Review: The Educational Significance of Human and Non-Human Animal Interactions: Blurring the Species Line (original) (raw)

Abstract

While Indigenous people across the world have recognized our kinship and relationality with other species for many centuries, it is a peculiar fact that the Western 1 world has only reluctantly inched toward a view that has humans in continuity with the rest of the biosphere. This has not primarily occurred through a newfound respect for these other traditions, but rather through the ontological insights offered by evolution and then ecology, as each has risen to cultural prominence. Whereas evolution shows that humans were in fact part of a much more inclusive ancestry than once thought, and therefore have significant homologies and resonances with other organisms, ecology reveals the myriad ways in which humans and other species are mutually intertwined, for better or worse, in a shared fate. Evolutionary epistemology and comparative biology, whatever their weaknesses, have drawn us into deeper contemplation of how alleged differences between humans and other species are often rooted in unwarranted biases. Genetic advances in molecular biology reveal, in another language again, the marvelous continuity we share with others on the planet. And yet, despite this flurry of boundary breaking, continuity and kinship remain for Western culture largely something abstract and propositional. It is not an ethical or performative connection that has been restored, and as such it still seems to lack much of what other cultural ways of engaging with other species have long nurtured. Outside of biology, multispeciesification and more-than-humanizing now assert themselves as prominent alternative approaches within posthuman geography , anthropology, semiotics and communication, and sociology. Movement in this direction is palpable in education too, though it is surprisingly late to enter the game. But is it, in fact, surprising that education should be a laggard here? Education is the process by which we ensure both the perpetuation and the development of our culture. It seeks novelty as much as stasis. Other social sciences are not burdened with this paradoxical responsibility. And so, in cases where education is perpetuating a culture built upon sharp ontological categories, educational processes work to contain that which seeks to blur them. This means that restoring continuity is encouraged within certain disciplines (like biology) while other disciplines are protected against that responsibility. One such discipline is education itself, the field, research methods, and practices where the boundary between beings that are educationally considerable — that is, worthy of engaging in learning and/or teaching relationships — is continually reestablished between humans and other species. I know of no teacher's college with courses on interspecies pedagogy (please contact me if such an institution exists — I would be delighted) and believe it would strike many teacher educators as absurd to offer such courses. And this does not appear to be mainly the result of it being outside of professional aims,

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References (36)

  1. statements. Happily, education has always been in the business in engaging in actual relationships, so we have a methodological gift that some other social sciences may be lacking. -Ramsey Affifi University of Edinburgh
  2. I use the word "Western" for convenience, but with trepidation. There are many minority cultures indigenous to Europe and the Americas that are not represented by such blanket terms.
  3. John Lupinacci and Alison Happel-Parkins, "(Un)Learning Anthropocentrism: An EcoJustice Frame- work for Teaching to Resist Human-Supremacy in Schools," 13-30; and Richard Kahn, "Afterword."
  4. Nadine Dolby, "What Did Your Vet Learn in School Today? The Hidden Curriculum of Veterinary Education," 69-86.
  5. Suzanne Rice, "Educational Experiences in Prison: Greyhounds and Humans Teaching and Learning Together," 87-99; and Mike Bannen, "Experience, Strength, and Hope: An Analysis of Animal Interac- tion with Alcoholism and Recovery," 101-116.
  6. Arlene L. Barry, "Lessons from Animals, Real and Imaginary, in the Work of Theodor Geisel," 117-131; and Aaron M. Moe, "The Work of Literature in a Multispecies World," 133-149.
  7. Rice, "Educational Experiences in Prison"; Bannen, "Experience, Strength, and Hope"; Jim Garrison, "Overcoming Veneer Theory: Animal Sympathy," 173-190; and A. G. Rud, "Schweitzer, Dewey, and a Reverent, Rewilded Education," 203-214.
  8. Susan Laird and Kristen Ogilvie Holzer, "Interspecies Encounters: A Prolegomenon to Educational Thought Experimentation on Befriending Animals," 151-172.
  9. Rice, "Educational Experiences in Prison"; and Laird and Ogilvie Holzer, "Interspecies Encounters."
  10. Moe, "The Work of Literature in a Multispecies World."
  11. Kenneth J. Locey and Jay T. Lennon, "Scaling Laws Predict Global Microbial Diversity," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 21 (2016): 5970-5975.
  12. Cris Mayo, "Vermin, the Proximate and Often Unpleasant Stranger," 191-202.
  13. A number of animal/human education scholars are not mentioned. I will surely fall prey to my own criticism here by extending the list only slightly. That said, it might have been nice to have notable environmental education scholars dealing with nonhuman animals enter into the conversation: consider, for example, Joshua Russell, "'Everything Has to Die One Day': Children's Explorations of the Meanings of Death in Human-Animal-Nature Relationships," Environmental Education Research 23, no. 1 (2016): 75-90;
  14. Ramsey Affifi, "What Weston's Spider and My Shorebirds Might Mean for Bateson's Mind: Wandering in Interspecies Curricula," Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 16 (2011): 46-58;
  15. Michael Derby, Laura Piersol, and Sean Blenkinsop, "Refusing to Settle for Pigeons and Parks: Urban Environmental Education in the Age of Neoliberalism," Environmental Education Research 21, no. 3 (2015): 378-389;
  16. Leesa Fawcett, "Kinship Imaginaries: Children's Stories and Inter-Species Ethics," in Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, ed. Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh (London: Routledge, 2014);
  17. Teresa Lloro-Bidart, "A Feminist Posthumanist Political Ecology of Education for Theorizing Human-Animal Relations/Relationships," Environmental Education Research 23, no. 1 (2017): 111-130;
  18. Susanne Gannon, "'Local Girl Befriends Vicious Bear': Unleashing Educational Aspiration through a Pedagogy of Material-Semiotic Entanglement," in Posthuman Research Practices in Education, ed. Carol A. Taylor and Christina Hughes (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016);
  19. Pauliina Rautio, "Being Nature: Interspecies Articulation as a Species-Specific Practice of Relating to Environment," Environmental Education Research 19, no. 4 (2013): 445-457; and Nora Timmerman and Julia Ostertag, "Too Many Monkeys Jumping in Their Heads: Animal Lessons within Young Children's Media," Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 16 (2011): 59-75. For a thorough review of this topic, see Reingard Spannring, "Animals in Environmental Education Research," Environmental Education Research 23, no. 1 (2016): 63-74.
  20. Matthew T. Lewis, "Transcending the Student Skin Bag: The Educational Implications of Monsters, Animals, and Machines," 51-67.
  21. Moe, "The Work of Literature in a Multispecies World." 15. Laird and Ogilvie Holzer, "Interspecies Encounters."
  22. Rud, "Schweitzer, Dewey, and a Reverent, Rewilded Education," 203.
  23. Marc Bekoff, "Foreword," xi.
  24. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 1975);
  25. and Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
  26. Tom Birch, "Moral Considerability and Universal Consideration," Environmental Ethics 15, no. 4 (1993): 313-332.
  27. See, for example, Anthony Trewavas, Plant Behaviour and Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014);
  28. František Baluška, Stefano Mancuso, Dieter Volkmann, and Peter W. Barlow, "The 'Root-Brain' Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin: Revival after More Than 125 Years," Plant Signaling and Behavior 4, no. 12 (2009): 1121-1127; and Monica Gagliano, Vladyslav V. Vyazovskiy, Alexander A. Borbély, Mavra Grimonprez, and Martial Depczynski, "Learning by Association in Plants," Nature, Scientific Reports 6, no. 38427 (2016): 1-9.
  29. Affifi, "What Weston's Spider and My Shorebirds Might Mean for Bateson's Mind"; and Ramsey Affifi, "The Metabolic Core of Environmental Education," Studies in Philosophy and Education 36, no. 3 (2017): 315-332.
  30. Lupinacci and Happel-Parkins, "(Un)Learning Anthropocentrism." 23. Ibid., 25.
  31. Bradley Rowe, "Challenging Anthropocentrism in Education: Posthumanist Intersectionality and Eating Animals as Gastro-Aesthetic Pedagogy," 31-49.
  32. Including, specifically, Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010);
  33. and Karen Davis, "A Tale of Two Holocausts," Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 2, no. 2 (2004): 1-20.
  34. Here, I borrow Gregory Bateson's term; see Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1979).
  35. Ramsey Affifi, "Learning Plants: Semiosis between the Parts and the Whole," Biosemiotics 6, no. 3 (2013): 547-559.
  36. Ramsey Affifi, "Biological Pedagogy as Concern for Semiotic Growth," Biosemiotics 7, no. 1 (2013): 73-88.