International Journal of Education & the Arts

Citation: Fredriksen, B. C., & Sarvanovic, A. (2024). The pancake-eating pig and the vegetable-eating cheetah: Three-year-old children’s affective perception and care for companion species. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si1.1). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si1.1

As educators of early childhood teachers, we care about developing their values and attitudes, which will affect future generations of humans and other species whose lives depend on human compassion. As art and craft teachers, we recognize the importance of embodied experience, senses, and emotional engagement in teaching and learning. Seeking to flatten the established power differences between young and old, humans and nonhumans, aesthetic and scientific, in this article, we present what we learned about relationships between human and nonhuman animals from three-year-old children. The children’s expressions about certain animals were initiated by adult animal drawings or emerged from their visual expressions. The expressions communicated new insights infused with care, empathy, compassion, pain, disgust, and horror. As a/r/tographers, we allow ourselves to be affected by the children’s cries for inter-species solidarity and compassion. Through this study, we explore what young children can teach their teachers, parents, and other adults about inter-species care.

The article employs an aesthetic, narrative approach to two recorded conversations that captured three-year-old children’s new insights. In the first case, deep reflections emerge during a TV interview with a girl about pigs she met during a drawing project facilitated by the first author; the second case presents negotiations of meaning that took place during conversations between the second author and her son during their reading of picture books and drawing animals.