More-than-human refusal, as an expression of agency, plays an active role in constructing boundaries. In this article, I address what kind of environmental education is made possible by the productive constraints of respecting more-than-human boundaries and refusal. This is intertwined with how humans can practice being attentive to the…

A phenomenon from the natural world, cricket chirping behavior in relation to ambient temperature, is used as the springboard for engaging the curiosity of gifted students in an interdisciplinary classroom curriculum. Mathematics and science standards and disciplinary practices are prominent in the investigation, while other disciplines deepen the…

This article explores the kinds of children's books--literary and informative--that can help young readers concern themselves with ecological matters; also the extent to which children's literature can be employed for the development of an ecological awareness in young readers. Can children's literature, beyond its inherently anthropocentric…

The Planetary Health (PH) approach addresses health risks resulting from anthropogenic climate change. It offers an integrative understanding of nature, whereby humans and their health are regarded as part of nature, and individual concerns are situated in relation to the interactions between society and the environment. However, this approach has…

This article critically explores the epistemic "practices" of bioscience, using creative writing and analyses of science studies to implicate the non-linguistic side of science where a "feeling for the organism" matters more, perhaps, than theoretical precision. It offers new critique of curricula in science which are so…

The release of genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys is part of a public health initiative to limit the spread of infectious disease. The local debate over this proposed action provides a current case study of a public, scientific controversy in which citizens and officials disagree about what is best for the community. The case…

Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of "staying with the trouble." Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage…

This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically…

Between 1906 and 1909 the biologist Ronald Ross and the classicist W.H.S. Jones pioneered interdisciplinary research in biology and history in advancing the claim that malaria had been crucial in the decline of golden-age Greece (fourth century BCE). The idea had originated with Ross, winner of the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the importance of…

The honeybee ("Apis mellifera") has long served as an invertebrate model organism for reward learning and memory research. Its capacity for learning and memory formation is rooted in the ecological need to efficiently collect nectar and pollen during summer to ensure survival of the hive during winter. Foraging bees learn to associate a…

Biologist and graphic novelist Jay Hosler has long been introducing young readers to biological subjects through entertaining narratives combining strongly fictional elements with nonfictional ones. Extensive application of fiction to nonfictional subject matter is uncommon, even in graphic novels, but Hosler's "The Sandwalk Adventures"…

An evaluation of the scientific content in a popular children's movie about bees provides an opportunity for discussion about the sources and consequences of scientific misconceptions.

Spiders are among the most common targets of fears and phobias in the world. In visual search tasks, adults detect their presence more rapidly than other kinds of stimuli. Reported here is an investigation of whether young children share this attentional bias for the detection of spiders. In a series of experiments, preschoolers and adults were…

Truly flower-naive bumblebees, with no prior rewarded experience for visits on any visual patterns outside the colony, were tested for their choice of bilaterally symmetric over asymmetric patterns in a radial-arm maze. No preference for symmetry was found. Prior training with rewarded black and white disks did, however, lead to a significant…

The nematode "Caenorhabditis elegans" ("C. elegans") adult hermaphrodite has 302 invariant neurons and is suited for cellular and molecular studies on complex behaviors including learning and memory. Here, we have developed protocols for classical conditioning of worms with 1-propanol, as a conditioned stimulus (CS), and hydrochloride (HCl) (pH…