This book discusses how we can inspire today’s youth to engage in challenging and productive discussions around the past, present and future role of animals in science education. Animals play a large role in the sciences and science education and yet they remain one of the least visible topics in the educational literature. This book is intended to cultivate research topics, conversations, and dispositions for the ethical use of animals in science and education. This book explores the vital role of animals with/in science education, specimens, protected species, and other associated issues with regards to the role of animals in science. Topics explored include ethical, curriculum and pedagogical dimensions, involving invertebrates, engineering solutions that contribute to ecosystems, the experiences of animals under our care, aesthetic and contemplative practices alongside science, school-based ethical dialogue, nature study for promoting inquiry and sustainability, the challenge of whether animals need to be used for science whatsoever, reconceptualizing museum specimens, cultivating socioscientific issues and epistemic practice, cultural integrity and citizen science, the care and nurturance of gender-balanced curriculum choices for science education, and theoretical conversations around cultivating critical thinking skills and ethical dispositions. The diverse authors in this book take on the logic of domination and symbolic violence embodied within the scientific enterprise that has systematically subjugated animals and nature, and emboldened the anthropocentric and exploitative expressions for the future role of animals. At a time when animals are getting excluded from classrooms (too dangerous! too many allergies! too dirty!), this book is an important counterpoint. Interacting with animals helps students develop empathy, learn to care for living things, engage with content. We need more animals in the science curriculum, not less. David Sobel, Senior Faculty, Education Department, Antioch University New England

This book explores interdisciplinary approaches to animal-focused curriculum and pedagogy in environmental education, with an emphasis on integrating methods from the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. Each chapter, whether addressing curriculum, pedagogy, or both, engages with the extant literature in environmental education and other relevant fields to consider how interdisciplinary curricular and pedagogical practices shed new light on our understandings of and ethical/moral obligations to animals. Embracing theories like intersectionality, posthumanism, Indigenous cosmologies, and significant life experiences, and considering topics such as equine training, meat consumption and production, urban human-animal relationships, and zoos and aquariums, the chapters collectively contribute to the field by foregrounding the lives of animals. The volume purposefully steps forward from the historical marginalization of animals in educational research and practice.

Animals in Schools 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. Animals in Schools 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 set of questions about domination and subordination, normativity and deviance, rationality and empathy, as well as possibilities of resistance and change.

Within the education system, acts of violence toward animals take place and are manifested on a routine basis in science classes, in lecture halls, in school canteens, and during study visits to zoos, farms, and slaughterhouses. Taken for granted as ”necessary” for teaching and learning, this violence profoundly affects animals as well as students. It also provides new entry points for understanding education as a multispecies power regime, driven by numerous other investments than knowledge dissemination alone. What, then, is the nature of this educational violence, and how exactly does education work through techniques of interference with student and animal bodies? Based on ethnographic research within upper secondary schools and higher education, this book challenges the use of animals in education by innovative engagement of Deleuze and Guattari's tool of schizoanalysis. Sparking a fundamental rethinking of educational processes, relations, and aims, the book explores how scientific knowledge about animals proliferates through complex interplay of power and desire in contested spaces of teaching and learning. Configuring animal science education as a set of machines working in tandem with the animal industry, Helena Pedersen offers radical new insights into how education forms subjectivities and social orders under conditions of capitalist expansion that capture students and animals alike. Bringing together education studies, science studies, critical animal studies, and continental philosophy, Pedersen also provides examples of disruptive action that can put education to work for transformation and liberation.

Within the education system, acts of violence toward animals take place and are manifested on a routine basis in science classes, in lecture halls, in school canteens, and during study visits to zoos, farms, and slaughterhouses. Taken for granted as ”necessary” for teaching and learning, this violence profoundly affects animals as well as students. It also provides new entry points for understanding education as a multispecies power regime, driven by numerous other investments than knowledge dissemination alone. What, then, is the nature of this educational violence, and how exactly does education work through techniques of interference with student and animal bodies? Based on ethnographic research within upper secondary schools and higher education, this book challenges the use of animals in education by innovative engagement of Deleuze and Guattari's tool of schizoanalysis. Sparking a fundamental rethinking of educational processes, relations, and aims, the book explores how scientific knowledge about animals proliferates through complex interplay of power and desire in contested spaces of teaching and learning. Configuring animal science education as a set of machines working in tandem with the animal industry, Helena Pedersen offers radical new insights into how education forms subjectivities and social orders under conditions of capitalist expansion that capture students and animals alike. Bringing together education studies, science studies, critical animal studies, and continental philosophy, Pedersen also provides examples of disruptive action that can put education to work for transformation and liberation.

Federal law now requires that institutions provide training for anyone caring for or using laboratory animals. This volume provides the guidelines and resources needed to coordinate a quality training program, as well as to meet all legal requirements. A core module for all personnel takes no more than four hours to present. Most staff then proceed to one or more additional skills-development modules including the species-specific module that can be customized to any species in use at the institution, the pain management module, and the surgery module. The volume provides content information for required topics-from ethics to record keeping-and lists sources of additional publications, audiovisual programs, and computerized teaching aids. Included are: Ready-to-use teaching outlines, with detailed instructions for presenting material. Practical guidelines on logistics, covering scheduling, budgeting, and more. Guidelines on how to design training for adults and how to work with investigators who may resist taking training courses. This practical guidebook will be necessary for research institutions, particularly for staff members responsible for training coordination.

Human language, cognition, and culture are unique; they are unparalleled in the animal kingdom. The claim that we can learn what makes us human by studying other animal species provokes vigorous reactions and many deny that comparative research can shed any light on the origins and character of human distinctive capacities. However, Learning from Animals? presents empirical research and an analysis of comparative approaches for an understanding of human uniqueness, arguing that we cannot know what capacities are uniquely human until we learn what other species can do. This interdisciplinary volume explores the prospects and problems of comparative approaches for understanding modern humans’ abilities by presenting: (1) the latest findings and theoretical approaches in primatology, comparative psychology, linguistics, and philosophy; (2) methodological reflections on the prospects and challenges of understanding human capacities through comparative research strategies; and (3) discussions of conceptual and ethical issues. This is the first book to address the issues raised by comparative research from such a diverse perspective. It will therefore be of great interest to students, researchers, and professionals in comparative psychology, linguistics, primatology, biology, and philosophy.