I’ve been selected to teach a course to high school students – grades eight to twelve, I believe – as part of a “mini-enrichment course” designed to get students interested in going to university (and to realize how utterly terrible high school is, I imagine). The course is a week long (Monday to Friday). The course is, broadly speaking, about humans and animals – specifically, how humans tend to treat animals. One day will involve a field trip – likely to a major animal hospital and to the humane society – but I haven’t decided what to do for the other four days. I’ll likely do a crash course in animal ethics – talk about abolitionism vs welfarism and a brief introduction to ethical theory (e.g., Franklin’s Kantian defense of animal rights vs. Singer’s utilitarian theory). A little on the legal status of animals as property. A little on the difference between “wild,” “domestic” and “pet” animals. Some on food choices (would you eat a pig? would you eat a donkey? why?) and the prevalence of animal by-products in every day items (I’ll have them keep an “animal journal”). Some on “factory farming” (I doubt I’d get access to a factory and I doubt I’d be allowed to take them to a slaughterhouse). I’d like to show them the two Oprah shows: on puppy mills and on Proposition 2, but it seems these aren’t available for purchase. Any suggestions (scu – you reading this?) at all?
Eventually this will evolve into educational materials for the local humane society – but that is further down the line.
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Wow, that is both an awesome thing to do, and also incredibly ambitious amount you want to do in just a week.
How long do you have each day of the week to teach?
I’ll try to give it some thought, but I think pets are important. I just finished teaching my course, and most of the students in there who weren’t there because they were already vegetarian (or whatever) were there because of a strong relationship to pets. It’s one of the few things I agree with Haraway’s last work on, the tendency among (some) animal theorists to ignore pets.
Regardless, good luck.
They’re on campus for six hours a day for a full week. I understand the course is capped at twenty students, so it will be a fairly small group. I expect that they get a lunch hour in there at some point. So, I get at least five contact hours each day – a lot of time to fill up. Each day, I think, can be thematically organized – pets, food animals, more abstract considerations (ethics, law). This is in part why I want to show those Oprah episodes. Lecture in the morning, video after lunch, discussion after that. The last day will have some sort of wrap-up.
Have you seen Erica Fudge’s new book on pets?
The all too vocal vegetarian mafia strikes again.
No kidding, but we’re both (as far as I can tell) vegans – even worse! I’ll note in passing that at an academic event yesterday, the only vegan option was hummus and carrot sticks. Where’s my mafia?
I really wish there was an academic vegetarian mafia. I’d totally try to be a Don if there was.
And that seems like an unprecedented amount of time to spend with high school students! I like the idea you have of separating up the days. You might want to think of some fiction to include, like Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (the actual tanner lecture part you can download from the tanner lecture website). Or maybe an essay in the form of David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster (Gourmet Magazine has his essay up for free download right now).
I haven’t read Erica Fudge on Pets. In general, I’ve done almost no work on pets. My students, however, were almost all very interested in the pet question. I taught an essay, Ferguson, Kennan. “I <3 My Dog”. Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3, 373-395 (2004). Not sure how good it is for HS, but certainly the questions resonated with my students. They would certainly spend money on their pets rather than use that money to save generic humans they don’t know. I think it is important to try and break down moments of anthropocentrism in their everyday lives (I’m sure you know this as well). You might also want to think about the other side, like a Michael Pollan essay (the one I use is , Michael. “An Animal’s Place.” The New York Times, Nov. 10, 2002). Anyway, good luck. You should post and tell us all how it goes. One last thing. I’m not sure how many students you are dealing with, but maybe for the last day of this class you might have a vegan goodies day. Like vegan brownies or something of the sort.
I am going to be gone for a while, but I am eager to see how this turns out.
With respect to the vegetarian mafia and a vegan goodies day, at the above mentioned academic event, the only vegan option beyond hummous and carrot sticks were the quite delicious cupcakes made by my partner, Blythe – so good those who tried them didn’t know that there was no dairy!
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