Pedagogy

An apropo excerpt from Haraway's Companion Manifesto. Haraway describes companionship through a professional dog trainer.

"A good agility teacher, like mine, can show her student's exactly where they left their dogs and exactly what gestures, actions, and attitudes block trust. It's all quite literal. At first, the moves seem small, insignificant; the timing too demanding, too hard; the consistency too strict, the teacher too demanding. Then dog and human figure out, if only for a minute, how to get on together, how to move with sheer joy and skill over a hard course, how to communicate, how to be honest. The goal is the oxymoron of disciplined spontaneity. Both dog and handler have to be able to take the initiative and to respond obediently to the other. The task is to become coherent enough in an incoherent world to engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh, in the run, on the course. And then to remember how to live like that at ever scale, with all partners."