Animals and Education Research : Enclosures and Openings

The objective of this chapter is twofold. First, it critically discusses conventional education epistemologies and their often instrumental relationship with “the animal” by addressing three primary areas of animal presence in education: Animals as “sites of sentimentality” in early childhood education (and beyond); animals as teaching and learning tools and as scientific objects in life science classrooms; and animals as a trope and antithesis in educational discourses of humanity. Second, the chapter opens possibilities for other questions and understandings of the position of the non-human animal in education to take shape. From this process emerge alternative ways of looking at education through the lenses of “biopalimpsest” and “zoocurriculum”, but also through disturbing our notions of who is the educable subject. In this manner, animals not only bring forth particular instabilities and indeterminacies of education, but make the “animal question” itself an educational question