REIMAGINING SUSTAINABLE EDUCATION THROUGH A POSTHUMAN LENS: BEYOND HUMAN-CENTRED LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Sustainable education has traditionally been framed around human knowledge, human needs, human agency and human responsibility for managing environmental and social challenges. Although this orientation has generated important educational responses to climate change, inequality and ecological degradation, it can reproduce the anthropocentric assumptions that contributed to these crises. This paper reimagines sustainable education through a posthuman lens, arguing that learning should recognize humans as relationally embedded within complex assemblages of animals, plants, technologies, infrastructures, materials and ecosystems. Drawing conceptually on posthumanist scholarship, the paper examines how posthuman thinking can transform educational purposes, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and institutional practices. It proposes a relational model of sustainable education organized around five principles: decentring the autonomous human, recognizing distributed agency, cultivating ecological relationality, embracing material-digital entanglement, and developing planetary ethics. The paper argues that posthuman education does not diminish human responsibility; rather, it expands responsibility by locating human action within networks of interdependence. Such an approach can strengthen Education for Sustainable Development by moving from learning about sustainability toward learning with human and more-than-human worlds.