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The Public Pedagogy of Neighborhood Facebook Communities: Negotiating Relations with Urban Coyotes
Type of Session
Individual Paper Presentation
Abstract
The Public Pedagogy of Neighborhood Facebook Communities: Negotiating Relations with Urban Coyotes
Teresa Lloro-Bidart & Christian Hunold
In this paper, we draw research on public pedagogy to explore how community Facebook pages in two cities, Philadelphia, PA and Chino/Chino Hills, CA, have become public spaces and/or spheres where residents debate and negotiate how to share their city with coyotes. We define public pedagogy as “various forms, processes, and sites of education and learning that occur beyond the realm of formal educational institutions…” (Sandlin, Wright, & Clark, 2011), including social media sites like Facebook (Freishtat, 2010). More specifically, we rely on educational philosopher Gert Biesta’s (2012) three forms of public pedagogy, which include: (1) pedagogy for the public, where instruction of the citizenry to think, act, and be in certain ways is key; (2) pedagogy of the public, where outcomes of learning are not pre-determined and learning, though necessary, is emergent; and (3) public pedagogy as enactment or concern for ‘publicness’ or ‘publicity,’ which creates the conditions for human togetherness and freedom—noting that we are also concerned with multiple forms nonhuman-nonhuman and nonhuman-human togetherness and freedom. We have chosen the case of coyotes because they have incorporated themselves into nearly every major city in North America, occupying a liminal position in these contexts. Coyotes’ abilities to thrive in cities testify not only to the increasing blurring of human-wildlife boundaries; they also undermine the idea that cities and suburbs are places where people do not have to contend with wild predators. Contemporary shifts in coyote geographies, coupled with the rise of Facebook community pages, thus open up interesting possibilities for public pedagogies that might challenge problematic human-nature and urban-wild binaries (Pedersen, 2010), particularly as they relate to situating apex predators within cityscapes.
References
Biesta, G. (2012). Becoming public: Public pedagogy, citizenship, and the public sphere. Social & Cultural Geography, 13(7), 683-697.
Freishtat, R. L. (2010). Constructing community, disciplining dissent: The public pedagogy of Facebook as a social movement. In J. A. Sandlin, B. D. Schultz, & J. Burdick (Eds.), Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling (pp. 201-213). New York: Routledge.
Pedersen, H. (2010). Is ‘the posthuman’ educable? On the convergence of educational philosophy, animal studies, and posthumanist theory. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31(2), 237-250.
Sandlin, J. A., Wright, R. R., & Clark, C. (2011). Reexamining theories of adult learning and adult development through the lenses of public pedagogy. Adult Education Quarterly, 63(1), 3-23.