This edited volume draws together educators and scholars to engage with the difficulties and benefits of teaching place-based education in a distinctive culture-laden area in North America: the United States South. Despite problematic past visions of cultural homogeneity, the South has always been a culturally diverse region with many historical layers of inhabitation and migration, each with their own set of religious and secular relationships to the land. Through site-specific narratives, this volume offers a blueprint for new approaches to place-based pedagogy, with an emphasis on the intersection between religion and the environment. By offering broadly applicable examples of pedagogical methods and practices, this book confronts the need to develop more sustainable local communities to address globally significant challenges.

This edited volume draws together educators and scholars to engage with the difficulties and benefits of teaching place-based education in a distinctive culture-laden area in North America: the United States South. Despite problematic past visions of cultural homogeneity, the South has always been a culturally diverse region with many historical layers of inhabitation and migration, each with their own set of religious and secular relationships to the land. Through site-specific narratives, this volume offers a blueprint for new approaches to place-based pedagogy, with an emphasis on the intersection between religion and the environment. By offering broadly applicable examples of pedagogical methods and practices, this book confronts the need to develop more sustainable local communities to address globally significant challenges.

From the first woolly mammoths painted in exquisite detail on Palcolithic cave walls to contemporary depictions of anthropomorphized mice as heroes of animated films and fiction, animals have played crucial roles in human cultures around the world. In What Are the Animals to Us? scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines explore the diverse meanings of animals in science, religion, folklore, literature, and art. The contributors focus especially on analyzing cultural products about animals. The chapters in the first section of the book, "From Totems to Tales," interpret folklore of cats, foxes, snakes, and frogs in various cultures, while the chapters in the section on "Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens" concern themselves with literary and historical representations of reindeer, wild birds, tigers, and other animals. The chapters in "Holy Dogs and Scared Bunnies" consider the roles of animals in art and religion. In the section on "Ethics, Ethology, and Konrad Lorenz," the contributors evaluate the legacy of this cofounder of the science of animal behavior in the light of recent revelations about Lorenz's National Socialist past. Finally, an extensive afterword offers theoretical and practical ways in which readers might better understand animal others in their own right, and discusses the ethical implications of such an understanding. Accessible and lively, What Are the Animals to Us? is a uniquely wide-ranging and well-written interdisciplinary introduction to the emerging field of animal studies that offers not just novel approaches to the study of what animals mean to people but also fresh insights into a broad range of topics, from environmental history to animal behavior, postmodern art to Christian theology.