Shared by Alicia Flynn
How could sympogogy help mobilize the educative praxis of learning-with the world? Based on Haraway’s (2016) proposition of ‘sympoiesis’ as a relational process ontology of ‘making-with’ the world, ‘sympoethnography’ has become my (com)posthuman methodology for inquiring with the more-than-human ‘Manna High’-‘Bluestone Creek’ community. I had understood this methodology as also pedagogical as the approaches were at once part of the doctoral ‘research’ and the school ‘learning’. But it seems pedagogy no longer serves in this context, where approaches to teaching children with constructivist mechanisms are entrenched in individual human-centred developmentalism ignoring the world’s relational affect and confining the arts of teaching and learning to adult human Teachers as a unidirectional transmissive process. Where ‘androgogy’ is the process of guiding adult learners and ‘heutagogy’ is ‘self-directed’ learning, each has its limitations in this sympoietic posthuman high school context. So, emerging is a new postdevelopmental (Blaise, 2010; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2011) teaching and learning praxis in which ‘learning to become with the world’ (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020) is a more-than-human intra-active participatory process of sympogogy—the arts of learning (and teaching) with the world.
Sym = with, together; as in sym-biotic
-po (from poiesis) = making
-gogy = learning, wor(l)ding, storying
References:
Blaise, M. (2010). Creating a postdevelopmental logic for mapping gender and sexuality in early childhood. In S.Edwards & L. Brooker (Eds.) Engaging play, pp. 80-95. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Common Worlds Research Collective. (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. UNESCO: Futures of Education Report [background paper] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374032
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2011). Rethinking developmental theories in child and youth care. In A. Pence & J. White (Eds.), Child and youth care: Critical perspectives on pedagogy, practice, and policy (pp. 19–32). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.