The Human-Animal Relationship as a Subject of Citizenship Education

The aim of this book is to explore the human-animal relationship as a new subject of political education and to make it accessible for critical reflection. A guiding thesis is that society’s relationship with animals is both political and problematic, as it is shaped by power structures and rarely recognized as an issue due to its status as an unexamined norm. To explore this topic, the model of didactic reconstruction is employed. A problem-centered interview study is used to reconstruct students’ everyday conceptions of animals, humans, and their (political) relationship. These conceptions are then compared with academic perspectives—particularly from Human-Animal Studies—in order to uncover contradictions and taken-for-granted assumptions, and to identify exemplary, didactically fruitful approaches to the subject. The author concludes that future engagement with the human-animal relationship in the context of political education should be critically oriented toward power structures. This would enable reflective and multi-perspective political judgment on the human-animal relationship—making the invisible visible. The Author Dr. Jennifer Bloise earned her doctorate at the Junior Professorship for the Didactics of Political Education at University of Kaiserslautern-Landau. She is currently a trainee teacher (Studienreferendarin) for secondary school teaching (Gymnasium level). The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.
This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.

Jennifer Bloise earned her doctorate at the Junior Professorship for the Didactics of Political Education at the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau. She is currently a trainee teacher (Studienreferendarin) for secondary school teaching (Gymnasium level).