WHEN THE CLASSROOM LEARNS: REIMAGINING TEACHING THROUGH THE AGENCY OF NON-HUMAN ACTORS

Abstract

The contemporary classroom is increasingly understood as a space shaped by technologies, digital platforms, artificial intelligence, material objects, and changing ecological conditions. Yet, even within these transformations, education largely remains organized around a human-centred model in which the teacher is positioned as the primary producer and transmitter of knowledge, while other entities are treated as instruments of teaching. This chapter questions such a hierarchy through a posthuman pedagogical perspective and proposes that learning is not produced by human beings alone but emerges through encounters among teachers, learners, technologies, materials, spaces, and the more-than-human world. Drawing on posthumanist and new materialist thought, particularly the ideas of relationality, distributed agency, and entanglement, the chapter reconsiders the classroom as a dynamic pedagogical assemblage in which non-human actors also shape what, how, and where learning takes place. The discussion further brings posthuman pedagogy into conversation with environmental criticism. Nature has historically functioned as an important teacher, offering forms of knowledge through observation, adaptation, interdependence, and ecological balance; however, technological advancement and anthropocentric notions of progress have increasingly reduced nature to a resource for human use. The chapter, therefore, argues for an educational imagination that does not merely employ technology to make learning more efficient, but also restores attentiveness to nature as a participant in knowledge-making.