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

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,