How can we engage all teachers and learners in thinking, feeling and being responsible for ourselves, one another, and the planet? In the new paper, New pathways for teaching and learning: the posthumanist approach, written by Fiona Blaikie, Christine Daigle and Liette Vasseur, the authors explore embracing a posthumanist pedagogy and returning to holistic, ancestral and Indigenous ways of knowing.
From the paper’s introduction:
“How does one “posthuman” teach another? Applying a posthumanist approach to education involves rethinking pedagogy, knowledge production and dissemination. If there is a need to understand the world differently, we must “defamiliarize [our] mental habits” (Braidotti 2019, 77) by moving away from a humanist worldview. This worldview has not only shaped our thoughts, but also our institutions. Universities and education systems are structured around binaried teacher-learner relationships, as well as seeing disciplines and school subjects as discrete entitites with their own objects and methods of study and practices. What changes must we bring about so that we can imagine and understand the world and ourselves in new ways? A posthuman approach can change the way we value ourselves, other species, the planet, and beyond. It requires thinking about the system as a whole instead of each agent as a perfect independent entity; it requires valuing all agents and their relationality.”
The paper was prepared for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and can be found on its website.
You can also download the paper here .