REGEN|ED Seminar | Yari Or

LEARNING THROUGH FRICTION IN POSTHUMAN PEDAGOGY: A TEACHING EXPERIMENT IN REGENERATIVE EDUCATION 

Regenerative education seeks to cultivate awareness of, connection with, and responsive engagement in more-than-human worlds. This presentation reflects on an attempt to enact this orientation in higher education, within a Social Work course. It asks what it means to create learning situations in which students can encounter more-than-human relations while questioning their own position, knowledge, and responsibility. 

The teaching experiment centred on an urban patch in Tsing et al.'s (2025) sense: a locally bounded yet open constellation in which organisms, materials, infrastructures, and layered histories co-produce a particular world. At this site in Frankfurt (Germany), students accompanied and experienced an artistic-political format that invited attention to the interests and relations of locally occurring organisms. The pedagogical intention was to foster particular processes of learning and reflection through situated encounters with the patch. In practice, however, the planned methods and learning processes did not unfold as intended and were met by a range of challenges. 

Rather than treating this solely as a failed experiment, the presentation reads these frictions as revealing both the promise and the limits of bringing a regenerative paradigm into higher education. Drawing on reflective teaching notes and student course reflections, it traces three learning movements: estrangement, attentiveness, and epistemic humility. The presentation argues that regenerative education depends on carefully held situations in which students can encounter the limits of their interpretive authority and the bodily and material conditions of learning. The presentation closes by asking how educators can responsibly hold open-ended teaching experiments whose outcomes cannot be controlled and may be experienced as failure by students. It invites discussion of how regenerative education can remain open to uncertainty, disruption, and failure while sustaining ethical and supportive conditions for learning. 

Keywords 
Regenerative education, posthuman pedagogy, higher education, Anthropocene, patch
 
Registration 
The REGEN|ED Seminar Series (organized by the REGEN|ED research environment at NMD) brings together educators, researchers, practitioners, students, and community members interested in regenerative education, sustainability, and social-ecological transformation. We warmly welcome anyone curious about these questions to join us in a spirit of curiosity, engagement, and reciprocity as we learn with and from one another across diverse disciplines, contexts, and perspectives.  
Registration for the REGEN|ED Seminar Series 2026/2027 is now open, and you can sign up here: Registration REGEN|ED Seminar Series 2026/2027