Animals in Environmental Education

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum and Pedagogy

Teresa Lloro-Bidart, Valerie S. Banschbach, Teresa Lloro-Bidart, Valerie S. Banschbach

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783319984780
• eBook ISBN: 9783319984797
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores interdisciplinary approaches to animal-focused curriculum and pedagogy in environmental education, with an emphasis on integrating methods from the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. Each chapter, whether addressing curriculum, pedagogy, or both, engages with the extant literature in environmental education and other relevant fields to consider how interdisciplinary curricular and pedagogical practices shed new light on our understandings of and ethical/moral obligations to animals. Embracing theories like intersectionality, posthumanism, Indigenous cosmologies, and significant life experiences, and considering topics such as equine training, meat consumption and production, urban human-animal relationships, and zoos and aquariums, the chapters collectively contribute to the field by foregrounding the lives of animals. The volume purposefully steps forward from the historical marginalization of animals in educational research and practice.

© The Author(s) 2019

Teresa Lloro-Bidart and Valerie S. Banschbach (eds.)Animals in Environmental EducationPalgrave Studies in Education and the Environmenthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98479-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction to Animals in Environmental Education: Whither Interdisciplinarity?

Teresa Lloro-Bidart¹ and Valerie S. Banschbach²

(1)

Liberal Studies Department, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, USA

(2)

Environmental Studies Department, Roanoke College, Salem, VA, USA

Teresa Lloro-Bidart (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Valerie S. Banschbach

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

At least since the mid-1990s, environmental education researchers have challenged the anthropocentrism and humanism of the field with their compelling portrayals of animals as subjects in a wide array of educational settings, including classrooms and informal spaces (e.g., Bell & Russell, 1999, 2000; Fawcett, 2000, 2002, 2005; Pedersen, 2004; Russell, 2000, 2005; Russell & Ankenman, 1996; Russell & Bell, 1996; Russell & Hodson, 2002). Published during the early stages of what is now referred to as the “animal turn” in the humanities and social sciences, this scholarship, as well as research in animal cognitive science, anthropology, ethology , geography, history, philosophy, political science, sociology, and other disciplines sparked a flurry of interest in developing curricula and pedagogy that address human understandings of and ethical/moral obligations to animals (e.g., DeMello, 2010; Rice & Rud, 2015). Although anthropocentric and humanist paradigms still dominate some environmental education research and practice (Fawcett, 2013; Spannring, 2017), a groundswell of contemporary scholarship, drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives in critical animal studies, critical disability studies, decolonization , fat studies, feminism and ecofeminism , humane education, Indigenous thought, postcolonialism, posthumanism , and queer studies, has begun to transform the field in significant ways (e.g., Affifi, 2011; Andrzejewski, Pedersen, & Wicklund, 2009; Boileau & Russell, 2018; Corman & Vandrovcová, 2014; Fawcett, 2013, 2014; Humes, 2008; Kahn, 2003, 2008, 2011; Kahn & Humes, 2009; Lindgren & Öhman, 2018; Lloro-Bidart, 2015, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2018d; Lloro-Bidart & Russell, 2017; Lukasik, 2013; Lupinacci & Happel-Parkins, 2016; Malone, 2016; Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Oakley, 2009, 2013; Oakley et al., 2010; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016; Pedersen, 2010; Rautio, Hohti, Leinonen, & Tammi, 2017; Rice, 2013; Rowe & Rocha, 2015; Russell & Fawcett, 2013; Russell & Semenko, 2016; Russell, 2017; Spannring, 2017; Spannring & Grušovnik, 2018; Taylor, 2017; Timmerman & Ostertag, 2011).¹ Here, we briefly review the influence of the animal turn on environmental education to situate the current volumes’ contribution to the field. To conclude, we briefly summarize the chapters, highlighting the significance of each for curriculum and pedagogy in environmental education.

Animal Subjecthood

Many animal-focused environmental education researchers work to capture animals as subjects rather than objects in research and practice. Although the field has consistently shed light on significant environmental issues affecting humans and animals alike, prior to the “animal turn” (Oakley et al., 2010), animals problematically figured as passive recipients of human action in most environmental education research. Reflecting wider historical trends in the humanities and social sciences, which Henry Buller notes, “long ago gave up the animal to the natural sciences and their distinctive mechanistic and observational methods,” educational researchers tended to focus their attention on social (i.e., human ) actors, relegating animals and the rest of nature to the realm of “objects or representations within and defined by human social practice” (2015, p. 375; also see Bell & Russell, 2000; Snaza, 2015). More than a decade ago, Connie Russell noted, for example, that even critical environmental education researchers were “mostly silent about anthropocentrism” (2005, p. 434). Drawing on the work of feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway and other feminists, Russell (2005) moved to contest this anthropocentrism by boldly suggesting that humans not only “co-construct” the world with each other, but also with “nature,” including animals. Although Russell (2005) primarily drew on critical animal studies, humane education, and feminist perspectives in order to explore and highlight animal subjecthood in her own research and teaching, environmental education researchers working from various other perspectives have sought to do the same.

Most recently, strands of posthumanism or new materialism (along with feminist renditions of each) have significantly influenced how scholars conceptualize animal agency and subjecthood in research and practice. Although neither posthumanism nor new materialism represents an easily defined or monolithic position, they share an explicit rejection of anthropocentrism and humanism (Cudworth & Hobden, 2015; Lloro-Bidart, 2018b, 2018d; Snaza, 2015) much like the diverse Indigenous cosmologies and philosophies that also influence the field (Battiste, 2002; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2015; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014). In their study of the raccoons, children, and educators that share a childcare center on Canada’s west coast, for example, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Fikile Nxumalo draw on a “common world” theoretical and methodological approach informed by posthumanism , decolonization , and Indigenous thought to undo nature/culture dualisms and capture the subjecthood of raccoons:

The raccoons who live in the childcare complex cross nature/culture and human/nonhuman boundaries in several interrelated ways. First, they spatially cross the nature/culture divide. Refusing to keep to themselves in the wild, they make incursions into human territories. They enter the childcare playgrounds, barge into classrooms through open doors and windows, and make dens in the centre’s storage sheds…the second divide that the raccoons cross is ontological—a gap between the civilized human world and the uncivilized animal world. (2015, pp. 155–156, authors’ italics)

As Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo (2015) vividly illustrate here by depicting raccoons as vibrant, acting beings who co-shape childcare playgrounds and classrooms, contemporary animal-focused education scholarship remains attuned to animal action, agency, and subjectivity , challenging what were once fixed ontological borders between humans and nonhumans . Although scholars approach these questions from differing methodological and theoretical positions, they are united in a commitment to decenter what Nathan Snaza refers to as education’s “discerned human” (2015, p. 19).

Politicizing Animals and Educational Contexts

The acknowledgment that educational contexts are inherently political is rooted in the work of critical pedagogues, activists, and scholars like Concha Delgado Gaitan, Cynthia Dillard, Paolo Freire, and Henry Giroux. Yet Aristotle’s famous proclamation “That man [sic] is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear” (1984/2013, p. 4) still pervades much educational research. That is, while many humans are conceptualized as political actors in politicized contexts, animals largely remain on the margins (Bell & Russell, 1999; Russell & Fawcett, 2013), with their concerns and interests sidelined as superfluous to those of human beings. Animal-focused educators, however, have begun to mount a significant challenge to such decidedly anthropocentric and humanist perspectives, explicitly recognizing that the macro and micro political contexts of education affect animals (and humans ) in profound ways. Two decades ago, for example, Russell and Anne Bell drew on ecofeminism to note, “The contexts of our endeavours—not only ecological, but also cultural, political, and, of course, pedagogical , must be taken into account…to work toward building healthy relationships with [our] local communities —human and nonhuman” (1996, p. 9). Soon after, critical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction to Animals in Environmental Education: Whither Interdisciplinarity?
• Part I. Intersectional Perspectives
• Part II. Posthumanism
• Part III. Arts-Based Approaches
• Part IV. Interdisciplinary Conversations in Formal and Non-Formal Education
• Back Matter