Intra-generational education: Imagining a post-age pedagogy

Abstract

This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four concepts: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. These may appear improbable in the context of education policy-making today, but they are born of theorising our practices in the age-transgressive field of Philosophy with Children. We argue that these concepts help to reconfigure intra-generational relations, ways of being and becoming. They express the longing, corporeality and visionary epistemology of nomadic enquiry. These inventions express a non-hierarchical philosophy of immanence. We draw some tentative conclusions about educational practices more generally.

Keywords:

• Intra-generationalism
• picturebooks
• posthumanism
• post-age pedagogy
• Philosophy for Children

Notes

1. The term onto-epistemology expresses the idea that for posthumanists nature cannot be reduced to a mere object of human knowledge. The physical world does not exist ‘out there’, passively, to be discovered by humans’ thinking about or experimenting on ‘it’. For Barad it is impossible to separate or isolate practices of knowing and being: ‘they are mutually implicated’ (Barad, 2007, p. 185).

2. The conjunction ‘bodymind’ is used by Floyd Merrell (2003) to describe how mind and body always act in concert, although he still holds on to a ‘relatively autonomous mind’ (p. 52), unlike the posthumanist conception of ‘bodymindmatter’ (Barad, 2007).

3. The significance of the use of ‘re-’ with a hyphen is explained below.

4. In South Africa, two States of Emergency occurred in the sixties and eighties when the government faced unprecedented internal revolt. See: http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/state-emergency-south-africa-1960-and-1980s (Retrieved June 18, 2015).

5. Bell (1995) defines adultism as the systematic mistreatment and disrespect of young people and that it is a pervasive and difficult form of mistreatment to identify and challenge because it is widely experienced and considered ‘normal’. Kennedy (2006a) compares adultism with colonialism, classism, racisms, sexism and homophobia. See also Philosophy’s Children, Chapter 10 in Philosophy and Education: An introduction to key questions and themes (Haynes, Gale, & Parker, 2014).

6. Kitamura in interview with Joan Carey. Retrieved November 24, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/08/satoshi-kitamura-angry-arthur-illustrations.