[Birdsong]: Pedagogies of Attunement and Surrender with More-than-Human Teachers

Abstract

Our current ecological predicament requires a shift to a post-anthropocentric educational paradigm in which we educate for and about a world that is not “for us,” but comprised of a multitude of eco-systems of which we are simply a part. To facilitate this, education should be enacted differently; we need to experience learning not as furthering entrenched nature/culture binaries, but as “worlding” processes, whereby imaginary divides between individual and environment are troubled, as humans and the material world are revealed to be relational and entangled. Posthumanism offers an affective turn towards a social and ecological justice that accounts for such entanglements; enacted through necessary processes of de-familiarisation from the dominant vision of education. In this article we firstly explore the theoretical underpinnings of critical posthumanism to critique sustainability education-as-usual and propose new modes of teaching that lean into affective processes of noticing and surrender. We then discuss a research project in which participants came together to explore what happens when we cease to privilege humans as the ultimate instructors and holders of knowledge. In doing so we disrupt normative methodologies, drawing on affect, embodiment, relationality, transdisciplinarity and an ethics of care which extend learning to more-than-human kin.