Anticipating Other Worlds, Animating OurSelves: An Invitation to Comparative Education

Abstract

Purpose: This article aims to reimagine education—and our selves—within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone are interrelated. Design/Approach/Methods: The aim is achieved by pursuing two speculative thought experiments to connect and bring into conversation seemingly unrelated knowledge systems across space and time—European “paganism” and 13th-century Japanese Buddhism, as well as excerpts from indigenous, ecofeminist, and decolonial scholarship. These thought experiments are conducted through a series of “and if” questions around education and schooling. Findings: The article proposes to radically reimagine education in two ways. First, it invites readers to reconfigure education as a “connective tissue” between different worlds, bringing together rather than hierarchizing them. Second, it proposes to reframe education as an opportunity to learn how to anticipate and animate our ongoing entanglement with more-than-human worlds. Originality/Value: Using the concept of “metamorphosis” as an antidote to Western metaphysics, the article re-situates education within a wider set of possibilities in relation to the taken-for-granted ways of knowing and being, as well as the notions of space and time.

Engaging with the More-Than-Human and Decolonial Turns in the Land of Shinto Cosmologies: “Negative” Comparative Education in Practice

“…Silova (2019) also suggests the tenacity of the "creature communities" today and how social science, including education scholarship, has been blinded to numerous students' encounters with the morethan-human worlds during their schooling (see also Silova, 2020).…”

“…In May 2019, a moment of pedagogic disruption was created for me, when Iveta Silova, Jeremy Rappleye, and Yun You organized a 2-day workshop at the East China Normal University in Shanghai on the theme of Beyond the Western Horizon in Educational Research: Toward a Deeper Dialogue About Our Interdependent Futures (see Silova et al, 2020). Setting the work of South American decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo as its central theoretical underpinning, the workshop also encouraged the participants to explore links to other bodies of intellectual work, including ecofeminism and East Asian (Chinese and Japanese) thought, to explore collectively the alternatives beyond Western epistemic and ontological horizons.…”

Toward Weaving a “Common Faith” in the Age of Climate Change

“…To Orr, “If literacy is driven by the search for knowledge, ecological literacy is driven by the sense of wonder, the sheer delight in being alive in a beautiful, mysterious, bountiful world” (p. 86). Apparently, the sense of wonder embedded in moral imagination is the key to bringing about “what if” questions (Stengers, 1997; see also Silova, 2020). In short, “what then” is a crucial question for the lay public as well as scientists to conduct a collaborative inquiry into the interconnections between varied specialized academic disciplines, between actions and consequences, between short-term and long-term consequences, between means and ends, between economics and ethics, and so on.…”

Beyond the Western Horizon in Educational Research: Toward a Deeper Dialogue About Our Interdependent Futures

“…Silova (2020) continues to incite our ecological imaginations by bringing into dialogue seemingly unrelated knowledge systems across space and time—European “paganism” and 13th-century Japanese Buddhism as well as excerpts from indigenous, ecofeminist, and decolonial scholarship. She pursues a series of speculative thought experiments—epistemological and ontological “regressions”—around “and if” questions in order to reimagine education and our selves within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone (both human and non-human) are deeply interrelated.…”