So what for other animals? Environmental education research after the animal turn

It has become a cliché to begin an editorial for this journal with a rehearsal of the challenges facing the planet and all its inhabitants. Yet we feel compelled to remind readers that unprecedented environmental destruction around the globe includes the annihilation of wildlife (be they insects, birds, or charismatic megafauna), alongside the mass killing of those animals deemed food, suitable ‘subjects’ for experimentation, or no longer wanted as companion animals. Consequently, the ‘animal turn’ that has occurred in many fields of study in the social sciences and humanities takes on heightened importance. Those who have taken this turn have explored the histories and complexities of human/animal¹ relations across times and cultures and how these have informed diverse contemporary ideas and practices.

There have been ebbs and flows of such scholarship in our field. Jan Oakley et al. (2010) suggest that the animal turn in environmental education began in the mid-1990s. As with related work in environmental ethics and philosophy, it has helped challenge the idea that humans are separate from the natural world and so different from other animals that human supremacy is not only inevitable but desirable. Over the last 25 years, there has been a proliferation of such writing in articles and special issues of Environmental Education Research as well as in other journals in the field, and in books such as the recently published Animals in Environmental Education (edited by Lloro-Bidart and Banschbach 2019). However, as with the animal turn in other disciplines, not all scholars seem committed to improving the material conditions of other animals. So in this editorial, we want to challenge our research community to avoid any sense of a default emerging whereby animals are treated as a new or ‘sexy’ topic to pursue, or merely as a domain for testing and applying abstracted theories. How might animal-focused environmental education research make a difference to our animal kin? What is at stake in answering this question, we will argue, are practices within and beyond the realms of our scholarship.

What’s critical?

To start, we revisit the reviews of animal-focused environmental education by Leesa Fawcett (2013) and Reingard Spannring (2017). Both show that critical scholarship can help problematize the human-animal binary and the portrayal of other animals as mere symbols, objects, or resources for educational use. More pointedly, a critical position invites recognition of the intrinsic value of other animals and that they too are subjects of their own lives with their own experiences, perceptions, and interests. Research that takes these matters into account has been conducted in a wide variety of sites. It includes studies published in this journal and elsewhere that are situated in elementary and secondary schools, post-secondary settings, zoos, aquariums, and wildlife tours, on public pedagogies like film, media, visual arts, and children’s literature, and on informal learning that happens within families and in communities An array of theoretical frameworks have informed this work, such as critical animal studies, critical disability studies, critical policy studies, ecofeminism, environmental philosophy, fat studies, feminist new materialisms, feminist science studies, Indigenous thought, intersectionality, political ecology, phenomenology, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and queer theory as well as a variety of critical, anti-oppressive pedagogies.

Given the diverse sites and inspirations of critical animal-focused environmental education, it is no surprise that it (and related work) goes by various names, including critical animal pedagogies, common worlds pedagogies, ecopedagogy, humane education, interspecies education, and total liberation pedagogy. Whatever the label, it has far-reaching implications for education—and its research. On one hand, its critical bent seeks to disrupt anthropocentrism and speciesism. On another—hoof or tentacle perhaps?—it has constructive and reconstructive ambitions, encouraging us to recognize and attend to our co-existence with the more-than-human and envision and create ways to contribute to practices that enable humans to live ethically and sustainably within and as multispecies communities.

Who, how, and now what?

While charismatic critters like whales, orangutans, and penguins tend to capture the attention of many environmental educators and researchers, we note that significant attention also has been paid to animals who can evoke fear (e.g. Kuhl 2019 and in this issue, Büssing, Schleper, and Menzel, 2019 on wolves) or who are often disdained or ignored (e.g. Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2017 on insects, and in this issue, Tammi 2019 on microbes). Clearly it is hard enough to ensure animals we revere flourish, so critical work on charismatic species needs to continue. But we also argue that research that seeks to imagine ways to live with animals typically construed as competition, pests, or dangerous—that is, with animals where conflict is likely to ensue—has especial potential for learning how to ‘stay with the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on earth’ (Haraway 2016, 40).

So too does critical research on another set of animals with whom we have deadly relationships: those deemed food. Recently there has been a surge of writing both within and beyond environmental education on animals-as-food, including on the hidden curriculum of school lunch (e.g. Rowe and Rocha 2015), hunting and fishing (e.g. J. Russell 2019), and ‘sustainable’ seafood (Lloro-Bidart, 2017) as well as writing on critical food education in post-secondary settings (e.g. in this issue, Spannring and Grušovnik 2019). We are encouraged by this trend and would like to see more of this research, especially given the pressing need to address industrialized meat production and its impacts on the environment and the human labourers and animals involved. Indeed, food can be an excellent entrée for investigating a whole host of complex and interconnected issues and opening up particularly fruitful opportunities for embodied and affective learning (e.g. Ma Rhea 2018, Stapleton 2015), especially considering that, for many people, the animals on their plate are one of the only types they interact with consistently (C. Russell 2019).

Another intimate way many people learn about and with other animals is through experiences with companion animals. While at first glance companion animals may not be seen as relevant to environmental education, there are connections to be made beyond the environmental impacts of pet-keeping (e.g. Twardek et al. 2017). For example, Joshua Russell’s (2017) fascinating research on children’s experiences with companion animal death is part of a growing conversation about the potential of ‘pedagogies of death’ (see also, this issue, Affifi and Christie 2019). Creating spaces such as these to explore ‘the hidden wounds of human supremacy’ (Martusewicz 2015, 31) may be a particularly generative element of animal-focused environmental education, and one that might help prevent the ‘affective turn’ in the field (Gannon 2017, Russell and Oakley 2017) from reverting to its anthropocentric inclinations (Fawcett 2013).

And that brings us to the injured elephant in the room. What are the impacts on other animals of the various environmental education initiatives described in this journal and elsewhere? Too often research reports focus on the educational benefits for human learners without attending to the lives of the animals involved. This is particularly obvious in much of the research conducted in edutainment venues like zoos and aquariums, where animals are imprisoned and the hidden curriculum is profoundly anthropocentric (Lloro-Bidart and Russell 2017). Surely all pedagogical endeavours that appropriate other animals’ physical, social, or emotional labour need to be opened up to questioning in these ways? A related risk is that integrating other animals into educational contexts can prevent recognition of animal subjectivity and forestall meaningful engagement with animal alterity. So we ask, how might environmental educators instead create opportunities for learners to not only interrogate the exploitation of other animals, but also explore their own animality and other animals’ subjectivity? We human primates both resemble and differ from other animals, and it would be worth deepening our understanding of the complexities of our own animality, including how educational settings and processes can undermine, preserve, or restore our animality and enable us to flourish in a shared community co-populated and co-produced with the more-than-human (Spannring 2019).

Some environmental education researchers have sought ways to take into account such considerations, such as by incorporating a ‘view from all fours’ (Hatch 2007, 37). Multispecies ethnographies and common worlds approaches are promising methodological approaches for understanding the complex mingling of humans and more-than-humans and how interspecies relationships are co-created (Gannon 2017, Lloro-Bidart 2018, Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2017). However, even in studies that seek to highlight other animals’ subjectivity and agency, animals often remain on the margins, just one element in a human-dominated setting rather than as a focus of investigation in their own right. That is not surprising given educational research has deep roots in certain humanist traditions that scour the more-than-human from the social sciences, except as objects in service of human interests (Bell and Russell 2000). Further, few educational researchers have substantive ethological knowledge; even today understandings of other animals are often coloured by descriptions grounded in the mechanistic and behaviourist approaches common in biology and psychology, which contributes to the erasure of animals’ experiences, understandings, and cultures (Noske 1989). While interdisciplinary collaboration has the potential to widen the horizons of animal-focused environmental education research, there are limits if all parties remain mired in anthropocentrism. Accordingly, intersectional analyses may help researchers and teachers push beyond the human, examining the ways that speciesism and other oppressions such as racism, colonialism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and sizeism interconnect and feed each other (Lloro-Bidart and Finewood 2018; C. Russell 2019).

Another challenge faced is one that pertains to all ethnographic work: the limits to understanding and representing others. Researchers’ positionality and power impact what we are able to observe, and that includes what we are able to ascertain about the experiences and perspectives of other animals (see Payne 2013). Helen Kopnina (2017) argues that even a ‘sympathetic gaze’ can conceal speciesist structures and the impacts of anthropo-formative projections on nonhumans. Power differentials also arise when representing the voices of other animals (Russell 2005), including how our various methodological approaches support or undermine animals’ ability to speak for themselves. Developing a larger representational repertoire in environmental education research, including the inclusion of video, sound, and various art forms may help here (ibid.). There are other possibilities within digital publishing, not just the photography and children’s artwork that has been featured in some animal-focused environmental education research reports. In other words, there is still ample space for further creativity and innovation in researching with animals (Kuhl 2012).

In this editorial, then, we hope we have illustrated and illuminated some of the rich theoretical and methodological foundations that have informed scholarship on animal-focused environmental education thus far. We find it telling, however, that there remains relatively limited engagement with perspectives aligned with animal liberation (see Nocella et al. 2019, Oakley 2019), particularly when such approaches have been routinely dismissed as ‘moralizing’ and therefore educationally suspect (Pedersen 2019). Let us return then to our initial questioning about the ‘so what for other animals.’ While we recognize that a diversity of (sometimes contradictory) approaches can be helpful in advancing a field, we are nonetheless concerned that much environmental education research continues to take an anthropocentric stance, which we argue limits its efficacy. So it is not so much so what, but now what. As Helena Pedersen (2019) has argued, much animal-focused educational research still fails to ‘stand with the animal herself’ and is not ‘a sincere act of solidarity with animals’ (7). Celebrating naturacultural entanglements without taking seriously the implications of human supremacy and the power of the animal industrial complex impedes the fundamental transformation needed to support multispecies flourishing.

Constance Russell
Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6093-7423
[email protected]
Reingard Spannring
Institute for Education Sciences, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3501-8660

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Constance Russell

Constance Russell is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. Her research and teaching snakes through the confluence of environmental education, interspecies education, and social justice education.

Reingard Spannring

Reingard Spannring is a researcher at the Institute for Educational Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her interests lie in the fields of critical animal studies, environmental education, and environmental sociology as well as the sociology of youth.

Notes

1 We struggle with nomenclature. To use the word ‘animal’ alone implies that humans are not animals, reinforcing the human-animal divide. ‘Non-human animal’ acknowledges that humans are also animals, but still keeps humans at the definitional centre (just imagine women being labeled ‘non-men’). So too does ‘more-than-human’ which also is less precise since the term often includes other life and the Land. We have used all of these words in our own writing while recognizing their limitations.