Educating in a Multispecies World

The widespread deterioration of our planet's life support system is a global challenge facing humanity. This dissertation is based on the premise that changing course requires fundamentally reconstructing how we think about humans and the rest of nature. If a sustainable course requires that we see ourselves as members of an ever-evolving biotic community, then we will have to abandon ways of thinking and acting that distort a sense of continuity between our species and others, replacing kinship with radical separation. Insofar as education is concerned with human learning processes while considering learning in other species as irrelevant or nonexistent, it institutionalizes and perpetuates attitudes that prevent us from reintegrating back into our web of relations. These attitudes are no longer biologically, philosophically, or ethically warranted. They do not keep up with the extent of our empirical and theoretical progress beyond thinking in terms of metaphysical dualisms. To evolve a better discipline, I claim that we must ecologize education; we must dare to imagine and enact an interspecies pedagogy. In the seven papers that follow, I draw from various philosophical, scientific and pedagogical sources to trace pathways into interspecies pedagogy and I try to overcome some of the ways my culturally-informed biases have blocked me from taking the concept seriously. The papers are diverse but they also overlap, showing the process by which I have worked to develop a theoretical alternative that erases the line between education and biology. As such, this publication fits within the larger "posthumanist" shift occurring variously throughout the university. My partial solutions and explorations are admittedly situated and contextual. However, I hope that they can help those who suffer similar blockages as I do to feel more viscerally that the world around them is responsive, attentive, and worthy of pedagogical consideration, and that the range of human affairs treating the biological world as but scenery set behind the great human story is as miseducative for other species as it is for us, and in need of a swift dismantling.Ph.D