Written by: Michael Lachney. Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States
Abstract: Posthumanist educational methodologists, theorists, and researchers tend to reproduce zoocentrism by privileging animals over plants in their scholarship. This comes at a time when disciplines from across the academy are taking “plant turns” by attending to plants’ abilities to sense and communicate, as well as their material relationships, representational significance, and lively entanglements with non-plants. This amounts to a rejection of traditional Western science and philosophy that treat plants as passive forms of life. To encourage this plant turn in posthumanist educational scholarship, I turn toward Anishinaabe-gikendaasowin, plant science, and continental philosophy to help recognize the agencies and behaviors of plants that challenge human exceptionalism. I engage with these knowledge systems through multispecies storytelling about the collaborative design of a library computer science learning environment. Multispecies stories from these collaborations not only show how plants contributed to computer science learning, but also how they affected and were affected by humans, nonhumans, and technologies in the library. These findings have implications for posthumanist educational research and computer science education
Keywords: posthumanism, plant turn, computer science education, zoocentrism, Anishinaabegikendaasowin, plant science, continental philosophy