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Published (Version of record)CC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open Access
Published (Version of record)CC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open
Journal article
Bewildering the legacy effects of Gail Melson's wild things/animals/children
Pedagogy, culture & society, Vol.32(4)
2024
Appears in Recent Faculty of Education Publications
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Abstract
This article bewilders dominant discourses about child-animal relations by acknowledging and challenging the work of Gail Melson who positions animals as providing emotional, social and pedagogical support for children. Melson's psychological approach rests upon implicit assumptions that shape and support anthropocentrism whilst also critiquing a utilitarian approach to animals in educational learning spaces. The legacy effects of this approach are steeped in neoliberal discourse that entangle with pedagogy and practice. Unless modified these effects pass through generations as sticky webs of knowability that are difficult to contest. Research from Australia and Finland, framed by critical posthuman and relational ontologies, unsettles these effects to reconfigure child-animal relations as fluid and situated. 'Bewildering education' grants insights into historical political legacies that can be traced in education policy, practice and theory preoccupied with knowledge development, relations and meaning-making around the productive 'good' human subject. Child-animal relations expose complex and far-reaching effects of early childhood because processes of becoming and being human with other animals provides spaces for knowing 'difference' as a constituting force that disrupts anthropocentric relations with the world. Building a political history of animals that pays attention to agency and ethical relations reconfigures and reconstitutes animal species, not as objects of pedagogical inquiry, but rather as subjects and fellow earth dwellers.
Details
- Title
- Bewildering the legacy effects of Gail Melson's wild things/animals/children
- Creators
- Tracy Charlotte Young - Southern Cross UniversityPauliina Rautio - University of Oulu
- Publication Details
- Pedagogy, culture & society, Vol.32(4)
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Number of pages
- 17
- Identifiers
- 991013193177202368
- Copyright
- © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article