Towards a Post-anthropocentric Pedagogy: Children’s Reading of Oliver Jeffers’s This Moose Belongs to Me

Anthropocentrism, the idea that humans are intrinsically superior to nonhumans, pervades children’s literature. While the last decade has seen an emergence of desk-based research on the intersections of children’s fiction and posthumanism, empirical research on the pedagogical potential of children’s books to destabilise anthropocentrism is relatively rare. In a similar vein, the field of critical pedagogy has paid relatively less attention to the oppression of the more-than-human. To address these research gaps, this paper examines the responses of two British child readers to Oliver Jeffers’s picturebook This Moose Belongs to Me (2012) through the lenses of reader-response theory, posthumanism, cognitive psychology, and children’s literature studies. This case study follows the methodological approach proposed by Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles (2003); while the researcher asked open-ended questions as to the visual and textual elements of the book, both readers demonstrated their readings of the human-animal interactions with a focus on the notion of pet ownership. Before reading the picturebook, the child readers demonstrated a mindset wherein the sentient quality of animals does not exist. However, children’s fiction’s ability to destabilise human-animal hierarchy is demonstrated through the readers’ critique of the protagonist’s self-proclaimed superiority over the moose, as well as their growing recognition of the animal’s subjectivity. This study, therefore, serves as a test case for how children’s fiction can be used in a critical pedagogy to encourage rethinking the human-pet relationship and fostering a less anthropocentric worldview.