Animal-inclusive education for sustainable futures: from policy to practice

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Education has been in the spotlight in debates on how to attend to the deepening climate crisis, yet transformations in educational policy and practice have been slow to attend necessary transformations that foster sustainable futures. In fact, education can be seen to be continuing down a path of unsustainability, where violent human-animal relations are often normalized. In this talk, Maria Helena Saari offers a “birds-eye view” of some of the ways in which educational policy and practice harmfully affect animals and children, the diverse pedagogical tools offered by the growing field of animal-inclusive education to foster more peaceable human-animal relations, and how innovative conceptual tools, such as ‘interspecies sustainability’ might offer pathways for educational transformations for sustainable futures. Two examples of what animal-inclusive pedagogies might look like in practice in higher education are given from the context of Finnish pre-service teacher education.  

GU-CAS will provide vegan fika.

Om Maria Helena Saar

Maria Helena Saari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education at the University of Oulu and Visiting Scholar at the Human-Animal Studies Hub at the University of Lisbon. She is currently Co-Leader of the Envisioning Sustainability Hub of the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Program and Chair of the Finnish Critical Animal Studies Network (CASFinland). She was awarded the Senior Animal Law Researcher Award by the International Centre for Animal Law & Policy (ICALP) for her doctoral thesis ‘Animals as stakeholders in education: Towards an educational reform for interspecies sustainability’. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on animals in education (policy and pedagogy), interspecies sustainability and justice, environmental education, and animal law. She teaches undergraduate courses on environmental education and multispecies childhood studies.