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.
Wild as will, as spirit and as habit
Wildness is not normally associated with education policy. The word ‘policy’ is derived from the Latin polis or city, pointing to civilization and citizenship. In contrast, the word ‘wild’ can be etymologically traced to ‘self-willed’ (Jickling et al., 2018: 161; Skeats, 1888: 711; Vest, 1985: 324). This connection in language of wild and willed is important, as it reveals associations in meaning that have reverberated across centuries. Paul (1958: 412) recounts Thoreau’s interest in the word ‘wild’ and its connection to ‘self-willed’ in articulating ‘the kind of culture’ that made it possible for him to live out his ‘faith in nature’. This kind of culture was informed by ‘liberation and enlargement, the conditions of a free and individual growth’, which were enabled via ‘the nurture of the New World’, understood as ‘set against the civilization of Europe’ (412). According to Paul, Thoreau found ‘a philological warrant for the connection’ (412) between wild and self-willed in Trench’s (1852) The Study of Words, wherein it is stated that ‘"wild" is the participle past of “to will”; a “wild” horse is a “willed” or self-willed horse, one that has never been tamed or taught to submit its will to the will of another; and so with a man [sic]’ (203).
Associations in meaning between wild and self-willed can draw on ideas of freedom and autonomy, as expressed in Kantian ethics, where ‘autonomy’ signals ‘a law which is self-given, … the same as freedom’, in contrast to a law imposed by an ‘outside authority’ (Dewey and Tufts, 1932: 166). However, Dewey (1922) considered will in a more situated way, where even ‘forceful energetic characters’ exemplary of freedom and autonomy, are always situated interactionally amidst ‘environing conditions’ (84). He encompassed both of these ideas within the notion of habit, acknowledging that in doing so, ‘the word habit may seem twisted somewhat from its customary use’ (40). Habits are often associated with ways of doing something that do not change. But then these habitual tendencies can be understood to have some influence, some sense of agency, or will. Dewey pointed out that ‘every habit is impulsive, that is projective, urgent’ (1922: 186); ‘habit is propulsive and moves’, knowingly or unknowingly, ‘toward some end, or result’ (37). Hence, habit is not different from will, commonly understood as ‘something practical and moving’ (44). In this sense, Dewey proclaimed that ‘all habits are demands [emphasis added] for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self’; thus ‘in any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will’ (25).
In Dewey’s understanding of habits, self-will and social civility are bonded together. Habits embrace a complex interplay: expression of self-will through activities guided in their action by social-civil claims. More than a century ago Dewey recognized that educators do not adequately understand this bond, with the tendency to see self-will and social civility in conflict. ‘Instead of seeing the educative steadily and as a whole, we see conflicting terms. We get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture’ (Dewey 1902: 4–5). So predominant was this conflicting that Dewey positioned it at the apex of the principles and concerns driving educational thought: ‘below all other divisions in pedagogic opinion lies this opposition’ (5). This conflicting is still rife today, with teachers ensconced in ongoing debates about teacher-centered and student-centered pedagogy (Cuban, 1984).
It is easy to see this account of conflicting and opposing as speaking for all of education. And yet this apex expression of the educational situation is distinctly humanist, raising questions about whether the scope of education might need to be broader. Dewey argued that ‘for human beings, the environing affairs directly important are those formed by the activities of other human beings’ (1922: 84). Applying a broader lens, this paper aims to open awareness to posthumanist ideas and respond to questions concerning how these may impact education. In order to do this, the notion of will must be further expanded: habits are not only human affairs. Will points to spirit, which can be broadened to include nonhumans (animism); for nonhumans, too, engage the projective force of habit, ‘the habits of plants and animals’ (Dewey, 1900: 124). But how can this much wider awareness of human and nonhuman habits/wills/spirits be comprehended by humans?
One possible way forward is a more nuanced understanding of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is often implicated with anthropocentrism as another damning ‘anthropo-’ word focusing attention on humans. However, when it is acknowledged – as Gough (2014: 160) does – that humans ‘necessarily experience the world with species-specific biophysical limitations and possibilities’, then an ‘irreducible anthropocentrism’ can be more readily discerned as an inescapable feature of being human. This then enables posthumanist arguments for decentering humans to be directed more pointedly at ‘hierarchical anthropocentrism’ (Gough, 2014: 160), an anthropocentrism which claims human superiority. Acknowledgment of irreducible anthropocentrism creates space for a more positive and posthumanist understanding of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism, then, can contribute to formation of pedagogical practices, of habits, that acknowledge the self-will not only of humans, but of nonhumans; building on Dewey’s understanding of ‘habits as the product of educational development’ (1916: 71). But in order to reach into the many schools and other places of learning which could benefit from these ideas, education policy must be influenced: policy that informs and guides action via practices that become habitual tendencies.
Education and wildness: acknowledging will and spirit
Policy for partnership
Education policy reflects acknowledgment of both self-will and social civility, sometimes clearly but more often by way of assumption, in influencing habits, as practices, with primarily (even exclusively) humanist objectives. An example which achieves a more explicit representation exists in the Framework for Improving Student Outcomes in Victoria, Australia (State Government of Victoria, 2019a). This framework is comprised of eight ‘essential elements for school improvement’ (State Government of Victoria, 2019b), the fourth of which has the title: ‘Student voice, leadership and agency in own learning activated so students have positive school experiences and can act as partners in school improvement’, pointing to the building of ‘a culture where teachers and students work together and student voice is heard and respected’.
This essential element is actualized in more detail via Amplify: Empowering Students Through Voice, Agency and Leadership, which is positioned as a ‘practice guide for school leaders and teachers”’ (State of Victoria, 2019: 6). Through Amplify it is argued that this fourth essential element ‘draws specific links between amplified student voice, agency and leadership and the role of students in improving their own learning and in creating positive learning experiences’ (11). An emphasis on self-will is highly visible here, which is ‘brought into the classroom’ via the ‘Victorian Teaching and Learning Model’ in its ‘Practice Principle 3: Student voice, agency and leadership empower [emphasis added] students and build school pride’ (13).
Empowerment is the pedagogical key to this practice principle, to the extent that ‘empowering students is intentionally positioned at the heart of the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model’ (State of Victoria, 2019: 20). The emphasis on empowerment in this policy initiative offers emancipation through voice, agency and leadership, expressed as the ‘power to re-make old habits, to re-create’ (Dewey, 1922: 97). Empowering students via teaching practices which offer the freedom to be involved in the re-making of habits, even teachers’ habits, can thus be contrasted with those which expect docility, where ‘docility is looked upon not as ability to learn whatever the world has to teach, but as subjection to those instructions of others which reflect their (i.e. teachers’) current habits’ (64).
The authors of Amplify interpret such student empowering teaching practices via participation and partnership, where ‘effective teachers enable students to be active participants in their learning’, by creating ‘a learning partnership approach – for example, by including students in curriculum planning, in setting goals and in the assessment process’ (State of Victoria, 2019: 20); practices usually determined by teachers alone. In such a partnership approach, teachers ‘are responsive to student feedback and adapt their teaching practice to suit the needs of all students’ (20). Teachers, too, must re-make their habits; but to do so they need to be aware of the needs of all students, of student wills/spirits/habits. Such awareness is the key to a learning partnership approach, which might also involve partnering with nonhumans.
Acknowledging a more-than-human world
But does this approach to empowerment create genuine partnership? This question is important and will be addressed in detail later in this paper. Before addressing it, a further relevant insight – enabled by pedagogical consideration of self-will, of empowerment and of partnership – must be included: that of the self-will of nonhumans. Here the idea of self-will is broadened to include nonhumans. As Thoreau recognized, wildness is used to characterize nonhumans as well as humans – wild horse and wild man – raising awareness of a much larger community of wills in what Abram (1996: 95) called ‘the more-than-human world’. This larger community can be understood generally, or as pertaining to a particular place or region. This larger community includes, along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals – birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, insects – that inhabit [emphasis added] or migrate through the region, to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms – forests, rivers, caves, mountains – that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth. (Abram, 1996: 6–7) (It is) not only the other animals and the plants that speak, as spirits [emphasis added], … but also the meandering river from which those animals drink, and the torrential monsoon rains, and the stone that fits neatly into the palm of the hand. The mountain, too, has its thoughts. The forest birds whirring and chattering as the sun slips below the horizon are vocal organs of the rain forest itself. (Abram, 1996: 14)
Centering and decentering
Acknowledgment of this larger community, the inclusion of the wills of nonhuman nature, presents a challenge to education policy and practice, for ‘education has been viewed as a humanist project par excellence’ (Pedersen, 2015), a project traditionally concerned with ‘becoming-human’ (see also Snaza, 2013). The educational emphasis on becoming-human, on child becoming adult, highlights again Dewey’s recognition of the division in pedagogic opinion. This positions the adult above the child, as teacher and designer of curriculum, because achieving adulthood in a successful way (determined by adults) is the purpose of education; in effect, becoming human means becoming adult. Yet the emphasis on becoming means that the ‘position and presence’ of the child in education is also ‘non-negotiable, fetishized, universalized, and as compulsory as the future itself’ (Pedersen, 2010: 692). The child can also take center stage.
This is a conundrum visible in long-running debates about teacher-centered pedagogy and student-centered pedagogy (Cuban, 1984); debates which have resulted in more than a century of educational ‘conflict’, ‘confusion’ and ‘compromise’ (Dewey, 1904: 20). This conflict arises because centering goes hand in hand with decentering. Teacher-centered pedagogy decenters the student, while student-centered pedagogy does the same to the teacher. And this conundrum remains positioned primarily in a humanist understanding of education. In order to embrace other wills, nonhuman wills, there is a need to decenter humans (Young and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020); to somehow move away from an education dominated by hierarchical anthropocentrism.
One way to challenge hierarchical anthropocentrism is to decenter humans by including a ‘nature-centered pedagogy’ (Quay and Jensen, 2018: 296). Moore (2008: 5) similarly draws attention to ‘ecocentrism’, as identified by Callicott (1998), building upon Aldo Leopold’s (1949) idea of a land ethic, which ‘changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for … fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such’ (204).
Following detailed investigation of the works of important nature writers, Moore (2008: 10) proposed the idea and practice of ‘ecocentric personification’ which ‘represents the relationship between human and nonhuman, challenges anthropocentrism, and extends “moral considerability to nonhuman beings” [ Zimmerman, 1998: 3]’. Again, an example can be seen in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which Moore argues ‘employs personification profusely and inventively to deliver its ecocentric message’ (2008: 160). The idea of personification has some similarity with subjectification, mentioned positively in light of will and spirit above, and anthropomorphism, highlighting Moore’s position that ‘anthropomorphism is not automatically connected to anthropocentrism’ (12), especially when this anthropocentrism is hierarchical anthropocentrism.
Humanist and posthumanist ideas
Ecocentrism is exemplary of posthumanist ideas: ideas which challenge humanist understandings of education (Bayne, 2018). Posthumanist ideas aim to question the broader positioning of humans in a more-than-human world, by arguing ‘that the “human” is not a stable, ontologically identifiable, being’, but ‘always has to be distinguished from various nonhumans with which it is at least potentially confused’ (Snaza, 2013: 45). As such, it is worth pointing out that posthumanist ideas are not acutely antihumanist.
Applying posthumanist ideas to an investigation of education policy, Pedersen highlighted how ‘dominant educational policy’ relies heavily on a ‘structural-anthropocentric ideology’ (2010: 692). Pedersen identified the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, 2005–2014 (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2014) as a key policy initiative embracing this anthropocentric ideology. Significantly, following her review of related policy documents, Pedersen found ‘the concept of environmental sustainability’ to commonly be ‘used as little else than a prop’, with sustainable development largely ‘focused on the life conditions of present and future generations of humans’ (2010: 691): an expression of hierarchical anthropocentrism.
Others have also critiqued this policy initiative. Commenting on the policy development work occurring during the years leading up to the launch of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, Jickling (2001) problematized the lack of ‘meaningful dialogue about the difficult nature of sustainability and sustainable development’, such that critical ideas were ‘subsumed by the language of sustainability, or marginalized and ignored’ (168). One of these critical ideas has been highlighted again, more recently, by Engelmann (2019), who argues that education for sustainable development takes ‘the rational human subject and its agency for granted’, thereby positioning ‘nature as a passive object or as an object that is only constructed by human agency’ (504). This hierarchical anthropocentric ideology informs other elements of education too, including the field of environmental education, thereby extending a challenge to ‘the dominant philosophy of environmental education which is very anthropocentric’ (Gough, 2018).
It seems, then, that ‘education, as it is often currently enacted, is unable to shoulder the challenge’ (Jickling et al., 2018: 160), the challenge further highlighted by posthumanist awareness. This is because, often, education ‘either explicitly or implicitly … aids and abets the problem. It bends toward the status quo’ (160), which is humanist. For this reason, Jickling and colleagues have proposed ‘wild pedagogies’ (159), drawing on the connection between wild and will. Wild pedagogies is thus an emerging discourse which legitimizes and encourages engagement with questioning around pedagogical practice. The basic question for teaching, Bayley (2018: 243) argues, ‘is no longer simply an “if” or a “why” but how. Simply HOW?’: how can education/pedagogy/teaching change in response to the necessary repositioning of humans identified in posthumanist thought?
Changing education with posthumanist awareness
Humanist positioning of the nonhuman in education
Dewey made the argument – one supported today by policy-related documents such as Amplify – that working with the wills of children, somehow partnering with children, is a necessary feature of pedagogy. He articulated this via the language of experience by making it clear that the child’s experience is not the same as that of the adult. Correspondingly, an adult’s will is quite different to that of a child, meaning that a child is never just a physically smaller adult. A child and an adult experience the social-civil norms of any situation very differently.
A significant issue for every teacher, then, must be to have as genuine as possible an appreciation of the experiencing of the particular children (or young people) being taught – of their wills – and additionally, a well-developed understanding of how the educational situation can and should be impacted by such an appreciation. Yet, focusing on the distinction between ‘the nature of the child’ and ‘the developed consciousness of the adult’, Dewey (1902) acknowledged that ‘it is easier to see the conditions in their separateness, to insist upon one at the expense of the other, to make antagonists of them, than to discover a reality to which each belongs’ (4). Discovering a reality to which each belongs is perhaps the most important task of the teacher.
This is Dewey’s articulation of ‘the problem of the teacher’ (1902: 23), the problem of ‘inducing a vital and personal experiencing’. This contrasts vividly with the traditionally accepted problem of the student: ‘the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set by the teacher … of finding out what the teacher wants, what will satisfy the teacher’, resulting in a situation in which the ‘relationship to subject matter is no longer direct’, because the emphasis is on ‘adapting that material (the subject-matter) to the teacher’s requirements’ (Dewey, 1916: 183–184). Dewey (1902) therefore argued that the teacher’s concern should not be ‘with the subject-matter as such, but with the subject-matter as a related factor in a total and growing experience’ (23). Hence that important task for the teacher in discovering ‘the ways in which that subject-matter] may become a part of experience’ (23).
Dewey’s understanding of these problems in education is humanist, yet it is worth acknowledging that Dewey’s ‘texts are not univocally or easily humanist’ (Snaza, 2017: 15). In this vein, Siddiqui (2016) applies the term ‘pre-posthuman’ to Dewey’s philosophy, because ‘several components suggest a readiness for a posthuman embrace’ (72). Even so, Dewey’s portrayal of these problems in education came to a focus on a humanized subject-matter. This view draws on that conflicting and opposing which sits at the apex of education – the child versus the curriculum; the individual nature versus social culture – which Dewey was trying to resolve. However, while he did not believe a resolution could be achieved by attempting ‘to bring about a compromise’, nor by finding ‘a via media’ or middle way, nor by making ‘an eclectic combination’ (Dewey, 1938: 5), he did articulate this opposition as one in which subject-matter, curriculum content, is humanized. Subject-matter represents the social culture drawn from adult life.
Dewey’s interpretation of this conflicting and opposing plays into a relational conundrum that has created confusion across centuries due to various shifts in meaning concerning subject and object: the subject–object relation (1913: 523). In one sense the child is the subject of education, ‘the experiencing subject’ (Dewey, 1929: 24), and the knowledge and skills of the curriculum are the objects for this subject. Hence, curriculum is commonly considered to be organized by way of disciplinary subjects, so named because they consist of subject-matter: objective matter for the subject. Yet this can position the disciplinary subject (such as mathematics or history) not as object but as the subject of education, supplanting the child. The disciplinary subject(-matter) becomes both subject and object of education.
Dewey attempted to alleviate this confusion by arguing that educators should ‘abandon the notion of subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child’s experience’; concomitantly, teachers should ‘cease thinking of the child’s experience as also something hard and fast’, and instead ‘see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital’ (1902: 11). This positions child and curriculum, then, as ‘simply two limits which define a single process’ (11).
However, even here, the focus tends to remain on the subject-matter, on what children should learn, as the object of education. Generally assumed, then, are broad understandings of how this learning will occur: methods relevant to a school-room. Who the child is, is also settled: a student, a pupil, a learner. What, how and who are always connected, with the specific mode of connection underlying and circumscribing responses to any questions about why something is the case (Quay, 2015). Yet it is a significant problem, from the perspective of posthumanist ideas, if nonhumans are considered as subject-matter, as what, as object – for the learner, student, pupil. The posthumanist education challenge is to position nonhumans as whos, as subjects, not as subject-matter (objects).
Personification, anthropomorphism, prosopopoeia
Posthumanist understandings of education open awareness to this problematic prioritization of subject-matter as the object of education. They problematize it, because it commonly leads to an objectification of nonhumans. Nonhumans primarily appear in education policy and practice via the curriculum as various instances of what, of knowledge: to be learned by students (who), taught by teachers in a school-room (how). Such objectification of nonhumans and nature was exemplified in Dewey’s time via object-lessons, which played a large part in the pedagogy of nature-study. Here objects (such as natural objects) are introduced in the school-room as the focus for discussions (often driven by scientific understandings) and other activities. Yet Dewey (1915) was adamant that ‘no number of object lessons … can afford even the shadow of a substitute for acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden acquired through actual living among them and caring for them’ (8)
Dewey implored teachers to discover a reality to which both child experience and adult designed curriculum belong; where curriculum is a related factor in a total and growing experience; a vital and personal experiencing. He fought for the idea that education can never deny the person, their will, their experiencing. Yet I argue that education does deny the wills, the spirits, of nonhumans, which become objectified as subject-matter, as curriculum content. As a consequence, the larger community, as a community (not just as an environment or ecosystem), is not seen.
Posthumanist ideas aim to question the broader positioning of humans in a more-than-human world, and this has consequences for education. How can decentering of humans occur in education, without at the same time denying humans? Evidence for this exists, Moore (2008) suggests, in ecocentric personification, which can ‘show the value of the natural world’ (13). Ecocentric personification is an important decentering trope. Yet it is anything but dehumanizing. On the contrary, ecocentrism is, I believe, a needed corrective in a world where wild nature is disappearing and an array of global environmental problems threatens the well-being of all living creatures; certainly the marketplace alone cannot address or make us realize the decisions we need to make to keep our world viable and humanity safe from itself. This decentering involves not the declaration of the irrelevance of humanity but a call for its reassessment and resituating. We may well be the central event on the planet, but we need greater awareness that we share that planet with over a million other species. (Moore, 2008: 195)
Personification – ‘giving nature our traits’ (Moore, 2008: 195) – on the other hand, can be aligned with anthropomorphism. Moore also introduces another word, prosopopoeia – ‘giving nature a voice’ (195) – which importantly widens the call for empowering student voice made in policy documents like Amplify. Hence all three words – personification, anthropomorphism, prosopopoeia – ‘are inextricably related and are in some cases synonymous’ (Moore, 2008: 13); but they are not identical. Connecting them is a wider attribution of value which acknowledges the larger community, inclusive of humans and nonhumans, as worthy of moral consideration.
Extending moral consideration to nonhumans
As mentioned earlier in this paper, Moore (2008) claims that ecocentric personification represents the relationship between human and nonhuman, challenges anthropocentrism and extends moral considerability to nonhuman beings. This extension of moral consideration to nonhumans goes hand in hand with a challenge to hierarchical anthropocentrism, a challenge which can be supported by anthropomorphism. So, as Moore argues, ‘although anthropomorphism, or more accurately in our case, personification, is indeed long connected … with supporting anthropocentrism, it may be and often is a tool to undercut (hierarchical) anthropocentrism’ (13). Anthropomorphism, when understood as associated with ecocentric personification, can support achievement of a larger community involving both humans and nonhumans.
Extending moral consideration to nonhumans can be hampered, however, as Plumwood (1996) has argued, when ‘only instrumental or means-ends value’ is given ‘to non-human nature’ (148). This is the case when nonhumans are considered as subject-matter for the achievement of humanist education purposes. Such objectification has the effect of setting up ‘a moral dualism’ in which nonhumans are ‘conceived as radically apart from the human in terms of moral consideration’ (148).
Instead, what is required is to reconceive ‘nature as active agent and site of independent value’ (Plumwood, 1996: 148). Nature as active agent is nature as wild, as willed, as self-willed. Nonhumans have will and spirit, and soul, a word that can have a similar sense. Making this connection, Abram (1996) revealed that ‘the word “spirit” … is directly related to the very bodily term “respiration” through their common root in the Latin word spiritus, which signified both “breath” and “wind” ’, and this relation also applies to ‘the Latin word for “soul,” anima – from whence have evolved such English terms as “animal,” “animation,” “animism” … (that) also signified “air” and “breath” ’ (238). Additionally, ‘the more specific Latin word animus, which signified “that which thinks in us,” was derived from the same airy root, anima, itself derived from the older Greek term anemos, meaning “wind” ’ (238).
Having will, nonhumans are animated. In other words, animals can have habits which, like those of humans, are projective, not just instinctive or impulsive. Dewey (1929) regarded an ‘animal given to forming habits’ as ‘one with an increasing number of needs, and of new relationships with the world about it’ (229). The related word ‘animism’ has various connotations, with Piaget (1929: 170) employing it ‘to describe the tendency to regard objects as living and endowed with will’; a tendency he considered ‘a fact’ amongst children; a finding of his investigations of children’s conceptions of the world. Analysis of his many interviews with children revealed that ‘will is the most persistent form of the animistic powers which the child attributes to things’ (Piaget, 1929: 227); and ‘in the great majority of cases this will is controlled by duty’ (224). Hence, Piaget concluded that ‘the child is led to explain the uniformity of nature by moral much rather than by natural laws’ (228). Therefore, ‘the key to child animism is this, that natural beings are conscious according as they have a part to play in the economy of things’ (222), an economy regulated by moral law and duty, via habits. Thus, through recognition of the self-will of nonhumans, children can extend moral consideration to the more-than-human world.
Child animism, as Piaget described it, signals this basic human tendency to ascribe self-will to nonhumans. Being a basic tendency, ‘child animism is not the result of a structure built up by reflection’ (Piaget, 1929: 231). Objectifying reflection removes moral consideration, on the premise that ‘things work neither for or against us and that chance and inertia alone count in nature’ (230). Objectifying reflection is, in Piaget’s words, a difficult ‘operation’ for a young child, for ‘to arrive at such an objective view of things the mind must free itself from subjectivity and abandon its innate egocentricity’ (230).
The subtle but important difference between these two words used by Piaget – subjectivity and egocentricity – is crucial to comprehending a more mature, hence less childlike, understanding of the extension of moral consideration to the more-than-human world, to enable recognition of a larger community. Subjectivity is related to subjectification, a word which can have a meaning similar to personification and anthropomorphism, and which is important in moral reasoning. Egocentricity, as self-centeredness, plays into hierarchical anthropocentricity, as human-centeredness: ‘the human ethical and political equivalent of self-centredness’, which Plumwood (1996: 139) argued must be abandoned. Yet importantly, ‘avoiding self-centredness does not imply abandoning prudence or all concern for the safety or well-being of the self’ (146). Moral reasoning requires some version of empathy, putting ourselves in the other's place, seeing the world from the perspective of an other with needs and experiences both similar too and different from our own [sic]. This may be said to involve some form of transcendence of or going beyond our own location and interests, but it does not require us to eliminate either our own interest or our own location, rooting out any trace of our own experience and any concern for our own needs. (Plumwood, 1996: 128)
Abram has gone some way to acknowledging anthropomorphic reasoning and a more enlightened anthropomorphism by exploring human empathic understanding of nonhumans. ‘We cannot, as humans, precisely experience the living sensations of another form’, Abram (1996: 14) argues; ‘we do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations; we cannot know, or can never be sure that we know, what they know’. For example, ‘we cannot know … the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight’ (13–14). But this does not, of course, mean we have no empathy for the experiencing of such others, because ‘we do [emphasis added] know how it feels to sip from a fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun’ (14).
Interestingly, this not-knowing nonhumans shares many similarities with the not-knowing experienced when attempting to understand other humans. Interpretation is involved, but this should not be naive interpretation, as Gebhard et al. (2003) point out. It could be argued that knowing other humans improves with age and growth. However, knowing other nonhumans through anthropomorphism tends in the other direction: it ‘wanes quite distinctly as children grow older’ (Gebhard et al., 2003: 92) – a situation which Piaget (1929) was well aware of – meaning that any form of anthropomorphism may not come so naturally to older children and adults. Perhaps this is especially so for those educated in mainstream schools, where ‘education, as it is often currently enacted, is unable to shoulder the challenge’ (Jickling et al., 2018: 160). The response to this challenge should be to reassert, pedagogically, an ‘explicit’ (Gebhard et al., 2003: 92) anthropomorphic reasoning, offering enlightened anthropomorphism, such that empathy with nonhumans is learned, extension of moral reasoning to nonhumans is supported, and a larger community including humans and nonhumans is achieved.
Teaching to embrace a more-than-human world
Responding to the challenges presented in this paper is not a simple undertaking. Teachers, in the main, are still grappling with the conundrum of teacher-centered versus student-centered pedagogies, let alone having to engage with posthumanist ideas like ecocentric personification and enlightened anthropomorphism. To decenter humans in any educational endeavor would be anathema to many, if not most, teachers. And yet this is seemingly what is required. So how do we get there?
Aware of this dilemma, Jickling et al. (2018) have suggested a set of six touchstones, under the banner of wild pedagogies. These touchstones are: (a) agency and role of nature as co-teacher; (b) wildness and challenging ideas of control; (c) complexity, the unknown and spontaneity; (d) locating the wild; (e) time and practice; and (f) cultural change. Presented in summary form, paraphrased by Quay and Jensen (2018), these wild pedagogies touchstones offer broad practice principles for teaching: (1) maximise the potential for nature’s agency – the self-will of wider nature – to be encountered and acknowledged; (2) work to enrich the flow of control so that nature-centeredness features, meaning that it is not just the wills of the teacher or the students that dominate always; (3) allow for situational emergence of encounters between wills by not shying away from complexity and by embracing spontaneity; (4) enable encounters with the self-will of nature by being where these encounters can most readily and obviously occur; (5) provide enough time, such that time is less of a barrier to how encounters with the self-will of nature can unfold and can engender new habits; and (6) engage in consideration of how these encounters and new habits may inform and transform encounters and habits in more everyday settings. (Quay and Jensen, 2018: 297)
Extending moral consideration through advancement of education policy
The central idea underpinning wild pedagogies is that of will. As mentioned earlier, self-will and social civility are explicitly acknowledged in the Victorian Framework for Improving Student Outcomes (State Government of Victoria, 2019a). In this policy framework the fourth essential element is focused on emancipating ‘student voice, agency and leadership’ so that students may have positive experiences and act as partners in school improvement. The idea of partnership requires that students be active participants. Both partnership and participation are further embedded in empowerment, and ‘empowering students is intentionally positioned at the heart of the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model’ (State of Victoria, 2019: 20).
Empowerment requires teachers to emancipate through voice, agency and leadership, re-making old habits so that others (other than teachers) may actively participate as partners in education. Victoria’s policy framework currently extends this sense of empowerment to students. But could empowerment extend further to include nonhumans and thereby institute a larger education community? This is a reconsidering and a repositioning of the nonhuman other as who, as subject, rather than as what (in educational terms, as subject-matter, as object).
This requires a sense of empathy which continues to grow beyond the naive anthropomorphic interpretation of childhood. In order to achieve this, there is a need to move away from a hierarchical anthropocentrism and to engage with an enlightened anthropomorphism, an ecocentric personification that enables moral reasoning to include nonhumans and to give voice – prosopopoeia – to their self-wills. In this way, ‘earthly locales may speak through the human persons that inhabit them’ (Abram, 1996: 182).
Many examples exist, in various cultures, of such voice-giving inclusion of nonhumans in a larger community that recognizes a more-than-human world. Expressive in this way are aspects of Japanese culture shown through the films My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away produced by Japanese filmmaker Miyazaki Hayao (Fujiki, 2015; Garza, 2014; Stibbe, 2007). In these films all phenomena have the potential to be considered spirits, to have self-will. ‘Miyazaki himself refers to this idea’, Boyd and Nishimura (2004: 7) reveal: In my grandparents’ time … it was believed that spirits (kami) existed everywhere – in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything. My generation does not believe this, but I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything. (Miyazaki, quoted in Boyd and Nishimura, 2004: 7–8)
There is advantage to experiencing nature directly. However, this does not mean nature can be experienced somehow purely, unencumbered by any informing perspective. Irreducible anthropocentrism highlights how there is always some way of being human in play in any experience, even one that could be deemed directly in and with nature. This brings awareness of who as always already situational, expressed via the habits in play. Yet comprehending who requires more than apprehending habits. Habits acquire meaning within what Quay and Jensen (2018) call ‘occupations’, building on Dewey’s (1916) use of that term. Occupations – such as being a student/pupil/learner – express who; ways of being that can be human and nonhuman. The pedagogical imperative, then, lies in crafting such occupations – versions of who comprised of various habits – so that they embrace and extend moral consideration to nonhumans, partnering with their ways of being, and in this way giving voice to nonhumans, enabling their wills to speak through human wills. For this, not only student voice is required, but the voicing of nonhuman others: prosopopoeia.
This voicing requires a specific ‘exercise of the will’, of human will, which ‘is manifest in the direction of attention, and depends upon the spirit, the motive, the disposition in which work is carried on’ (Dewey, 1903: 9). Such self-will does not emerge uncritically and unproblematically in situations. It must be exercised, and exercised in a social-civil situation: habits within an occupation. Student voice emerges in the crafting of one such occupation: being a student/pupil/learner (Quay, 2015). However, while empowering student voice may be considered a contemporary goal of education policy, I am arguing that education policy must be even more expansive.
The need for such expansion of education policy is evident when it is recognized that the dominant humanist understanding consigns education to a level of ineffectiveness when attempting to make inroads into environmental and ecological issues that are themselves inseparable from humans. This is because these issues cannot be comprehended in purely curricular terms: as what, as subject-matter to be learned. Humans are involved with nonhumans, and for humans to heed the needs of the larger community, the nonhumans that exist there must be given moral consideration. This can be achieved through the re-making of human occupations experienced through education, those within the purview of the teacher, to partner with nonhumans, to morally consider their ways of being, to give them voice so that they can speak.
The need to extend moral consideration through education is the main message of this paper. Getting there requires rethinking overly simplistic understandings of anthropocentrism, allowing for irreducible anthropocentrism while decrying hierarchical anthropocentrism. This opens space for an enlightened anthropomorphism, further developing a tendency of childhood, which positions nonhumans as subjects rather than objects: as other whos rather than as subject-matter to be learned. Moral reasoning that supports the subject, rather than objective reasoning supporting subject-matter, can then play a much larger role in decision-making concerning issues which circumscribe humans and nonhumans.
Dewey’s (pre-posthuman) plea for teachers to ‘discover a reality to which each belongs’ (1902: 4) can now be reconfigured to apply to a reality which embraces nonhumans in a larger moral community wherein all belong. Only then may education move beyond its humanist confines and embrace the more-than-human world through wider enactment of learning partnerships. Getting there will require advances in education policy that support evolution in habits, in practices, in order to enable teachers and students to meet the challenges presented. Victoria’s developing policy framework has made strides in the direction of empowering students; but how to empower nonhumans? Wild and willfull pedagogies offer a beginning in the endeavor to re-make pedagogies. Such an undertaking will present significant moral challenges, a significance which comes from the fact that these challenges cannot be ignored any longer.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
