Towards Posthuman Education: Curriculum-Making for a World to Come

Despite the dramatic acceleration of technology, rapidly advancing climate crisis, widening equality gaps, and global political instability, education continues to follow and repeat the same pedagogical and curriculum trends that we have seen for the past century. This seminar will argue that teaching needs to play a key role in taking a ‘posthuman turn’; that is, re-imagining what humans could, and should become in the 21^st century and beyond. Moving from ‘learning-as-cognition’ to seeing learning as an embodied and relational process; viewing (human) difference and variation as generative and transformative; and recognising that other-than-human agents are always present in processes of learning opens up space for understanding education differently. Posthumanism as a theory is often dense and impenetrable, but holds great potential for educators who want the opportunity to explore ethics in teaching, create meaningful networks with others, and examine their practice through a different lens. It expands what is understood as social justice beyond liberal and humanist understandings of ‘Man’ which limit can humanity to Vitruvian ideals of whiteness, ableism, patriarchy and heteronormativity. This seminar offers a route in to posthuman thinking so that teachers can apply the concepts to their own curriculum endeavours, drawing on examples from practice and introducing provocations to stimulate thought and action.

Bio:

Dr Kay Sidebottom

Kay is a Lecturer in Education, and Programme Director for the MSc Education at the University of Stirling. Her PhD research explored how teachers can work with posthuman ideas to facilitate meaningful, care-ful and disruptive education spaces for our complex times. With a background in community and adult education, her pedagogical specialisms include critical, radical and anarchist education, arts-based practice and community philosophy. Kay’s current projects have a specific focus on what we can learn from ‘more-than-human' teachers; that is, the animals, insects and wider ecological systems on which humanity depends.