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Primary School

This is a note about a potential engagement with children of the primary school age.

This might be relevant for a collaborative and practice-driven research project.

A Story Sketch

This story sketch is in response to an invitation to do an incursion at the Clifton Hill Primary School.

This needs work, just to start with something... I shall have videos and pictures too, audio recordings...

Some thoughts on the conversation with children about nonhuman subjectivity, traditions, cultures and languages

  • All creatures, humans, cows, crab, beetles, trees, mushroom or bacteria, see the world differently

  • All want to live well, this means seeking food, seeking shelter, seeking companionship, seeking reproduction

  • All have feelings and emotions that tell them what is good or bad for them; they run away when it hurts and enjoy tasty food or a rest when they are tired

  • All live among other creatures and come into different relationships with them (neighbours, friends but also food/predation and home/parasitism/mutualism/symbiosis)

  • All have to say something to other creatures (camouflage, warning colours, avoidance, aggression, mimicry, invitations to play, etc.)

  • Signs and gestures or appearance and behaviour become stories (a mother ape tells a strong male not to be angry at her child who broke the rules, a fish saying I built a good home for the family, a bird saying we are still married after a year apart to her life-long partner, a bee scout dancing because she found a new home while other bees feel pessimistic)

  • If we agree that language does not have to use letters, words made of letters, and sentences made of words, we can see that all creatures have ways to communicate, even if this communication does not look like human language

Relevant issues

  • Interspecies culture

  • Interspecies design

  • Beauty in nature (girls deciding on the fashions through sexual selection in most species)

  • Democratic systems presume human speech and this excludes disempowered others, children, disabled, animals, plants. Those beings have voices too and deserve consideration and political protection.

  • Etc.

References

Attenborough, David, and Joerg Wiedenmann. Life in Colour. Documentary. Humble Bee Films, SeaLight Pictures, 2021. Benyus, Janine M., and Juan Carlos Barberis. The Secret Language of Animals. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2014. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Hearne, Vicki. Animal Happiness: Moving Exploration of Animals and Their Emotions - From Cats and Dogs to Orangutans and Tortoises. New York: Skyhorse, 2007. Meijer, Eva. Animal Languages: The Secret Conversations of the Living World. Translated by Laura Watkinson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021. Stevens, Martin. Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Whitehead, Hal, and Luke Rendell. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Background and Projects

For my thoughts and some examples on these issues, see: my papers on Academia.com