Non-human ethics and the habitation of teaching and learning in the OnLIFE education paradigm

Abstract

The profound global transformations of this century, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and technological innovations, highlight the interdependence between humans, nature, and technology. These changes challenge the prevailing anthropocentric view and redefine our understanding of the world. This context particularly impacts education and educational research, urging a reconsideration of the paradigm and ethics guiding their practices. The objective is to understand how recent global transformations challenge the predominant anthropocentric paradigm and instigate a redefinition of the educational paradigm and the ethics that underpin education and educational research, with a focus on the interdependence between humans, nature, and technology. The methodological procedure involves a theoretical review of contributions from authors such as Serres, Latour, and Di Felice, who emphasize the interconnectedness between humans, nature, and technology, and contribute to rethinking education in the third millennium. The results suggest that education remains relatively impermeable to global changes and challenges for inhabiting the third millennium. Innovative perspectives, such as the OnLIFE Education Paradigm, present themselves as alternatives that incorporate digital connectivity and the hybridization of spaces, times, technologies, presences, languages, and educational modalities, in composing new spaces for teaching and learning. This paradigm, by operating in problematization and invention, refers to a formation in ecologically connected ecosystems, where humans and non-humans co-create knowledge in interconnected digital and physical environments, emphasizing the need for a new cognitive policy in education and, therefore, an ethics that transcends anthropocentrism and adopts an ecological and connective perspective.