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This edited collection engages with the extant animal-focused education literature in environmental education and considers multidisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary approaches. This project historicizes curriculum and pedagogy related to animals in education. ...
We ask in this chapter how students’ purposeful, imaginative belonging to their multispecies worlds can be nurtured as a starting point for creative resistance to dominant anthropocentric pedagogies. We explore how environmental education and ethics can resist reproducing colonizing, instrumental relations to coexisting entities. Our theoretical framework ranges across the intersections of experiential environmental education, Indigenous pedagogies (specifically Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee), critical animal studies, and phenomenological perspectives. We are motivated by intersectional analyses examining the links between oppressions and are encouraged by interdisciplinary collaboration, experiential understanding, and the explicit linking of theories to praxis as illuminated in critical animal studies. Methodologically, the chapter draws on arts-based praxis as a way to disrupt and reimagine narratives of justice and multispecies pedagogies.
The animal or more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences has challenged nature/culture binaries in the fields of environmental education and early childhood studies, yet the field of educational studies has yet to confront its humanist roots. In this article, I sketch a nascent conceptual framework that outlines how multispecies ethnography, as a methodology informed by critical strands of feminist posthumanism, can begin to address and redress both social and species injustices in educational studies. To do this, I first provide a brief overview of educational humanism to situate the article within the animal and more-than-human turns in education. I then define multispecies ethnography and briefly review educational multispecies ethnographic research. Next, I sketch the conceptual framework, which is guided by feminist posthumanist theories of performativity and intersectionality, providing ethnographic examples from my own research projects and the research literature. I conclude by drawing out the implications for educational studies, with a consideration of how animal performativity and intersectionality open up new lines of inquiry to explore animal concerns, as well as social ones.
This article begins by introducing educational humanism, the Anthropocene concept, and the political ecology of education framework that guides the analysis. I then demonstrate that the current Anthropocene-informed educational research literature pragmatically focuses on how education has the capacity to serve as a means to adapt to the impending environmental challenges of the current geological epoch. I argue that though this literature makes important contributions, educational researchers doing Anthropocene-informed work would benefit from an ecofeminist and/or posthumanist political ecology of education. This conceptual lens: (1) examines how the kinds of human-nature relationships perpetuated in educational spaces are the result of complex and scaled political factors and (2) questions and reimagines human-nature divides reified in educational practice and research. Throughout the article, the persistent humanism of the American formal education system is critiqued, drawing on both the extant literature and a textual analysis of the Framework for K–12 Science Education.