Human-animal relationships in adult literacy education: Reading the Australian Magpie (original) (raw)
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Human-Animal Relationships in Literacy Education
Literacy and Numeracy Studies
This paper presents a case for the inclusion of human-animal relationships as a focus for literacy education. It outlines the ways in which language is implicated in human alienation from nature in a modern technology-focused life, and discusses the effects of nature-deficit disorder on human well-being. It calls for an ‘entangled pedagogy’ that attends to stories of local wildlife, and points to the importance of such a pedagogy for particular groups of literacy learners, including international students, new migrants and recent refugees, who may be unfamiliar with the flora and fauna of their new environment. As an example of entangled pedagogy the paper presents ideas for literacy lessons based on the iconic Australian magpie whose relationship with humans is, at times, problematic.
Bird Language and Contemplative Education in the Anthropocene
FusionJournal, 2021
As a biologist and educator, this essay weaves together personal experience with pedagogical exploration through narrative and academic prose. First, we explore bird language, nature attunement, and what shadows can teach us. Bird language is an aural blessing and soundscape that, to the attuned ear, reveals storm, predator, and wonder alike. We consider the Ecology in 1m 2 study I co-developed for remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this place-and inquiry-based project, students contemplate, in silence, a microsite several times a week over the course of a month. Then we go on a soundwalk in the city, where habituated noise pollution dulls our senses to the more-than-human world. Finally, we bear witness to Takaya's tragic story, the lone wolf who lived for eight years on an island just outside a metropolitan city. Through storytelling and philosophical consideration, alongside more academic modalities, I explore the importance of active listening beyond the anthropocentric babel. If we can hear the downstroke of a raven's wings, the creak of an old alder, the warning trill that goes Chickadee-dee-dee, perhaps we can better attune to the more-than-human world and both recognize and atone for our destructive actions towards the Earth.
Language & Ecology Journal, 2022
According to Margulis, Wong, Simchy-Gross and McAuley, humans possess a tendency to narrativize abstract events. In their 2019 paper, the authors point out that when we face any type of chaotic information, we infer a narrative. The tendency to transform unknown information into narratives shapes the way people make sense of their lives and the way we interact among us humans and with other species: characters, events, context. We assign roles in our stories even to rocks, rivers, tables and chairs. Narratives and stories not only help us relate with the world around us, but they make us understand and empathize. We can figure out something about the characters in a story by the unfolding events, and vice versa, the type of characters may suggest a plot. We can also foresee upcoming events due to our experience with previous narratives. But the most important thing about narratives is how they make us feel. We get involved in social action because we care, because we feel something that happened to others may happen to us or someone we love. In this sense, Writing for Animals: An anthology for writers and instructors to educate and inspire is a toolbox for writers and communicators but also a guide on how to build bridges between non-human animals and a human-dominated world. The book starts with an invitation to rethink the way we relate with other species and the part they play in our lives. In the introduction, John Yunker reminds us how much we talk and write about animals and yet how little we really know them, or rather, how little we think about their needs, emotions and intelligence. Yunker takes the opportunity to point out to the difference between writing for animals and writing about them. In doing so, he makes his ecosophy explicit while he invites us to include animals in our narratives and lives by taking a look at their world, not adopting a dominating perspective but through the ethnographer's vision. The internal structure of the book suggests a journey following this perspective: it starts with the place of the writer in the narratives and ends with a description of the impact they can achieve in the world.
Living as Textual Animals: Curriculum, Sustainability and the Inherency of Language
The ecosystems that sustain us are sending warning signals we ignore at our peril. Environmental and economic indicators tell us how we live in our respective places must change radically. Education in general and curriculum developers specifically, struggle to find an appropriate response to an impending crisis. Literacy learning focuses on the spoken and written word as well as representation that contribute vitally to how individuals understand maintain and transform their worldview. The language arts classroom is potentially a powerful site for challenging taken for granted cultural assumptions. A research project undertaken with middle school students was designed to allow the students to address questions that increase awareness of how we live in our places. The project provided students the space to record connections, observations, descriptions and evidence of ecological relationships that emerge out of daily living. By attending to felt sense through an embodied approach to writing and response, students developed a deeper sensibility for the existence of their ecological selves. Students were able to sensitively address inner connectivities of body, mind and emotions to awaken and develop a deeper connection with the living landscapes in which they dwell demonstrating the integral role the literacy classroom will have in efforts to re-orient education to teach for the values of sustainability.
Education for Total Liberation: Critical Animal Pedagogy and Teaching against Speciesism
Educational Studies, 2019
Education for Total Liberation: Critical Animal Pedagogy and Teaching against Speciesism is a collection of articles showing how critical animal studies scholars have addressed animal liberation and interconnecting issues of oppression with a diverse range of tactics. The book is a welcome addition to the field of education research, which despite a growing interest in human-animal relations, animal rights, environmental sustainability and social justice, has yet to sufficiently bridge the gap between theory and practice, and has often failed to address speciesism and interconnecting issues of oppression (see e.g. Spannring, 2017; Pedersen, 2010; Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015). This is where critical animal studies (CAS) can offer an "important starting point for organizing around social justice, since it includes speciesism within its intersectional understanding" (p. 5). The diverse collection of articles fall under the praxis of critical animal pedagogies, which aims to demonstrate "what education can be if humans are not the center of focus and understood as superior" (p. 6). Given the time we are living in, transforming education into a space where critical voices are heard and new perspectives are welcome is a necessary feat. The book aims to serve as "a springboard for how to develop further ideas on intersectional organizing or more practically engaged education" (p. 10) to advance liberation, critically address anthropocentrism and attack "the oppression that solidifies itself through a form of liberal humanism" (p. 6). Central to CAS is that theory be tied to action and the premise of the book is to offer examples of CAP in practice. The articles demonstrate how speciesism and animal exploitation are often normalized and overlooked in educational contexts and how the authors have tackled the shortcomings found in their respective educational contexts. The
Pedagogy and the poetic: Nurturing ecological sensibility through language and literature
This article provides an overview of the context, methodology, and theoretical framework of a research project conducted with coastal Newfoundland children living in communities deeply affected by the collapse of the marine ecosystem. Through a participatory engagement with bioregional poetry, the author investigates how children grow in their capacity to develop an ecological sensibility for the places they inhabit. The article critically examines the technical, resourcist bias of present educational discourse and proposes it is imperative that the term "ecology" be reclaimed for education. Résumé Le présent article donne un aperçu du contexte, de la méthode et du cadre théorique d'un projet de recherche portant sur des enfants vivant en région côtière à Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador dans des collectivités profondément touchées par la destruction de l'écosystème marin. Par l'entremise d'un engagement actif et d'une poésie axée sur la biologie locale, l'auteur se penche sur la croissance des enfants en matière de sensibilité à l'écologie des endroits qu'ils habitent. L'article examine d'un point de vue rationnel la partialité technique qui ressort de la tendance à tout considérer comme une ressource exploitable, présente dans le courant de pensée éducatif actuel, et avance qu'il faut absolument se réapproprier le terme « écologie » dans le domaine de l'éducation.
The Presentation of Animals in English as an Additional Language Coursebooks
Education materials can be analysed in many ways. The current study analysed EAL (English as an Additional Language) coursebooks as to the presentation of nonhuman animals in the books. The study examined 22 EAL coursebooks. The research looked at the percentage of activities that contained animals in the coursebooks, what types of animals were present, and whether animals were the focus of the activity. Animals that appeared were categorized as wild animals, animals for human consumption, animals used in research (e.g. rabbits for cosmetic products), companion animals, work animals, animals viewed as pests (e.g. rats), animals in entertainment and extinct animals. The Discussion section offers suggestions as to what teachers can do if they are dissatisfied with the content of their coursebooks in regard to presentation of nonhuman animals.
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).
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2022
There is little room left for doubt or even debate at the severity of the ecological, indeed planetary crises that we find ourselves in during this period coined the Anthropocene. As educators working in the face of these crises, we have asked ourselves the ‘how do we carry on?’ We reflect on a set of sensory, multimodal, meditative and arts-based pedagogical activities that bridge the geographical, biological, sociological and environmental dimensions of learning using the concepts from Hannah Arendt and John Dewey, in a higher-education context in Sweden. The first-cycle (undergraduate level) course in which these activities are conducted—Teaching sustainability from a global perspective - engages students in a range of pedagogical activities designed to encourage greater awareness of sustainability issues in diverse educational settings. In this paper we reflect on pedagogical practices as praxis in a sustainability focused course, and use the theory of practice architectures to question what people do in a particular and place. We explore how educating for the future using multimodal and arts-based pedagogies could be a strategy to support new ways for reconfiguring environmental sustainability education in the Anthropocene.