Posthuman Pedagogy of the Common Worlds of Children and Animals – From Independence to Relationality (original) (raw)
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Posthuman Theory and Practice in Early Years Learning SpringerLink copy.pdf
Research handbook on childhood nature: Assemblages of childhood and nature research., 2019
This childhood/nature chapter was provoked by curiosity about the rise of posthuman theorizing in early years learning research and practice. Set in the context of the Anthropocene as the age of human entanglement in the fate of the planet, it takes the view that the primary task of this time is to develop new understandings of the human and new concepts of thought (Colebrook 2010). Early childhood has led the field of education in the development and application of posthuman theorizing in response to this imperative, prompting the explorations of the chapter. A review of the literature in this field resulted in the identification of three distinct areas of posthuman theoretical activity: new materialism, child-animal relations, and Indigenous-nonindigenous intersections. The third category Indigenous-nonindigenous intersections which draws primarily on Indigenous theorizing was so divergent from the others, and so complex, as to be considered outside the scope of this chapter. In gathering the various papers together to make sense of the literature in each of new materialism and child-animal relations, different modes of analysis were called for. New materialism in early childhood education and practice is considered using a genealogical generational analysis following the work of Van der Tuin (2014), while child-animal relations prompted an analytical approach involving Haraway’s bag lady method following Taylor, Blaise, and Giugni (2013). A particularly interesting and curious finding was that “life” emerged as a major theme from new materialism and “death” from child-animal relations in keeping with the paradoxical nature of the Anthropocene.
A posthuman approach to human-animal relationships: advocating critical pluralism
Environmental Education Research
This paper contributes to the debate about the absence of nonhuman animals (The term 'nonhuman animal' is used to emphasise the interconnection with the human being, viewed as a human animal. Using this terminology does not avoid a homogenising, stereotyping and simplifying of a multiplicity of animal (and human) beings. Nonetheless, we think that such a 'simplification' of concepts is inescapable in academic discussions concerning humans and nonhuman animals.) in environmental and sustainable education (ESE) and the challenge of the anthropocentric characterisation of European education.
Children's Literature in Education, 2017
This article explores posthumanism as a philosophy that emphasizes human relationships with the natural world by examining representations of animality, both in children's literature (e.g. titles such as Where the Wild Things Are, Wild, Virginia Wolf, and No Fits, Nilson!) and in children's play in order to better understand the significance of philosophy in children's literature and lives. By fostering a feeling of ''necessary wilderness,'' or connection to nature (Almond, 2011, p. 110), and by practicing a sense of being in nature, ''keeping some wildness always alive'' (Lerman, 2012, p. 311) through literary engagement and animal play, the authors suggest that children and adults can maintain an interconnectedness with the natural world, even when they cannot be in it themselves. Through a mixed Maija-Liisa Harju, PhD, is a Lecturer of young people's text, cultures, and education at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her latest publication ''Enchanted woods and magical saunas: Cultivating Finnish-Canadian identity through stories,'' can be found in Being young in a neoliberal time: Transnational perspectives on challenges and possibilities for resistance and social change (Gådin and Mitchell, 2015). Dawn Rouse, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse where she teaches courses on child development, Reggio Emilia, art, and administration. Rouse's dissertation (2012), ''Let me show you what I'm thinking,'' used a Vygotskian framework to explore children's contextual use of private speech as a social communication and cognition device. She has just finished a year-long research project during which she was embedded in a classroom of four-year-old children as a ''least adult'' co-player.
Childhood Animalness: Relationality, Vulnerabilities, and Conviviality
2018
This paper traces how animals have been and are reduced to mere objects for use in child development, examining historical and contemporary trends in developmental literature. We alternatively present scholarship that delves into children’s and animals’ subjective encounters and intersecting worldhoods as critical of more anthropocentric developmental psychology models. We utilize continuity as a model that emerges from our field work in order to make various suggestions about the ethics that emerge from children’s embodied experiences with animals, including felt senses of vulnerability, death, and precarity. Finally, we finish the chapter by outlining potential pedagogical directions that encourage deeper reflections about the precariousness of childhood lives, lived differently and J. Russell (*) Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: russellj@canisius.edu L. Fawcett Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, T...
This paper contributes to the debate about the absence of nonhuman animals in environmental and sustainable education (ESE) and the challenge of the anthropocentric characterisation of European education. Relating to the debate about a pluralistic approach in ESE as a ‘one-species only pluralism’, we draw on Val Plumwood’s ecofeministic dialogical interspecies ethics and Rosi Braidotti’s understanding of a posthuman/nomadic subjectivity. By regarding ‘difference’ as a constituting force, we present a ‘critical pluralistic’ approach to human-animal relationships in ESE. Instead of drawing new lines of moral consideration for nonhuman beings, an ethical and political appreciation of what nonhuman others can do in ESE is suggested. Recommendations for educational practice are to recognise nonhuman agency to reveal political and ethical dimensions, recognise the agency of non-living animals and stay in conflicts and ‘study up’ and develop an immanent critique, which could lead to alternative pedagogical approaches to human-animal relationships in different cross-curricula settings.
The lure of The Animal: The question of the nonhuman animal for educational theory and research
Critical theory in education has exposed many oppressive features of contemporary society. However, the literature remains fixed on the human experience, despite the fact that the representations of nonhuman animals provide a rich context in which to explore ideology, power, and what Michel Foucault called regimes of truth. In this paper, the author brings forth animal studies, an interdisciplinary approach to theorizing nonhuman animals in our society. The author provides a brief summary of the animal studies scholarship that has implications for educational theory: anthropomorphism, the representation of nonhumans, and speciesism. The author demonstrates the discursive construction of nonhumans is riddled with assumptions based upon Enlightenment notions of empirical science and rationality that expose our representational practices and has implications for how we represent Other humans. He ends with examining Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal and argues that this can be a location in which we can begin to challenge the human/nonhuman binary.
LEARNING FROM NONHUMAN ANIMALS: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF POSTHUMANITIES
ENSEMBLE, 2021
Throughout the debated discourse of humanism, humans were considered as the only species endowed with reason and moral values. The result was an andro/anthropocentric humanism that divided everything into hierarchies and confined everything within boundaries. European model of higher education has undoubtedly been an enforcement of humanist ideas and ideologies which established certain humans as exceptional and superior to other 'non-privileged' humans and nonhuman animals. In this era of posthumanism all the imposed and imbibed boundaries between the human and nonhuman are being questioned, challenged and eliminated to create an open network of cross-species encounters. In this context this article through the theories of Posthuman philosophy and Critical Animal Studies proposes a shift towards posthuman ethics of inclusion and understanding in the field of classical humanities in India. This can be achieved by employing post ontological methods to create and understand nonhuman representations. Theories and studies by posthuman scholars like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Graham Harman form the basis of this paper. This article is an acknowledgement as well as an advocation of the shift happening across disciplines from humanities to post humanities, which however is yet to make a movement in education in India.
Children€s Wild Animal Stories and Inter-species Bonds
Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2002
In this paper, I discuss the contemporary dilemma of animals disappearing from the minds and direct experiences of many human beings in Western culture, and the implications of this dilemma for the fields of child development, environmental education and biological conservation. As part of a larger research project, I explored kindergarten and grade 5 children's (N = 177) ideas and stories about three common, familiar and wild, Canadian animals-bats, frogs, and raccoons. In the research process, I attempted to attend to the methodological decisions I made along the way. I reflect upon trends in the children's wild animal stories, and questions they raise about anthropomorphism, kinship, and inter-species bonds. Résumé Dans ce document, j'aborde le dilemme contemporain de la disparition des animaux de la pensée et de l'expérience directe de plusieurs êtres humains de la culture occidentale ainsi que les implications de ce dilemme pour les champs du développement infantile, de l'éducation environnementale et de la conservation biologique. Dans le contexte d'un plus vaste projet de recherche, j'ai exploré les idées et les histoires d'enfants (177) de la maternelle et de la 5e année portant sur trois animaux sauvages qui nous sont familiers au Canada : la chauve-souris, la grenouille et le raton laveur. Au cours de la recherche, j'ai tenté de prêter attention aux décisions méthodologiques que je prenais chemin faisant. Ma réflexion porte sur les tendances de la littérature enfantine sur les animaux sauvages et les questions qu'elles soulèvent à propos de l'anthropomorphisme, de la parenté et des liens interspécifiques.
2018
Using the human-animal bond, relational ecology, and the “common world” framework as theoretical underpinnings, I set out to better understand the array of settings and experiences wherein young children are able to interact, either directly or indirectly with animals within the context of early childhood environmental education (ECEE). There is opportunity within the discipline of ECEE to reflect on practice and means of supporting children’s engagements with and relations to non-human animals. This approach asserts children and animals as co-creators of children's learning and development. The relationships, nuances, and engagements between child and animal are themselves teachers (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). This has important implications as we move into a time where environmental connectedness and interspecies connectedness matter more than ever (Haraway, 2008; Kellert, 2012; Louv, 2007).