Comments on: Introducing High School Students to Animal Studies

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:41:04 +0000

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!

By: Scu

Scu — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 05:48:48 +0000

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.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:50:46 +0000

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?

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:27:29 +0000

The all too vocal vegetarian mafia strikes again.

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:34:11 +0000

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?

By: Scu

Scu — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:05:34 +0000

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.