Paper Short Abstract:

Feminist approaches to care as ‘situated’ centre relationality to highlight micropolitical connection in the classroom. Combining a ‘pedagogy of mattering’ (Gravett et al. 2022) with ethnographic research in a democratic school, I argue affective multisensory practice and play can be applied to HE.

Paper Abstract:

Within post-covid, neoliberal, competitive and individualising HE systems, many of us search for innovative methods to challenge the transactional, competitive, and hierarchical model predominant in HE and facilitate the conditions for a more caring and relational model. Feminist approaches in particular centre care as ‘situated’, rather than external from, relationality (Haraway, 1988). In contexts of teaching and learning this reorients us to the micropolitical practices of connection and power between students and staff in the classroom (hooks, 1998). Drawing on my ethnographic research with adults and young people in a radical democratic school in England, I argue that caring approaches to education can emerge through a ‘pedagogy of mattering’. This approach aims to place “the human in relation, attending to the entangled materialities that constitute these relations and the matters that arise therefrom, offers a fundamental recasting of being, knowing and doing in HE and research” (Gravett, Taylor & Fairchild, 2022: 2). Exploring this approach in combination with insights from my research within democratic schools, I draw attention to two dimensions of ‘mattering’ that could be applied to HE education: affective multisensory practice and methods of play. Thinking with my experiences of teaching and learning Anthropology in HE, I suggest these unconventional methods invite a different way of relating for students and staff, creating dynamics that can reduce hierarchy and lead to community building.