Why Multispecies’ Flourishing?

Abstract

As a science teacher I often tried to "shift" the viewing of the world by my middle-school students from being very human-centric towards one that was more focused on the world as experienced by the organisms in the (eco)systems we were studying, to think about the world from the "level" of the organisms and the richness of the lived experiences they were having. One approach I used was showing them scenes from the movie "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" where the world view of the human participants was considerably shrunken to that where they could "ride" on the back of a bee and experience simple rainfall as a small organism would. I used Barbara McClintock's description of her thinking like corn, trying to imagine what it would be like to be corn (see Keller, 1983; Henry, 1997), as a foundation for my thinking on this as a teacher, and engaged my students in science talks (Gallas, 1995) to get them to start thinking about the world in more complex ways, in some senses as experienced by other organisms and from a different point-of-view, a different perspective and scale, than humans doing science usually start from. – GMB