The para-pedagogical asks a lively question: What might it mean to treat learning as central—not supplementary—to cultural institutions?

For me, the para-pedagogical did not begin as a theory but as an unruly practice, cultured slowly across places, relations, and moments of institutional dissonance. It emerged through agitation: the quiet resistance of learning practices that didn’t fit, that refused to translate neatly into institutional outcomes. It grew from the margins—from what bubbled, from what unsettled.

The prefix para is central. In Greek it means beside and beyond, but also amiss or irregular. This instability—semantic, structural, political—is where the para-pedagogical lives. It does not claim neutrality. It embraces adjacency, asymmetry, and deviation. It begins from beside, not to complete, but to unsettle.

The term carries a lineage. Erickson (2008) first described para-pedagogy as writing practices running alongside formal instruction. Zerdy and Daddario (2015) framed it as bootleg, emancipatory, student-driven learning that reclaimed failure as generative. Manning and Massumi (2024) extended it as a para-institutional practice, fluid and time-sensitive, unfolding across philosophy, art, and pedagogy.

In my work, the para-pedagogical emerges not in relation to the university, but in relation to cultural and artistic institutions—particularly galleries and museums. It seeks to liberate pedagogy from contextualising objects and artefacts, reimagining learning, people, and more-than-human bodies and energies as material. To learn para is to learn beside: to stand with art and with others, in dialogue with institutional values, community needs, and ecological urgencies.

The para-pedagogical therefore repositions pedagogy as a sovereign force—an act of learning beside that is porous, durational, and alive with potential.

It is not a model to scale, but a method to sit with:
a practice of staying longer, asking differently, and opening institutions to re-worlding.