Animals and Educational Policies: A Multitier Approach to Educational Transformations

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Research After the "Animal Turn": Speculative and World-Making Multispecies Encounters

Abstract

Education has been said to normalise and perpetuate the instrumental use of other animals and reproduce anthropocentric values (Pedersen 2010, Dinker & Pedersen 2016, Lupinacci & Happel-Parkins 2016, Rice 2013). Schools can be seen as an economic playground for animal agribusiness, where oppressive and unsustainable food systems are normalized through government subsidies, school lunch programs and educational activities, and little progress has been made to eradicate these practices. Posthuman and critical animal studies scholars both highlight the need to create new ways of ‘doing’ education (Malone & Truong 2017), but do the frameworks of formal schooling limit the possibilities of doing education in new ways, of “animalising education”? Transforming education in the time of climate change necessitates not only pedagogical rethinking, but also critical analysis of the frameworks that guide institutional and pedagogical practices, in other words both legislative and pedagogical transformation is needed.

The objective of this paper is to identify how animals are addressed and affected by selected educational policies and what kinds of human-animal relationships are facilitated by these policies. Educational policies analyzed in this paper include ones that mediate the content and scope of learning (curricula), global frameworks upon which national policies are modelled (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals) and policies related school food practices (school milk schemes and nutrition guidelines). The frameworks established by these policies may impede the introduction of new knowledges and practices in school settings. The power relations manifested in these policies place both children and other animals in precarious positions, as both are universally categorized and have limited agency to affect their own lives.

Perspectives and theoretical framework. This paper aligns itself with critical animal studies, which takes a “stance against animal exploitation” and “against an anthropocentric status quo in human–animal relations,” viewing animals as social beings in their own right (Taylor & Twine 2014: 2-4), thus advocating for animals to be seen as stakeholders also in educational contexts. Using critical policy analysis (CPA) this paper looks at how policy issues are framed, the wider context in which they are constructed as well as the effects of these policies, asking who do these policies fail (Taylor 1997, Jie 2016). In addition, combining CPA with critical discourse analysis (CDA) allows for analysis of how inequality, power and dominance are reproduced, legitimated and represented through the language used in policies (van Dijk 1995).

The results or insights gained from this study aim to demonstrate how a multi-tier approach can strengthen the scope of environmental education research through interdisciplinary collaboration in addressing animal issues, highlighting the importance of including educational policy analysis into environmental education research.

Scholarly and societal significance. To strengthen the possibilities of educational transformations in classrooms and to “animalise education”, the structural foundations that currently set a largely anthropocentric agenda in need to be transformed. For the “animal turn” to gain further momentum, the speciesist interspecies relations promoted through current educational policies and frameworks of formal schooling need to be transformed.

Author

• Maria Helena Saari, University of Oulu