Ecologies of Education: a Pedagogical Perspective Beyond Anthropocentrism

This paper is aimed at introducing a reflection about the status of the “human” and his/her relationships with “non-human” alongside the domain of pedagogical knowledge and the educational field. A body of knowledge and a field of practices that have been always characterized by a human-centered perspective rooted in anthropocentric assumptions on the relationship among humans, nature and other living beings. This dualistic vision, opposing human and non-human, nature and culture, meaning and matter, is becoming more and more unbearable in connection with dramatic ecological changes we are witnessing. In this scenario, then, who is the “human” at the heart of pedagogical knowledge? Our proposal is to reassemble the human with the environment through a perspective we termed "Ecologies of Education", an inclusive theoretical vision of education aimed at grasping the multiple interactions involving people, technologies, objects, spaces, animals, living beings embedded in a world characterized by intense and unprecedented contaminations between different bodies, domains of knowledge, theories, fields, imaginaries and experiences. On this idea we founded a book series aimed at promoting the dissemination of research and studies dedicated to the exploration of educational themes and issues through an ecological perspective, able to understand and analyze educational phenomena as situated, complex, processual and relational events, assuming contingent and dynamic forms, deeply connected to the environmental, technological, social, cultural and natural transformations of the contemporary world.