Co-Learning Framework
The purpose of this note is to describe more-than-human co-learning activities across agents and organisations.
Learning/Teaching Agents
Institutions and Organisations
The open question is membership. Education has named nonhuman teachers repeatedly without attaching to the title any entitlement that the title carries for a human. Cf. Learning on the three co-learning literatures, Ladder on power, Leadership.
What the Literature Names, and Stops Short Of
Wild pedagogies make nature as co-teacher the first touchstone, then frame it as a question the human educator asks about their own practice, which is how to invite the more-than-human world in.1 The wilding literature continues this as a project of theorising, practising and imagining.2 Policy arguments in the same tradition reach for anthropomorphism as the device that extends moral consideration, so the extension runs through human interpretation.3 Cf. Wild Pedagogies.
Posthuman educational relationality dissolves teacher and learner into entanglements. Ceder's literacy dogs become a natureculture edu-activity, so the dog is an event in a relation rather than an employee in an institution.4
Work on more-than-human education governance analyses assemblages of humans, platforms, algorithms and AI. Its nonhumans are digital, and it declines the proposal step on purpose, offering itself as critical orientation rather than as a solution.5 A parallel policy framework extends posthumanist reasoning to nature education through planetary policy ecologies and sympoietic policy systems.6
Political theory goes furthest. Four institutional mechanisms are on the table for representing animals: reserved parliamentary seats, an ombudsman, deliberative mini-publics, and electoral reform that lets small parties through.7 Every one is a human seat filled by a human acting on another's behalf. Cf. Participation, Deliberation.
Membership as the Missing Step
| Role | Instrument universities already run | What membership would add |
|---|---|---|
| Student | enrolment, access, progression, award | a nonhuman collective admitted, with progression judged on its own terms |
| Teacher | appointment, remuneration, curriculum authority | a nonhuman teacher appointed and paid, with authority over what is taught |
| Governor | council or board seat, vote, veto | a nonhuman member seated where curriculum and estate are decided |
| Beneficiary | endowment, scholarship, named chair | an endowment held for nonhuman benefit rather than spent on their behalf |
Universities already operate every instrument in the middle column. They also already regulate research on animals, so animals sit inside university governance as protected research subjects and outside it as members. Tesar, Peters and Jackson note that an ethics rarely turns its attention on the institution itself, which is where this question lands.8 Cf. Assessment, Principles.
Where the Funding Half Comes From
Pedagogy cannot supply remuneration or standing on its own. Property and legal standing can. An ecosystem that holds title through a trust with ecological fiduciary duties can hold an endowment, employ custodians and fund a chair.9 Property rights extended to animals would let them own land and building surfaces through ecosystem-level trusts that fit existing legal institutions.10 A collective with legal standing can be a party to a curriculum decision rather than its subject. Cf. Rights, Personhood, Law, Commons, Ecological Economics.
Open questions: what would admission criteria be for a nonhuman student, and who would assess progression? Which existing body could seat a nonhuman member without proxy capture? What does refusal look like as an act of governance rather than as missing data? Cf. Relational Accounting.
Co-Learning Activities
Methods and practices of co-learning such as subjects, workshops, etc.
The University of Melbourne
Graduate
Design Futures Foundations of Design Representations Individual Design Theses Interspecies Design Studio
Undergraduate
Virtual Environments Studio Air Installations and Happenings
Transformations
What changes and for whom? How large is the change? How persistent is the change? What is the beneficial impact of the change?
The concept of transformation is similar to the notion of learning outcomes, but it is more focused on the substantive changes that happen in the agents and communities with the focus on the long-term impacts and the systemic changes.
Flows
In a relational system that prioritises processes, chains of relationships transmit information, co-dependencies, change. These flows open new capabilities and have the potential to reconfigure the system.
Regulations, policies, and other social, institutional, legal arrangements seeks to govern the flows, create exclusion zones, attract attention of the agents, etc.
Examples:
- Flow of information, knowledge, skills, practices, evidence.
- Flow of change through the system, through subjects, from subjects, osmosis, horizontal transfer.
- Progression of agents through the system: human students, human academics, other humans, nonhumans.
References
Footnotes
Blenkinsop, Sean, Marcus Morse, and Bob Jickling. “Wild Pedagogies: Opportunities and Challenges for Practice.” In Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: Re-Wilding Education for a New Earth, edited by Michael Paulsen, Jan Jagodzinski, and Shé M. Hawke, 33–51. Cham: Springer, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90980-2_2.˄
Paulsen, Michael, Linda Wilhelmsson, Sean Blenkinsop, Bob Jickling, and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles. “Wilding Pedagogies: Theorising, Practising and Imagining towards a Changing, Decolonising and Reconciling World.” Australian Journal of Environmental Education 41, no. 2 (2025): 107–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2025.10046.˄
Quay, John. “Wild and Willful Pedagogies: Education Policy and Practice to Embrace the Spirits of a More-than-Human World.” Policy Futures in Education 19, no. 3 (2021): 291–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210320956875.˄
Ceder, Simon. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality. London: Routledge, 2019.˄
Landri, Paolo, and Francesca Peruzzo. “More-than-Human Education Governance: An Introduction.” In Shifting Landscapes in Digital Education Policy, edited by Paolo Landri and Francesca Peruzzo, 1–16. Cham: Springer, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-29276-6_1.˄
Yin, Chenyang. “Theorising Nature Education Policy within Planetary Boundaries: A Posthumanist Transformative Governance Framework.” Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 2026, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2026.10167.˄
Magaña, Pablo. “The Political Representation of Nonhuman Animals.” Social Theory and Practice 48, no. 4 (2022): 665–90. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract2022811171.˄
Tesar, Marek, Michael Peters, and Liz Jackson. “The Ethical Academy? The University as an Ethical System.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no. 5 (2021): 419–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1884977.˄
Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. “The Universal Commons: An Economic Theory of Ecosystem Ownership.” Ecological Economics 208 (2023): 107822. https://doi.org/10/gshcd3.˄
Bradshaw, Karen. Wildlife as Property Owners: A New Conception of Animal Rights. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. See also Bradshaw, Karen. “Animal Property Rights.” University of Colorado Law Review 89 (2018): 809–69.˄
Backlinks