In secondary English curricula, animals are typically encountered through symbolic and representational frameworks, functioning as metaphors for human experience, moral development or narrative themes. While such approaches are well established within literary pedagogy, they tend to stabilise animals as interpretive objects rather than attending to how animals participate materially and affectively in classroom life. Drawing on posthumanist and literary animal studies, this paper challenges representational models of animal meaning by treating animals as material–semiotic actors within pedagogical assemblages, foregrounding how they shape attention, affect and classroom relations.

Within education research, more-than-human approaches have become increasingly influential, particularly within early childhood and environmental education, where scholars have explored how learning emerges through relations between children, materials, places and nonhuman others (e.g. Hackett; Hohti; Lenz Taguchi; Schulte). However, there remains comparatively little empirical work in secondary, subject-based classrooms, especially within culturally oriented disciplines such as English. This study positions secondary literary education as a critical site for posthuman inquiry, arguing that challenges to anthropocentric pedagogy cannot remain confined to outdoor or ‘nature-based’ contexts but must also engage with the cultural forms through which animals circulate, including literary texts, classroom discourse, institutional infrastructures and curricular practices.

The paper draws on five months of postqualitative classroom-based research conducted in a UK Year 8 English classroom, focusing analytically on a moment from a lesson centred on the ‘symbol of the butterfly’ in a contemporary novel. During the lesson, students are invited to identify what the butterfly represents and how it connects to a central human character. While the task is framed in terms of symbolic interpretation, classroom interactions quickly exceed this representational logic. Students introduce personal experiences with butterflies, stories of rescue and captivity, ethical concerns about animal commodification, references to popular media and observations about architectural features designed to exclude birds from school buildings. The butterfly becomes simply a metaphor to be decoded, but a site through which multiple multispecies narratives and ethical questions emerge. Although this paper centres analytically on a single butterfly vignette, it draws on a wider corpus of classroom observations.

Analytically, the study adopts a postqualitative approach that does not seek to represent classroom reality through thematic coding or generalisable findings, but instead attends to emergent relations, interruptions and material–semiotic processes within specific pedagogical events (Hohti; Sandvik; MacLure). Methodologically, the research ‘follows the animal’ across textual, discursive and material domains, tracing how animals circulate between literary texts, pedagogical practices, students’ lived experiences, consumer cultures and institutional infrastructures. Postqualitative inquiry is used here as methodological translation, enabling concept-driven interpretive approaches familiar in literary studies to become legible within educational research, while situating literary analysis within classroom life.

Through close attention to the butterfly vignette, the paper argues that animals in secondary English classrooms function merely as symbolic devices but as pedagogical actors that reorganise classroom attention, disrupt planned learning trajectories and generate ethical and affective engagements that exceed curricular intention. Rather than understanding literacy as symbolic decoding or representational mastery, the study conceptualises reading as a relational, multispecies process through which meaning emerges in encounters with human and nonhuman actors.

The paper contributes to posthuman literacy research by extending more-than-human inquiry into a secondary, culturally mediated educational space and by demonstrating how literary animals operate as material–semiotic forces within pedagogical practice. It also offers a conceptual intervention into literary education by showing how symbolic pedagogies attempt to stabilise animal meaning, while classroom life continually reopens animals as sites of uncertainty, vulnerability and ethical relation. In doing so, the study advocates a open, multispecies approach to secondary English education, in which animals are not simply read about but read with.

The study is based on ethnographically informed fieldwork conducted in a UK secondary school, involving regular observations of Year 8 English lessons once a week over a five-month period. The research focuses on everyday classroom practices within a subject-based setting, attending to how literary texts, pedagogical routines, material environments and human and nonhuman actors co-produce educational events. Data include detailed fieldnotes written during and immediately after lessons, classroom artefacts such as slides, worksheets and whiteboard content, and informal conversations with teachers and students. These materials are treated not as stable data to be extracted and coded, but as part of a wider pedagogical assemblage that includes bodily presence, spatial arrangements, institutional rhythms and affective atmospheres. The analysis adopts a postqualitative approach, which does not seek to represent classroom reality through thematic coding or generalisable findings, but instead attends to emergent relations, affective intensities and material–semiotic processes within specific pedagogical events. Rather than working with predefined categories or variables, the research proceeds through close, iterative engagement with particular scenes, allowing concepts to emerge through sustained attention to what unfolds in practice. Writing itself functions as an analytic practice, with fieldnotes and descriptive accounts used to remain close to the textures and uncertainties of classroom life. Postqualitative inquiry is used here as a form of methodological translation, enabling concept-driven interpretive approaches familiar in literary studies to become legible within educational research contexts. Rather than separating theory from empirical data, concepts are treated as generative tools activated through encounters with the field. This involves reading classroom events diffractively through posthuman and more-than-human scholarship, not to apply theory to practice, but to explore how theoretical ideas are reshaped by specific pedagogical situations. Methodologically, the study ‘follows the animal’ across textual, discursive and material domains, tracing how animals circulate between literary texts, pedagogical practices, students’ lived experiences and institutional infrastructures. This entails tracking moments where animals interrupt or exceed curricular framings, such as when symbolic interpretations give way to ethical, affective or personal narratives. Attention is paid to digressions and seemingly peripheral exchanges, treating these as analytically productive sites that foreground what exceeds curricular intention. Ethical approval was obtained through institutional procedures and care was taken to ensure informed consent, anonymity and non-intrusive observation. The research prioritises relational and ethical accountability over extractive data practices, seeking to remain responsive to the classroom as a lived, shared space rather than a site of knowledge extraction.

This paper contributes to posthuman and postqualitative research in education by offering an empirically grounded account of how animals operate as pedagogical actors within secondary English classrooms. Rather than treating animals as symbolic devices to be interpreted, the analysis shows how meaning emerges relationally through multispecies encounters that exceed textual representation. The study aligns with new materialist and posthuman approaches to literacy and applied linguistics, while extending them by centring animal life not only as a condition of human meaning-making but as a pedagogical and ethical subject. While much posthuman literacy research productively rethinks language, subjectivity and learning, it often remains oriented towards human concerns such as student development, agency and voice. By contrast, this study draws closer to more-than-human education in early childhood and environmental research, where animals are approached as participants in pedagogical relations rather than as resources for human transformation. Bringing this orientation into secondary literary education relocates multispecies ethics within a culturally mediated, subject-based discipline in which animals typically appear through symbolic forms. For pedagogy, the findings unsettle assumptions of pedagogical mastery and control by showing how animals disrupt planned learning trajectories and reorganise classroom attention. The butterfly vignette illustrates how seemingly peripheral moments – personal anecdotes, ethical concerns or spontaneous observations – become central sites of pedagogical significance. These moments generate alternative forms of engagement that foreground vulnerability, uncertainty and relationality as constitutive features of classroom life. Taken together, these contributions suggest the need for a more open, multispecies approach to secondary English education, in which animals are not merely read about as metaphors for human concerns but read with as material participants in pedagogical events. This invites educators and researchers to reconsider what counts as learning, where pedagogical value is located and how ethical relations with nonhuman others are already being negotiated within everyday classroom practice.

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