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

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Cala Coats (Arizona State University, USA) Derek R Ford (Depauw University USA)

New Materialisms and Embodied Encounters in Education

Curiosity’s Vital Potential

Cala Coats (Arizona State University, USA), Derek R Ford (Depauw University USA), Tyson E Lewis (University of North Texas USA)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
24 July 2025

Moral & social purpose of education

Series: Radical Politics and Education

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.

By: Cala Coats (Arizona State University USA)
Edited by: Derek R Ford (Depauw University USA), Tyson E Lewis (University of North Texas USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781350278783
ISBN 10: 1350278785
Series: Radical Politics and Education
Pages: 194
Publication Date: 24 July 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

Cala Coats is Associate Professor of Art Education in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, USA.

Reviews for New Materialisms and Embodied Encounters in Education: Curiosity’s Vital Potential

This book makes an important contribution to the fields of art education and curriculum studies. It draws upon cutting edge theory in art education and curriculum through the use of highly readable narratives articulating alternative images and approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. -- Jason Wallin, Professor of Media and Youth Culture in Curriculum, University of Alberta, Canada