Animals in Schools: Processes and Strategies in Human-Animal Education

This book explores important questions in the field of critical animal studies and education by close examination of a wide range of educational situations and classroom activities. How are human-animal relations expressed and discussed in school? How do teachers and students develop strategies to handle ethical conflicts arising from the ascribed position of animals as accessible to human control, use, and killing? How do schools deal with topics such as zoos, hunting, and meat consumption? These are questions that have profound implications for education and society. They are graphically described, discussed and rendered problematic based on detailed ethnographic research and are analyzed by means of a synthesis of perspectives from critical theory, gender and postcolonial thought. This work makes human-animal relations a crucial issue for pedagogical theory and practice. In the various physical and social dimensions of the school environment, a diversity of social representations of animals are produced and reproduced. These representations tell stories about human-animal boundaries and identities and bring to the fore a complex of questions about domination and subordination, normativity and deviance, rationality and empathy as well as possibilitiesof resistance and change.

Helena Pedersen, who holds a Ph.D. in education, is a researcher in the School of Education at MalmA? University. Recent and forthcoming works appear in the volumes Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education: Transformative Standards (Routledge, 2009); Zootopian Visions of Animal Encounter: Farewell to Noah (Lexington Books, 2010); Global Harms: Ecological Crime and Speciesism (Nova Science Publishers, 2008); and Values and Democracy in Education for Sustainable Development (Liber, 2008). Helena Pedersen received the American Sociological Association's Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Scholarship (the Animals and Society Section) in 2006.