New Materialisms and Embodied Encounters in Education: Curiosity's Vital Potential

This open access book develops a theory of "vital curiosity" as a transdisciplinary force that activates ecological flows of connection across pedagogical spaces, disciplinary bodies, curricular structures, and institutional ontologies. Educational approaches and values are currently being rethought in light of global economic and environmental crises, posing fundamental questions about desire, access, responsibility, ethics, and relationality in teaching and learning. Cala Coats explores curiosity's vital force as a critical learning disposition and creative process that activates movement and attraction through aesthetic disruptions and embodied connections, propelled through affective ruptures and durational commitments toward affirmative complexity. The chapters follow questions and connections that emerge from embodied encounters in schools, homes, public spaces, and the natural environment, illuminating residual patterns of colonization and commodification across bodies, territories, and knowledge. While this book is rooted in questions of schooling and education, it serves as a proposition to realize curiosity's vital energy as an affirmative ethico-aesthetic force in any context. Drawing on new materialist and posthuman theories, the book puts forward an image of educational life, as it extends from curiosity, as a radical pedagogical practice. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Acknowledgements Prelude: Ghostly Palimpsests and Locust Transformations Introduction: Vital Curiosity's Disruptive, Connective, and Collective Force Part I: Disruptive Curiosity: Unsettling Education's Neoliberal Monoculture 1. What can GMOs teach Us about curriculum reform? Coding Pedagogical Vitality through Neoliberal Logics 2. What did the Cafeteria Just Become? Educational Fundraising's Affective Intensity 3. What can a Body Earn? School Fundraising as Immaterial Labor and Affective Currency Part II: Connective Curiosity: Permeating Thresholds through Transcorporeal Movement 4. What if we Dig it Ourselves? Mapping a Transcorporeal Inquiry Across the Composition of Clay Bodies 5. What Else Could we Create by Suspending Our Reality? Traveling Isolation's Intensity as Frictions of Potential 6. Is this Land Just Layers of Bodies? Mapping Spectral Flows Across Skeletal Forms Part III: Collective Curiosity: Affirming our Ethico-Aesthetic Potential 7. What can a Body Express? Nesting as Collective Sociality 8. How Might we Live as Pollinators? The Joyful, Strange, and Vital Uncertainty of a Pedagogical Life 9. What if we Learn This Together? Composing Collective Ecologies through Curiosity's Radical Interconnectedness References Index