The Life Space of Learning: A Posthuman framework for teaching practicein Initial Teacher Educationdeveloped from Martha Muchow's Life SpaceTheory

This thesis presents an attempt to confront education philosophy at a moment of crisis in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England, where dominant educational discourses (shaped by neoliberal reform) situate around learning theories and pedagogies that favour dualistic models of learning, reinforcement and cognitive load theory.

It is argued that these models appear to be inadequate to engage with the rapid onto-epistemic changes in learners’ models of being and becoming. Proceeding from an assertion that rather than to attempt to break learners out of their world, this may be an opportunity to reconsider how ITE trainee teachers are supported to engage more purposefully with emerging phenomena that influence developing learner onto-epistemology in learning spaces. By recovering and recontextualising a 1930s phenomenological model of child development, and through a wider engagement with posthumanist theory, models of embodied cognition, and artistic making and practice, this thesis provides a contemporary methodological means to support ITE trainee teachers in understanding and re-informing learning spaces to better account for the continuous transformation and influence of relational learner becoming.  

This is investigated through an exploration of non-dualistic relational ontology, affectivity and movement, focusing on the porosity and affordances of space to support teacher understanding of relational ontology when cultivating learning experiences. This method is then tested in a series of case study workshops to inform and develop a framework for supporting such ideas into wider practice in Initial Teacher Education and Training.