This paper examines how participation in the Decentring the Human (DCH) seminar series informed the development of RippleWork, a pedagogy positioned between self-centred and de-centred models of learning. It explores how RippleWork navigates the space between these orientations to create generative sites of reflection, responsiveness and renewal. The purpose of this paper is to examine how participation in the DCH seminar series informed the refinement of RippleWork, a pedagogy that integrates self/world-centred approaches to learning. It aims to demonstrate how the interplay between these orientations creates generative spaces of participatory knowledge-making.
The paper probes the RippleWork methodology, developed through engagement with the DCH seminar series. It interweaves theoretical perspectives from Haraway's cat's-cradle (2016), Ingold's wayfaring (2011), Wiener's cybernetic feedback loops (1950) and Biesta's world-centred questioning (2022), with reflexive and interpretive analysis. Learning is examined through the cybernetic process of acting ↻ reflecting ↻ meaning-making within the entanglement of self and world, where the symbol ↻ denotes an iterative, cyclical process.
RippleWork operates as a participatory epistemology, where learning arises through tension, movement and relational responsiveness. By staying with the trouble, learners cultivate attentiveness, ethical awareness and creative subversion within complex educational environments.
RippleWork remains in theoretical development and has not yet been implemented or empirically tested. Future work will focus on its application in educational contexts.
This paper offers new ways of thinking about how learning unfolds in the space between self and world. The RippleWork model provides a participatory framework for designing learning environments that nurture responsiveness, care and creative subversion. It invites educators to see tension, uncertainty and entanglement not as obstacles but as vital forces of learning. Through multimodal engagement, feedback loops and collaborative meaning-making, RippleWork encourages students to develop attentiveness, ethical agency and adaptability within the churning complexities of contemporary education.
This paper invites a reimagining of education as a shared act of learning with the world rather than about it. By engaging the space between self and world, RippleWork encourages learners and educators to stay with the tensions that shape understanding. It highlights the value of agency, care and participation in making meaning together across difference. In this way, it challenges the culture of standardisation and offers a more inclusive, responsive and compassionate vision of education – one grounded in attentiveness to the relational, the collective and the living world.
This paper contributes a new pedagogical model that positions learning as an ethically responsive and participatory process between self and world. It extends posthuman and world-centred approaches by integrating multimodal, reflexive and cybernetic methodologies.
