‘Local Girl Befriends Vicious Bear’: Unleashing Educational Aspiration through a Pedagogy of Material-Semiotic Entanglement

Abstract

In education, posthumanist approaches require us to pay attention to the more-than-human contexts within which young people come to take themselves up in the world, and to the affordances and capacities of worldly things and affective flows to shape young people’s desires and ways of being in the world. While there has been considerable work in early childhood contexts (e.g., Blaise, 2013; Davies, 2014; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor, 2015; Taylor, 2013), in secondary schools the more-than-human requires researchers to look beyond taken-for-granted rational, cognitive, curriculum contexts to attend to surprising configurations where bodies, things, affect, desire, matter, imagination and pedagogy collide to form new assemblages and possibilities. The material-semiotic entanglements of pedagogy are complex, multiple, uneven, unstable, emergent, and contingent on the specificities of particular times and places. In school education, pedagogy tends to be a taken-for-granted concept, shorthand for all manner of practices around teaching and learning, and in its most common usage it foregrounds the humanist master narrative that positions careful teacher planning for student learning as the most significant aspect of the classroom experience.¹ Deviations and surprises, lessons that veer away from intended outcomes, unexpected ‘pedagogical encounters’ provoked by things other than people are elided rather than understood as part of complex assemblages where pedagogy is emergent, relational and ethical, opening towards intensities and difference (Davies, 2014; Davies and Gannon, 2009).