Taking the perspective of others, or «perspective-taking», is an ubiquitous concept. One will find it in both curricula, teaching, and educational discourse, usually described in positively valent terms, coupled with the implication that increased engagement with the perspectives of others might engender an increased humility, respect and openness to difference when facing the complexity and wicked problems of the world. But which perspectives do teachers actually ask the learners to take? 

In the latest Norwegian curricular reform (LK20), «taking the perspective of others» has been made a core element in the lower secondary subject KRLE (Translated: «Knowledge of Christianity, Religion, Worldviews and Ethics»). LK20 also rephrases the foundational Objectives Clause, and introduces three cross-curricular themes that all subjects except mathematics are required to approach. The new Objectives clause requires Norwegian education to open for pupils to «learn to think critically and act ethically and with environmental awareness». One of the cross-curricular themes is «Sustainable Development», which in KRLE is specified to involve «participation in ethical reflection on nature and the place of the human in it». If students are to take the perspective of others with an environmental awareness that allows reflections on nature – will taking the perspective of *humans only* be enough? What if one allows more that just human perspectives?

This paper proposal describes an exploratory empirical study of perspective-taking as it is envisioned, implemented, and evaluated by teachers in Norwegian lower secondary ethics education classrooms. The aim of the study is to describe examples of how the ethics didactical process might be expanded to move beyond anthropocentric notions of what a perspective entails, and the implications of such an expansion. The study is part of an ongoing PhD project on more-than-human perspective-taking and will be the first of two empirical contributions. The current problem statement of the paper proposal is as follows:

How do Norwegian teachers in lower secondary ethics education design, implement and evaluate more-than-human didactical perspective-taking? 

The theoretical lens of the project is the concept of the “more-than-human”, initially developed by Abram (1997) to signal anthropocentrism in understandings of nature and the world. The concept is here applied to perspective-taking in both the quantitative and qualitative sense, with a focus on the inclusion of more than just human perspectives in ethics education, as well as expanding “perspective” beyond rationalist, humanist definitions (Haraway, 1988, 2016). I thus ask how an expansion towards a more-than-human didactical perspective-taking in teaching for ethical reflection on nature and the place of the human in it is expressed teachers’ design, classroom implementation and self-assessments. 

Futhermore, the study has certain critical-hermeneutical aims (Ricoeur, 1981), as it is presumes that the teachers assumptions, conceptual operationalisations and legitimations for their choices will inform and affect the normative slant of their resulting teaching. Attendant questions for this study are oriented towards what role the human is ascribed in relation to nature by the teachers through more-than-human didactical perspective-taking, be it stewardship (eg. Jonas, 1984), kinship (eg. Kimmerer, 2020) or even human self-hate.

The study is intended as exploratory, as more-than-human perspective-taking is novel in the Norwegian ethics education context. The study is currently ongoing, and aspects of the methodology and analysis may be subject to change. The material will consist participating teachers and their students in ethics education from two to three schools. My project is distinctly practice- and didactics-oriented, in which I as the researcher initiate collaborative, reflexive, and co-creative teaching design workshops that I hold together with participating teachers. Co-created structures and designs for teaching of more-than-human perspective-taking are then carried out in the classroom by teachers. The study thus has a design research component, and later studies will evaluate and reiterate implementation, also in collaboration with practitioners. As study forms part of my PhD project, my supervisors Elin Sæther and Ole Andreas Kvamme support in the data collection and analysis phases. The study mainly focuses on in-school formal teaching practices in the classroom, and multiple research methodologies are applied. Selected teaching is observed and recorded, the teachers are interviewed both before, during (if necessary) and after each lesson, and both the teaching materials and student products are collected. The focus is on the teacher(s) in the classroom, but conversations with students and student products are collected for purposes of later contextualization and validity. The collected data are subsequently compiled, ordered and compared before selected sequences from the observed sessions of participating groups are shown to the participating teachers as grounds for discussion and co-creative reflection. Classroom teaching is both video and audio recorded. I collect field notes during all observation and I otherwise make audio recordings of all interviews and workshops. All data is transcribed, systematized and coded in secured Nvivo research software. Following careful transcription, the data will be thematically analyzed and coded to further structure and identify both the affordances, tensions and difficulties of more-than-human perspective-taking in ethics education as it is expressed both in teaching, interviews, workshops and in resulting student work. Given the currently ongoing nature of the study, choice of analytical approach is deliberately left vague, as all data have not been collected yet. An important condition is that the analysis must allow for critique of the human in relation to anthropocentric hegemony. Possible approaches may be critical-hermeneutical analysis (Ricoeur, 1981), narrative analysis (Polkinghorne, 1995), or case study methodology (Yin, 2018).

The project is currently ongoing, and the following predictions are based on incomplete evidence. Even so, I expect to see certain tendencies and areas of explication. As the project is normative in its expansion of what to consider as relevant perspectives in ethics education, the conclusions will include a discussion of the merits of more-than-human inclusion in environmentally oriented ethics education. Furthermore, as the project has explicit critical and constructive aims (following Klafki, 1998), I expect that the findings will make clear certain limitations, possibilities and tensions in practical educational perspective-taking. The data that has been collected thus far documents the teachers work to operationalise perspective-taking to their purposes. I therefore expect the findings to give indications towards the participating teachers’ priorities in adapting and aligning more-than-human perspective-taking to the specific learner-, class-, subject- and school context. I expect the findings to in this way exemplify the flexibility of didactical perspective-taking, both as it relates to how it is conceived, taught, received, and what student work may result. As it stands, the research project is oriented towards understanding perspective-taking and its more-than-human affordances. I therefore expect that the findings will reveal the teachers’ stances and approaches towards student preparation, engagement and evaluation of more-than-human didactical perspective-taking. I expect to document teachers’ reformulation and negotiation of the didactical perspective-taking concept and process both before, during, and after classroom activity, as well as the active work made by students to understand, appropriate and apply it. As more-than-human perspective-taking requires some degree of imagination from the students, I also expect that the data to some extent reveals examples of boundary work when trying to move beyond human-only perspectives. I expect this to involve that both the teachers and learners to some degree situate themselves in relation to the more-than-human world.

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