CURRENT PROJECTS:
GINTL (2021-24)
Co-designing teacher education THAT CONNECTS THEORY AND PRACTICE AND IS RELEVANT TO THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY
Funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, this Global Innovation Network for Teaching and Learning (2021-24) project aims to strengthen teacher education through joint collaborative research between the University of Oulu and University of Namibia with a focus on early childhood education and care, school-based studies, environmental education and learning in diverse contexts. In the project I am co-leader of the Environmental Education Working Group together with Anna Vladimirova and Richardine Poulton-Busler. We work on developing environmental sustainability education in teacher education.
Project members: Marika Matengu (Coordinator - Oulu), Satu Karjalainen, Outi Yltitapio-Mäntylä, Maria Helena Saari, Anna Vladimirova, Anais George, Jacolynn van Wyk (Coordinator - UNAM), Sirkka Tshiningayamwe, Kashinauu Faustina, Elizabeth Kamara, Karolina Gontes, Mirjam Sheyapo, Richardine Poulton-Busler, Taimi Ndapandula.
past projects:
MULTISPECIES CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION (2022-23)
PI: Maria Helena Saari
Multispecies Climate Change Education is an interdisciplinary research project exploring how multispecies perspectives could be better integrated into different facets of environmental education, including in disaster risk reduction and climate change education. Through a multidimensional approach that includes policy mapping and development of animal-inclusive pedagogies, the project explores how education could better attend to including multispecies perspectives in our understandings and analysis of climate change and sustainability. The project works in collaboration with the Liminal Becomings: reframing human-animal relations in natural disasters project and is made possible with mobility funding granted by the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Program of the University of Oulu.
As part of the project, a pilot multispecies climate change education workshop is carried out in collaboration with a public school in Lisbon, where students explore diverse climate change events in Portugal from multispecies perspectives, meaning taking into consideration the interests of humans, animals, and nature. Animals are among the most vulnerable populations affected by the events, but are often overlooked in media coverage, public debate, policy, and emergency responses. Using a humane education-inspired pedagogical approach, the workshop aims to explore the causes and effects of natural disasters and specific environmental events in Portugal and explores possible ways of sustainable coexistence between humans and animals in the aftermath of disasters. Other educational activities of the project include exploring human-animal relations from diverse perspectives, including in relation to cultural practices and food systems.
CITIZENS WITH RATS: From citizen science toward non-anthropocentric education with young people and difficult urban companions (2020-24)
CitiRats is funded by the Academy of Finland (2020-2024) and combines natural sciences and education in a project with young people. The main objective is to study and to develop arts of attentiveness towards multispecies communities and for imagining multispecies futures while rethinking exclusive human agency in society and in education. This is needed because the problems of sustainable co-living are part of young people’s everyday lives here and now. Education is, however, said to be among the slowest of disciplines to address these concerns. CitiRats produces new knowledge and solutions with a state-of-the-art three-tier approach, based on collaboration between researchers, young people (ages 13-15) and selected experts. The research design comprises three progressive research stages with methods from natural sciences, human sciences and the arts. This produces new knowledge of urban communities as shared between many species, as well as knowledge about how young people best come to learn about sustainable co-living.
Project members: Pauliina Rautio (PI), Tuure Tammi, Maria Helena Saari (Postdoc), Riikka Hohti, Tuomas Aivelo, Anttoni Kervinen, Mika Simonen, featuring Johanna Sinisalo
ANIMATE: Significant others – The meaning of animals in children’s everyday life (2018-2021)
Funded by the Eudaimonia Institute (2018-2021), the objective of this project is to produce knowledge of the ways in which child–animal relations are significant in order to accommodate their existence in a rapidly urbanising world. In studies that map important individuals in children’s everyday lives, children themselves repeatedly include animals. Systematic in-depth studies on how significant child–animal relations form and evolve on children’s own terms thus contributing to their experienced wellbeing, are still missing however. At the same time there is a growing concern in urbanising societies of the diminishing of direct, spontaneous contact between children and animals. If societies respond to this challenge by fostering child–animal relations animals and children can form strong bonds, meaningful ‘networks of learners’ and ‘communities of knowers’. Such communities exemplify ’common worlds’ in which the human actors are intensely aware of their interconnectedness with the environment. Fostering such worlds will not be possible, however, before we know how significant child–animal relations form and are sustained by children and the animals as part of their everyday lives.
Project members: Pauliina Rautio (PI), Riikka Hohti, Tuure Tammi, Maria Helena Saari (PhD Candidate), Riitta-Marja Leinonen
Within this project I conducted my PhD research project Animals as stakeholders in education: towards an educational reform for interspecies sustainability (2018-2021). The project explored how we might move towards an educational reform for interspecies sustainability, grounded in the understanding that a just multispecies coexistence and sustainable futures require disrupting violence against other animals and attending to the creation of spaces of peace (within and beyond education). The overarching aim of the study was to explore through a multi-angle approach the occlusions and openings for attending to the ways in which (educational) violence(s) are (re)produced in formal education and how we might understand animals as stakeholders in education, sustainability and in our multispecies communities, and thus move towards an educational reform for interspecies sustainability. This overarching aim is elaborated by a set of sub questions and objectives. The first objective was to examine the ways in which human-animal relations are socially constructed. The second objective was to assess how animals are addressed in (and affected by) educational policies related to sustainability, consumption and curriculum and the third objective was to explore the openings offered by animal-inclusive educational frameworks and how they might propel us forward in educating for interspecies sustainability. These objectives were examined by using cows and the dairy industry as a case example, given the stronghold the dairy industry continues to have in the (Finnish) education system. Finally, the fourth objective was to inquire how humane educators are facilitating the implementation of animal-inclusive pedagogies. Overall, this study seeks to explore how, with effective alliances, we might move beyond the current impasse of a politics of unsustainability, which is inherently a multidimensional, interdisciplinary, intergenerational and interspecies endeavour.
CLAN – Child-Animals Friendships: challenging boundaries between humans and non-humans in contemporary societies
Funded by the Portuguese Scientific Foundation (PTDC/SOC 28415/2017), this project aimed at understanding the relationships between children and companion animals, by analyzing their affective practices, and explored how these are intertwined with other practices, environments and contexts, such as those involved in taking care of a pet. Children and pets are considered as co-producers of a common world, where the boundaries of what is a child, and an animal, are built, and permanently reconfigured. In this project I was worked on the educational dimensions of child-animal relations and created an educator’s toolkit for exploring multispecies relationships.
Visit EXPOCLAN for project findings and outputs and download the ‘Who is your CLAN?’ Educator’s Toolkit here. The educator’s toolkit explores the emotional lives of animals, communication and body language, habits and routines of companion animals, friendships and curious encounters with animals, and animal shelters. These themes are explored through storytelling, role-playing games and other creative activities. The toolkit was designed as a conversation starter and to stimulate our sensitivity to delve deeper into the complex and fascinating worlds we share with other animals. As we strive to see the world through the eyes of others, can we look at our neighborhoods and homes in different ways, and indeed see our furry, feathered, and finned friends in different ways?
Project members: Verónica Policarpo (PI), Ana Nunes de Almeida (Co-PI), Monica Truninger, Teresa Líbano Monteiro, Henrique Terreno, Clara Venancio, Vasco Ramos, Joana Catela, Maria Helena Saari (Visiting PhD Student).