An Intersectional Approach to Teaching About Other Animals

• In Event: Animals in Environmental Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum and Pedagogy

Abstract

Other animals have featured in most courses I have taught over the past 20 years, whether the focus has been social justice education or environmental education; I have long taken an intersectional approach that critically examines underlying assumptions of different approaches to education, including diverse and contested positions on human/animal and human/nature relationships and the ways in which anthropocentrism and speciesism intersect with racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and sizeism. In my “Animals in Education” course, however, other animals take centre stage and it is this course that is the focus of my paper. Designed for Med students with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, most of whom are certified teachers working in elementary and secondary schools across Canada, the course is an elective 12-week asynchronous online course. Inspired by ideas from critical animal studies, ecofeminism, environmental philosophy, and intersectionality studies, approaches such as common world pedagogies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015), critical animal studies pedagogy (Corman & Vandrovcová, 2014), ecopedagogy (Kahn, 2008), humane education (Selby, 1995), interspecies education (Andrzejewski, Pedersen, & Wicklund, 2009), posthumanist pedagogy (Rowe & Rocha, 2015), and environmental education focused on other animals (Spannring, 2017) are forefronted to ponder the ways in which animals are generally marginalized or erased in contemporary Western culture generally and in education specifically (Caduto & Bruchac, 1991; Fawcett, 2013, 2014). Course topics include: learning with and from companion animals, common and familiar animals, animals living in or visiting classrooms, dissection animals, food animals, captive animals in zoos and aquaria, and endangered animals as well as the ways in which animals feature in children’s literature, media, and public pedagogies. Discussions are sparked by theoretical writing, research reports, descriptions of practice, videos, comics, songs, and artistic illustrations.

Because a course focused on other animals is exceedingly rare in teacher education, investigating the challenges of and possibilities for such learning has significant theoretical and practical implications. Taking a self-study approach (Loughran et al, 2004), sources of data included personal writing, student assignments and coursework (online courses such as this one are mostly text-based so a particularly rich source), and anonymous student feedback. At the outset, almost all students asserted in autobiographical writing assignments that they knew next to nothing about human/animal relations or even what to expect in the course, yet as the course unfolded, it became increasingly clear to them that they had in fact learned much about other animals and human/animal relationships albeit mostly through an anthropocentric and speciesist hidden curriculum. Students’ most notable learning moments related to recognizing their own animality and anthropocentrism, grappling with school dissection, eating other animals, companion animal death, “pest” animals, Indigenous perspectives, and pondering the power of story, the arts, and public pedagogies. I struggled with the challenges and potential of online pedagogies and the emotionally fraught dimensions of teaching about other animals, especially given I recognize that there are no innocent moves in this messy, complex work. I argue we nonetheless must learn to “stay with the trouble” if we are to support multispecies flourishing (Haraway, 2016).

Author

• Constance L. Russell, Lakehead University