I Am Someone : Towards a Recognition of Nonhuman Personhood in Children’s Media and Education

From our earliest days of childhood, our exposure to certain species is confusing and contradictory, with animals like the beloved characters who fill our storybooks moulded into unrecognisable shapes and served up to us in deceptively happy packaging. With a recognition of this cognitive dissonance as a starting point, this report seeks to highlight the inconsistency of teaching children to love and respect animals whilst at the same time to accept the eating and usage of them. Whilst the topic of animal farming is finally beginning to be taken seriously in conversations about environmental sustainability, its ethical implications for both humans and nonhumans remain massively overlooked. My project aims to bring the conversation about animal rights to the forefront of our moral considerations with childhood education as an entry point. In collaboration with a primary school class (ages 9-11) and an animal sanctuary, I ran a three-part workshop designed to encourage interspecies thinking and provide a space for students to critically evaluate mainstream attitudes and assumptions towards nonhuman animals and, by extension, to question current norms surrounding animal use and consumption