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.

Check us out, www.coconut-thinking.com

How can learning&doing help us become good participants in the web of life?

In this special episode, I speak about how systems change won’t happen if we replace names and labels but continue to do the same old thing. I propose that we move beyond assessing learning, competencies, soft skills for their own sake. Rather, what if we collected the voices of the community (human and other-than-human) and had that be the measure of quality of learning? Emphasis placed on testimonials of how the learning and specifically the application of the learning contributed to a more positive world. And if we really want to go nuts, we can answer the question at the top of these show notes.

This takes us beyond the individualization of student achievement because it becomes about how we use our learning for good. It de-centers the student and centers life.

This episode is inspired by a post I put up a couple weeks ago, that you can find below. Please listen to this one-take, uncut episode, with a guest appearance by Clementine the cat.

To access the post, click here.

How might we participate as Earthlings, part of a living planet, in kinship with the more-than-human?

Dan Burgess is a regenerative practitioner, creative strategist, and facilitator working at the intersection of ecology, culture, and transformation. With roots in the worlds of storytelling, activism, and systems innovation, Dan helps individuals and organizations reimagine their roles in a world undergoing profound change. He draws on years of experience in creative industries, participatory leadership, and place-based learning to design processes that foster deep connection, agency, and collective renewal. Dan is known for his work in cultivating regenerative mindsets and practices that align human activity with the rhythms and needs of the living world. He is the founder and host of Spaceship Earth, a podcast and platform for exploring how we might live with greater imagination and responsibility as crew members of a planet in crisis. At heart, Dan is a bridge-builder—linking the inner and outer, the personal and systemic, the practical and the poetic in service of a thriving future. We discuss:

🥥 The balance between trying to get more people on board with our transformative ideas and the need to put energy into how we are creating space in ourselves to create space;

🥥 How the culture of modernity is a passenger story, where few of us are benefiting from modernity, within humans and as humans;

🥥 How ideas are processes that move and drift through interactions with others and their ideas, a sort of confluence that is never isolated.

Check us out: www.coconut-thinking.com

Check out the Spaceship Earth podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-spaceship-earth-podcast/id1338946235