The body and the practices of embodiment are fundamental to our ways of knowing place. However, these ways of knowing and making place are not produced in isolation. They are produced through the continuous practices of embodied and material learning and teaching. In this chapter I develop this new materialist theory of pedagogy where the intra-actions of bodies with matter are conceived as pedagogic: an embodied and material pedagogy. I examine and explore how materials teach and how we learn through a series of dynamic evolving intraactions that is a continuous open pedagogic practice that is constituted through, and made by, the body with matter/materials to make place.

Generically, pedagogy can be defined as the ‘theory and instruction of teaching and learning’ that comes from the Greek ‘to lead the child’ (OED). First of all, where is practice in this definition? Also this particular definition of ‘leading the child’ resonates with Freire's (1970) premise of ‘banking education’, in which teaching and learning are conceived as processes of transmission where ‘students are regarded merely as passive consumers’ (hooks 1994: 40). In opposition to this conception, Freire and hooks conceive of pedagogy as a ‘union of the mind, body and spirit, not just for striving for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world’ (hooks 1994: 15), a practice of how to live in the world. Using this idea, pedagogy can then be understood as an entanglement of the body with the world (social and material) that we learn with but that also teaches. Pedagogy, in my definition, is the practices and theories of teaching and learning about how to live with the world, and this can then occur everywhere, not only in the classroom; and it can be also be personal/individual and/or public/collective (Irwin et al. 2009). Ellsworth states that ‘specific to pedagogy is the experience of the corporeality of the body's time and space when it is in the midst of learning’ (2005: 4) and Barad reminds us that: