Charlotte Hankin: Where are the animals?

Coconut Thinking

How might our relationships other-than-human animals help us consider sustainability and regenerative education in more life-centered ways?

In this episode, I speak with Charlotte Hankin. Charlotte is an educator, sustainability consultant, and PhD researcher in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Her doctoral work explores how relationships between children and animals in international schools can help shift education away from human-exceptionalism toward more regenerative, relational ways of learning. Guided by posthumanist and feminist materialist theory, Charlotte uses arts-based, post-qualitative methods, including poetry, photography, sound, and craft, to attend to spontaneous, everyday encounters between human and other-than-human beings. These ‘multispecies moments’ offer insight into power, care, and co-existence, inviting schools to reimagine pedagogy as something co-created in the spaces between species. And, of course, Charlotte is the co-founder of Coconut Thinking. We discuss:

🥥 How schools often portray animals in ways that separate us from the natural world and contribute to extractive practices;

🥥 How school curricula might embrace an ethic of care, beyond what serves humans;

🥥 The importance of cultivating relationality in schools over content mastery.

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