10. Living, Learning, and Teaching with Chickens: Unforgetting Southern California’s Agrohistories to Enact Transformative Futures

• In Event: Nature-connectedness and the More-than-human in Environmental Education - Environmental Education SIG Structured Poster Session

Abstract

Interest in animal-focused EE has fomented in the last two decades and EE researchers have creatively engaged with multiple conceptual/theoretical and methodological paradigms to explore how people live, learn, and teach with other animals (e.g., Spannring, 2016). Concomitantly, backyard chicken keeping in urbanized contexts in the US has exploded since the early 2000s, with an increasing number of municipalities crafting policies to permit a small number of backyard hens (Levy, 2023). Despite written accounts of backyard chicken keeping practices (Danovich, 2020; Levy, 2023 Warren, 2021), little is known about how people who share their lives with chickens also learn and teach with them. This lack of knowledge is especially acute in immigrant, low-income, and racially/ethnically diverse communities in the US (like those where my research takes place) since the research literature has focused on the experiences of middle class and White Americans (e.g., Blecha & Leitner, 2014; Giacalone, 2017; McClintock et al., 2014).

Authors

• Teresa Lloro, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona

• Jillian Muñoz, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona