Wild and willful pedagogies: Education policy and practice to embrace the spirits of a more-than-human world

Abstract

Education faces a dilemma: policy and practice are primarily humanist in orientation, and yet the environmental challenges education hopes to confront require moving beyond humanist perspectives – to posthumanist awareness. Recent policy advances in Victoria, Australia, highlight the empowerment of students. Yet widening the scope of education policy to embrace posthumanist ideas and the more-than-human world is a challenge not yet conceived by most policy-makers and teachers. In this paper the relevance of posthumanist ideas to education is taken seriously, and arguments presented which connect policy and wildness, two words not often considered co-supportive. Wildness and policy come together in habits, in practices, where self-will and social civility are bonded together. I introduce anthropomorphism, in its connection with irreducible anthropocentrism, as a means to understand human engagement with the wills, spirits, habits, of nonhumans, in a more-than-human world. Anthropomorphism is one way to enable moral consideration to be extended beyond humans, offering a way to shift education policy and practices, thereby supporting understanding of wild pedagogies.

Imagining Advancement of Wilding Educational Policy: Reflections and Possibilities in Botswana

“…Post-humanists argue for a more-than-human world (Snaza, 2013). As noted by Quay (2020), post-humanist ideals can be used to investigate the wilding of educational policy. The post-humanist stance helps dialogue over the problematic prioritisation of 'subjectmatter as the object of education.'…”

“…Post-humanists argue for a more-than-human world (Snaza, 2013). As noted by Quay (2020), post-humanist ideals can be used to investigate the wilding of educational policy. The post-humanist stance helps dialogue over the problematic prioritisation of ‘subject-matter as the object of education.’ The author explains the inherent difficulties associated with other elements of the natural world as objects subject to human dominance.…”

“…This paper examines the potential implementation of the wilding educational policy in Botswana's mainstream schooling system. Quay (2020) and Aikens (2020) observed that the wilderness is rarely considered in educational policy discussions. However, it has been argued that education has a moral responsibility to advocate, adapt, and mitigate changes in order to protect the wild.…”

Deconstructing the anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism binary through Māori oral fire traditions

“…Some might associate anthropomorphism with human-centeredness because it implicates another bias "anthropo-" word. Yet, the term should be understood as an inescapable feature of being human (Quay, 2021). Anthropomorphism is widely used to promote products and brands in the marketplace (e.g., car's headlights, curves of the coke bottle, Mr Clean).…”

General education in Taiwan’s universities: Development, challenges, and role

“…Moreover, we live in extraordinary times, in a more-than-human world; in the face of the globalization of education, many countries have tried to promote the quality of higher education in recent years, and cultivate students' independent thinking and problem-solving ability. General education plays a pivotal role (Morse et al, 2021;Quay, 2021;Shih, 2019Shih, , 2020cShih and Wang, 2022;Tesar, 2020). Taiwan is no exception.…”