Animal personhood research comes from different theoretical directions: animal rights, animal welfare, compassionate conservation, animal rights law, and many related disciplines. The term “personhood” is taken to lie in three main characteristics, including the capacity to act intentionally, the capacity to experience feelings, and the possession of moral worth. This division is complementary to three approaches: the perfectionist approach, the humanistic approach, and the interactive approach, with the third approach being the strongest. The basic idea is that personhood can be linked to legal rights based on recognition of intrinsic rights based on sentience or other characteristics of a living being, including personality. The move toward recognizing animal personhood in education promises to signify a return to a nonanthropocentric ethic that characterizes both the most transformative forms of education for environmental sustainability and the type of education that stresses responsibility and compassion toward all living beings. This type of education, at both the school and university levels, supports both ecocentrism and animal ethics and supports the rights to life of all living beings on Earth—including, to state the obvious, humans. Many initiatives supporting developing education for animal personhood have emerged within the literature on (sustainability) education and practice. This literature emphasizes multiple forms of education, ranging from education for sustainability, education related to ethics (anything that fits under the broad banner of sustainability, from human rights to social justice and indeed animal welfare), for example, including posthumanist education, action research, education for sustainable development, curriculum development, pedagogical studies that specifically engage with animal rights, and animal welfare education. More specifically, Animal Protection Education provides students and teachers with the information they need to understand and discuss the concept of granting legal personhood to animals.
Article
Animal Personhood in Sustainability Education
Helen Kopnina
Article
Arts and Disability
Anna Hickey-Moody
Art is a significant source of expression for people with a disability and it also represents them in important ways. The work of artists with a disability can augment viewer’s feelings about them, or, to put this another way, the work of artists with a disability can create social change. Not all of the artwork made by artists with a disability is “about” disability, and this separation between being an artist with a disability who makes art, and making artwork examining disability, is often a crucial distinction to make for those involved in the development of disability arts as a social movement. In light of this distinction, art of all kinds can provide us with powerful knowledge about disability, while also facilitating an important professional career trajectory. When art is made by an artist with a disability, and is about disability-related issues, the work created is usually called disability arts. When the work is made by someone with a disability but is not about disability, it may not necessarily be considered disability arts. This collection of work that is less concerned with identity politics is important, and is also worthy of independent consideration.
Article
Critical Race Parenting in Education
Cheryl E. Matias and Shoshanna Bitz
Conceptualized as early as 2006 via ideas of the motherscholar, the concept of Critical Race Parenting (otherwise ParentCrit) was first identified in 2016 in an open access online journal to discuss pedagogical ways parents and children can coconstruct understanding about race, racism, whiteness, and white supremacy. Since then Critical Race Parenting/ParentCrit has become more popularized in academic circles, from peer-reviewed conference presentations to special issues by journals. The rationale behind ParentCrit definitions, theoretical roots, parallels to education, implications to education, scholarship and literature, and controversies are explicated to describe what ParentCrit is and where it came from. To effectively articulate its epistemological roots in the idea of the motherscholar to its relation to Critical Race Theory, one must delve into the purposes, evolution, and implications of ParentCrit in education.
Article
Earth Education
Bruce Johnson and Constantinos Manoli
Earth education is an alternative approach to environmental learning, which has been developed as a potential serious response to the environmental crises we face. With roots in frustrations with traditional nature education that led to the innovative Acclimatization program, earth education has grown into a more comprehensive approach to environmental learning. The early work of Acclimatization led to earth education. The programmatic approach used in earth education, with its components of ecological understandings, feelings, and processing, have led to innovative aspects such as the I-A-A (Inform-Assimilate-Apply) learning model and the inclusion of “magic.” The Institute for Earth Education is the non-profit organization leading this approach and its work under the leadership of Steve Van Matre helps to propel these ideas.
Article
Homeschooling in the United States: Growth With Diversity and More Empirical Evidence
Brian D. Ray
Homeschooling (home education) is parent-directed, family-based education, and is typically not tax-funded, with parents choosing assistance from other individuals or organizations. Home-based education was nearly extinct in the United States by the 1970s but grew rapidly during the 1990s to about 2.6 million K–12 homeschool students in March of 2020 to then about 5 million in March of 2021. The demographic variety among homeschooling families rapidly increased during the 2000s to the point that in 2016, 41% of homeschool students were of ethnic minority background, with about 79% of those living in nonpoor households, and with parents’ formal education levels similar to national averages. Since the early 2000s, parents’ main reasons for homeschooling have shifted from an emphasis on religious or moral instruction to a somewhat more emphasis on concern about institutional school environments and the academic instruction in schools. Empirical research shows that the home educated, on average, perform above average in terms of academic achievement, social and emotional development, and success into adulthood (including college studies). However, there is scholarly debate about whether enough well-controlled studies have confirmed these overall benefits. Some theories have been proposed to explain the apparent positive effects. They include the concept that elements such as high levels of parental involvement, one-on-one instruction, low student-to-teacher ratios, effective use of time, more academic learning time, customization of learning experiences, and a safe and comfortable learning environment that are systemically a part of home-based education are conducive to children thriving in many ways. However, more research is needed to test these theories.
Article
Indigenous Language Revitalization
Anne Marie Guerrettaz and Mel M. Engman
Countless Indigenous languages around the world are the focus of innovative community regeneration efforts, as the legacies of colonialism have created conditions of extreme sociopolitical, educational, and economic adversity for the speakers of these languages—and their descendants. In response to these conditions that Indigenous people face globally, the burgeoning field of Indigenous language revitalization and maintenance has emerged since the 1990s with the goal of supporting speakers of these languages and future generations. Indigenous language revitalization involves different but often interlocking domains of research, practice, and activism. Given the uniqueness of each community and their desires, history, values, and culture, the significance of the local is critical to the global phenomenon that is language revitalization. For instance, cases on five different continents offer valuable insights into this field, including the Hawaiian language in Oceania; Myaamia in the United States (North America); Básáa in the Cameroon (Africa); Sámi in Finland (Europe); and, Cristang and Malay in Malaysia (Asia). These offer examples of both local resources and common challenges that characterize revitalization efforts.
The field of Indigenous language revitalization is interdisciplinary in nature, exemplified through five lines of inquiry that significantly contribute to this area of research: (a) theoretical linguistics and anthropology, (b) applied linguistics, (c) education, (d) policy studies, and (e) critical studies, including postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, and raciolinguistics. Questions of research ethics are central to the field of Indigenous language revitalization since reciprocity and collaboration between researchers and Indigenous communities matter as the lifeblood of Indigenous language revitalization work. Finally, we believe that the notion of Indigenous language revitalization pedagogies along with underexplored Indigenous concepts (e.g., from Yucatecan and Māori scholars) offer compelling directions for future research.
Article
Oral History Illustrated by the Case of Cyprus
Nicoletta (Niki) Christodoulou, Miranda Christou, and Maria Hadjipavlou
Oral history offers unique meaning for curriculum studies by presenting, analyzing, and interpreting experiences and memories of participants in an educational situation. The situation and context of Cyprus, an island with protracted conflicts and ethnical division, provides sites of illustration for oral history in curriculum studies. Couched in an historical background of oral history and definitions, as well as characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of narrative inquiry, the essence and application of oral history can be conveyed through the case of Cyprus. Oral history projects undertaken in Cyprus are conveyed, with prominent reference to the Cyprus Oral History Project (COHP), which has delineated the nuances of language, performance, and creation of pedagogical spaces. For example, COHP established a link among oral history, curriculum, instruction, and education, which has been used in Cyprus to understand memory as curriculum and to rethink issues of language and curricular questions in light of the knowledge drawn from oral histories. Further, oral history projects in Cyprus have delineated refugee trauma through the description of loss, painful memories, and silence; how narratives worked as significant evidence and material in conflict and reconciliation workshops; and the importance of the gender lens of oral history in Cyprus. The themes of cultivating historical consciousness, shaping responses to conflict, discomforting pedagogy, memory and trauma, and their role in the reunification process have been explored extensively through such projects; yet, more extensive work needs to be done. The number of oral history projects is still limited, yet there is still so much to be uncovered through people’s narrations. In the case of Cyprus, oral history is considered as a source of information about ordinary people’s lives but also for the role it can play in understanding how being dispossessed and returning to the homeland can reconstruct and reorganize education and culture. The uses of oral history to understand curriculum in Cyprus is offered as an example for modified use for exploring a broader sphere of curriculum studies in other settings.
Article
The Artist-Teacher
Esther Sayers
Artists who teach or teachers who make art? To explore the identity of the artist-teacher in contemporary educational contexts, the ethical differences between the two fields of art and learning need to be considered. Equity is sought between the needs of the learner and the demands of an artist’s practice; a tension exists here because the nurture of the learner and the challenge of art can be in conflict. The dual role of artist and of teacher have to be continually navigated in order to maintain the composite and ever-changing identity of the artist-teacher. The answer to the question of how to teach art comes through investigating attitudes to knowledge in terms of the hermeneutical discourses of “reproduction” and “production” as a means to understand developments in pedagogy for art education since the Renaissance. An understanding of the specific epistemological discourses that must be navigated by artist-teachers when they develop strategies for learning explicate the role of art practices in considering the question: What to teach? The answer lies in debates around technical skills and the capacity for critical thought.
