Learning ecologies and agentic pedagogies: children meeting the world

Abstract

With a challenge to conceptualize an environmental/sustainability education that employs imaginaries and praxis for learning our way through and beyond our planetary crisis, we consider how posthuman creativity articulates into pedagogical practice. We share insights from our researcher/practitioner experience in two different educational settings, theorizing creative/learning ecologies with posthuman insights from Karen Barad and Dan Harris. Our two “learning ecologies” are located within: a preschool in Western Sydney; and a girls’ school in the Himalayan mountains of Uttarakhand. These learning ecologies intra-act to create agentic pedagogies, equipping children to care-take themselves and their worlds, affected as they are by the ecological distortions inherent in the Capitalocene. The pedagogies, characterized as “a pedagogy of hope” and as “a pedagogy of love and responsibility” respectively, enable students to meet and respond to the world in ways which reclaim human/nature agency.

Keywords:

• posthuman creativity
• learning ecologies
• natureculture
• agentic pedagogy
• imaginaries

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In using the term ‘learning ecologies’ we make a distinction between its technical use in the field of digital learning, instead embedding our use of it in the context of a more-than-human relational and ecological paradigm.

2 Names are changed to ensure anonymity