Learning to Recognize Multispecies Equity: The More-Than-Human Accomplices in Educational Collaborations to (Re)Imagine Democracy

• In Event: 21st Century Collaborations in (Re)Imagining Activist Teaching: Addressing Social Justice and Sustainability in Teacher Education

Abstract

Responding to the interrelated exploitations of both humans and more-than-humans brought to attention by a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, this paper addresses the call in this symposium for critical researchers to respond to the idea of thinking of animals as stakeholders in education and what such consideration means for a pedagogical practice in solidarity with radically reimagining democracy. This paper offers an overview of an ecocritical framework for education research that radically considers collaboration with more-than-human life as integral in addressing the dangers of Western industrial models of schooling, human supremacy, and more broadly environmental degradation and social injustice. Drawing from Critical Animal Studies (Best, 2009; Nocella et al., 2014; 2019), Anarchism (Haworth, 2012; Suissa, 2010) and EcoJustice Education (Martusewicz et al. 2015), the author illustrates how human-supremacy is culturally constructed and dominant throughout school curriculum. Further, the paper draws attention to the potential for educators to interrupt human supremacy together with diverse species as integral to environmental justice and inextricably linked with social justice. Highlighting the agency and role of diverse more-than-human (Abrams, 1996; Plumwood, 2002) life in humans learning to live in accordance with Earth in ways that support ecological, environmental, and social justice, the author draws from their work in environmental education, critical animal studies, eco-ability, and anarchist pedagogies to share how they teach about, and learn from diverse species that include mycelial networks to model radical organizing, activism, and anarchist principles of mutual aid, anti-authoritarianism, and decentralization. This anti-anthropocentric research in education offers a glimpse at a pedagogical approach aimed at addressing how to work toward socially-just and sustainable communities given the extreme politics and environmental conditions of the Anthropocene

The author situates this work in the diverse landscape of critical environmental education and shares how education research that confronts human supremacy poses the opportunity for alternatives for educators to teach toward ecological, environmental, and social justice together. Illustrating how dominant cultural assumptions of human supremacy contribute to unjust social suffering and environmental degradation, this paper emphasizes the pedagogical potential for teaching aimed at ending human-supremacy as anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ablest pedagogy that offers the potential for thinking and acting beyond capitalism. Examples from critical environmental education and the deschooling of PreK-12 models of education in the paper provide context for how a multi-species collaborative movement in education inclusive of all agents of radical activism contributes to human beings of all ages learning to recognize, resist, and reconstitute how we as humans organize in support of ecological, environmental and social justice and sustainability.

Authors

• John J. Lupinacci, Washington State University

• Brandon Edwards-Schuth, Washington State University