This paper is a call for educators to respond to the problematics that arise from reducing the Earth to a resource for human activities. The concept of ‘Anthropocene’ is a burning invitation to rethink education by putting the human to its place. We therefore argue for a spatial-embodied conceptualization of learning, which involves the more-than-human and nonrepresentational. In this effort, we use Latour’s concept of ‘geostory’ to problematize the prevailing anthropocentrism in education. We discuss the power of experimentation by introducing (...) a learning experiment that took place at a pop-up greenhouse in Helsinki. The idea was to encourage upper secondary geography students to playfully discard their human perspective and study the city from the viewpoint of plants: to probe the presumed human/nature divide through brief but moving encounters with ‘others’. We argue that through affective encounters with nonhuman others, the Earth speaks: it tells stories with us. If humans let themselves be addressed by these encounters, geostories can temporarily re-place human-centred narrative storytelling practices (histories), voiced by the modernist ‘I’, and generate alternative forms of knowledge that emerge from our belonging together. These stories emerging from geographical experimentation entail potential to cultivate both knowing and care that exceed the human. (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

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, n...

In this article, we argue that the interest being taken by governments in establishing innovative learning environments in schools relies on a conception of space as a largely neutral arena. In consequence, relations of space and power inherent in the infrastructural shift to ILEs tend to drop from view. Adopting an assemblage approach to investigating learning environments, and exploring ILEs as they are playing out in Australian schools, we strive to surface what drops from view. Taking ILEs to be sociomaterial (...) assemblages, we work with empirical material and trace how they assemble and reassemble. The account is less concerned with what works in ILEs; rather, its focus is on their ‘workings’ as assemblages of relations and most particularly, affective relations. Thus, we explore two affective encounters involving school leaders, teachers and students showing the ways in which they position and are positioned within ILEs. The argument is made that the assemblage approach which is non-deterministic and relational affords new ways of understanding what ILEs are and how they work and who they work for. And, that attending to affective practice brings into view the micropolitics through which infrastructural shifts and infrastructural policy-making are made. (shrink)

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to (...) rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to... (shrink)

The traditional divisions in the methodology of educational research include two types of methods: quantitative and qualitative. These comprise e.g. quasi-experiment, comparative research, observat...