Re-worlding environmental education: assemblage literacy, compost pedagogy, and a reflexive pedagogical framework for more-than-human learning

Under conditions of Anthropocene uncertainty, environmental education is increasingly challenged to respond to complex human–more-than-human relations. Drawing primarily on Haraway and Tsing, and engaging Shiva as a complementary resource for ecological democracy and anti-extractive critique, this article proposes two orientations: assemblage literacy and compost pedagogy. Assemblage literacy enables learners to notice, interpret, and map multispecies entanglements across ecological, social, and infrastructural scales. Compost pedagogy foregrounds decay, mourning, reciprocity, and ongoing repair as educational practice. These orientations are illustrated through a reflexive pedagogical case of human–bear coexistence in Nan’an (南安), Hualien, Taiwan, drawing on course fieldnotes, publicly available reports, and a disclosed op-ed, all within an explicit ethics protocol. A five-phase framework, Attend, Entangle, Ethicise, Experiment, and Account, translates these orientations into teachable practices aligned with the Tbilisi aims. Rather than presenting a formal ethnography, the article offers a locally bounded conceptual and pedagogical contribution that specifies how more-than-human environmental education can be made teachable, ethically attentive, and assessable. Limitations include a non-ethnographic design and local scope. Overall, the article shows that assemblage literacy and compost pedagogy provide a usable framework for re-worlding environmental education through reflexive, place-based, and more-than-human learning. Future research should test and refine this framework in collaboration with Indigenous and community partners across diverse educational contexts.