Researching Child-Dog Relationships and Narratives in the Classroom: Rhythms of Posthuman Childhoods

"This beautifully crafted book deploys a range of creative methodological practices to illuminate the relationality and materiality of school classrooms. Drawing on posthumanism, new materialism, human geography, psychogeography, and creative practices the books focuses on Ted, the classroom dog. An empathic and walking ethnography reveals dog-human moments, rhythms, and bodiments of interspecies communication in classrooms. The combination of images, etudes, musical scores, photography, and field notes highlights a layering of wander lines which chart the impact of Ted as he connects with bodies, classrooms, and affects. This book is a must for those who wish to explore more-than-human classroom encounters and multispecies empathic flourishing and relationships in a creative and novel way." Dr Nikki Fairchild, Associate Professor in Creative Methodologies and Education, University of Portsmouth, UK. "In this book, Donna Carlyle turns our attention to the vital role of more-than-human others in influencing, mediating and enriching classroom experiences. We are carried along on a journey of care for animal companions (in this case, Ted, a classroom dog) through a series of creative and artistic provocations, which open minds to what learning could be if we decentre humans as the only possible teachers. Understanding the world as entangled, affective and responsive has the potential to change the way we educate and move us to a world that fully appreciates complexity. This book is recommended for anyone wanting to re-imagine teaching and learning through exciting methodologies of worlding, kinship, and care." Dr Kay Sidebottom, Lecturer in Education, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. "This is a wonderful book!!! Donna Carlyle brings a fresh, theoretically, methodologically and phenomenologically rich analyses to her interdisciplinary research on ‘animal- assisted’ education in the primary school classroom. She deepens our thinking and understanding of dog-human relations, of ‘making kin’ and brings to life relational concepts such as ‘ethnoarray’ and ‘ethno-mimesis’ through careful observation and psycho-social analysis of movement, rhythmanalysis, storytelling and music in the classroom. Deeply embedded in her ethnographic experience in the classroom with Ted. The book is also a love letter to Ted as pedagogue. Compulsory reading for all in teacher education, education students and for qualitative researchers and teachers within and out with the academy." Professor Maggie O'Neill, Director of the Institute for Social Sciences in the 21st Century and UCC Futures: Collective Social Futures, University College Cork, Ireland.