the ontological separability of the two entities while they are in-phenomena. Instead, using anthropologist Tim Ingold’s notion of “correspondence-thinking,” I argue that humans and technology “sync up” and enter into “correspondence” (T. Ingold, “On Human Correspondence,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23[1] [2017a]: 9–27). By doing so, I contend that the human body enters a different ontological category, which I describe using the neologism “humAIn.” I take inspiration from philosopher and physicist Karen Barad, and using her approach to causality and agency, contend that the ontological gap between human and AI is collapsed during “intra-actions.” Thus, the blood-filled veins of the human body and the blinking light of the metallic body coordinate and operate in unison—they are in sync. To explore the transient state humans enter while syncing with AIs, I outline ethnographic research carried out with the “chatterbot” hosted in my smartphone. While syncing with the device, I consider collaborative learning, a modality that attends to the role of education in wider society, and think through the repercussions of syncing for human–AI civic life. I argue that humAIn entities generate a valuable quasi-synthetic resource—proto-data—and these are the new coal beds of generations X, Y, and Z.

The ethics of becoming in a pedagogy for social justice. A posthumanist perspective

The spate of local (#Rhodesmustfall, #Feesmustfall) and global (such as Occupy, Arabspring) protest movements point to the multiple forms of exclusion that characterise late Capitalism. These exclusions are not only detrimental to the majority of humans, but also to the earth. The protests at higher education institutions are directed at institutional mechanisms and pedagogies that exclude the majority from meaningful participation in defining the social and environmental good. This article is a conceptual investigation into aspects of a posthuman pedagogy that aims to define notions of sociality and justice. A pedagogy of social justice does not simply aim at the inclusion of the marginalised in the social order, but queries the ways social ordering draws on an economy of lack and desire, the very resources of transformation. It is claimed that a posthuman perspective could do justice to the becoming of humans, nonhumans and earth. Particular aspects of a pedagogy of social justice are discussed such as desire, enjoyment; becoming and responsibility. It is argued that a focus on the production of desire through which students become minoritarian could enhance their power of differential becomings and their constructive engagement in the transformation of reality.

Posthumanism, Philosophy for Children, and Anthony Browne’s “Little Beauty”

Using a posthuman conceptual framework, I analyze in detail Anthony Browne’s complex decisions about censorship and child protection in the process of creating the written text and the images in his picture book Little Beauty. Analysis of this work exposes many contradictions located in the relationship between science/art, animal/human, fantasy/reality, machine/life, and child/adult and includes Browne’s choice of characters, ending of the story, and the deliberate variety of art styles throughout this work. I offer a theoretical framework for exploring the ethico-politcal role of the artist when producing such a picture book and a practical posthuman pedagogy that interrupts using children’s literature in education as a means to give readers the right moral messages. Instead, I invite students of all ages to interrogate possibly discriminatory conceptual distinctions via philosophical enquiries.

Performance as Critical Posthuman Pedagogy

In this essay, I argue that performance studies practitioners are well positioned to participate in, as well as educate the public about, discourses of science and technology. Arguing that technoscientific conditions create the need for alternative pedagogical practices, I turn to critical performative pedagogy (CPP) as one way to begin moving toward technoscientific literacy. Drawing lessons from a collaborative performance installation in which I embodied a cyborg persona, I highlight connections between CPP and cyborg/posthuman pedagogies, demonstrate some of the dynamics of these approaches, and argue for their value as public pedagogical practices for a technoscientific, posthuman world.

The ‘unfinished’ subject: Pedagogy and performance in the company of copies, robots, mutants and cyborgs

ABSTRACTThe posthuman perspective, which suggests that the boundaries of the human being are undergoing constant revision, has grown as a paradigm for analysis of the connection between technology and the body in contemporary performance practice. This article explores the potential of a ‘posthuman pedagogy’ and its relation to practices of multimedia performance. It suggests an approach to learning that considers specific manifestations of the posthuman being within pedagogical process, encourages students to examine their own existence within a ‘posthuman condition’, and positions the learner as part of a network of material and mediatized components. Various manifestations of ‘posthuman bodies’ within performance are identified such as the ‘copying’ of the body, robotic or cyborg bodies, and ‘mutating’ bodies. To explain the position of the human body within a posthuman world, it is asserted that the posthuman does not involve the ‘death of self, nor the death of the liberal humanist subject, but the re-conception of the self as ‘unfinished’. Finally, posthumanism is framed as a perspective on education that shifts the direction of learning from the traditional doctrine of internalizing knowledge, to a model of experience and practice that connects the student with the material world, and is particularly relevant to drama and theatre studies.

Little War Machines: Posthuman Pedagogy and its Media

The article examines Deleuze’s, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, theories of affect. In so doing, it argues that the materiality of affect, as a meta-subjective exchange, can be considered a posthuman pedagogy. Three different media (literature, music, and dance) are explored as examples of this material exchange. As an affective exchange, encounters with literature, music, and dance might be considered a posthuman form of education. This is because, on one level, pedagogy is fundamentally about people, yet on another level, the material changes, or traces of interaction that identify the kinds of subjective modulations that occur through literature, sound, and movement, are forms of change that are not created by people. Rather, these changes are created by the materialities of texts.