My dog and I, or Paradise lost : An autoethnographic reflection on the clash between different ambitions and needs within an asymmetric relationship built on significant otherness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through an autoethnographical reflection the aim of this paper is to explore the clash between high ethical ambitions in educative relationships and demandingbehaviours. What happens when the map does not resemble reality, when, forexample, someone in the educative relation does not behave as expected and themethods are challenged? What increases or decreases the risk that the teacher (orsimilar) will act contrary to her or his convictions?The background to this autoethnographical, substantive paper, goes like this:Inspired of Donna Haraway’s (2003, 2008) writings about her relation with theAustralian shepherd Cayenne, I last fall expanded my family with a miniatureAmerican Shepherd. I wanted to call her Kajan, as a Swedish wink to Haraway’sCayenne, but my daughters said no. In the end – and after long and intensivedeliberations – we all agreed on the name Lyra after the main character in PhilipPullmans His Dark Materials (1995, 1997, 2000). Lyra has turned out to be a wellchosenname. This small, blue-eyed beautiful miniature version of the Australian shepherd has really brought some dark materials into our home and into my mind.My last dog Lissie, born 2011, gave me already as a puppy a life changingexperience of alternative ways of being in the world with a different species. This led among other things, to a doctoral dissertation in educational sciences, in which I with ethnographical methods explore the paradigmatic shift that has occurred in parts of the dog-training world. Older methods built on domination and punishment, have been challenged and out dated by methods built on care, willingness to see the world from the perspective of the other, positive reinforcement and companionship (Bosseldal, 2019).With Lyra, I dreamed about building a perfect companionship from the beginning,built on what Haraway (2008) calls significant otherness. I intended to do this byseeing the world from Lyras perspective, protect her from failures and use onlydecent training methods where her voice could be heard. This has turned out to be much more difficult than I predicted. Lyra, my beloved dark material, has much more of significant otherness than I was able (or experienced) to foresee.As far as I can understand, Lyra is interested in a companionship with me. But herperspectives and reactions on the world, differs dramatically from mine. This hasbeen really challenging. I have some days failed to be the decent partner I intended to be. I have also met other people, especially other dog trainers, that has questioned my methods and mocked my ambitions. They have not been interested at all, in seeing the world from the eyes of Lyra and this has left me sad, anxious and angry. It is these experiences that I want to dig deeper into with the autobiographical methodology.The relation between me and Lyra, and the clash between my ethical ambitionsabout otherness in connection and the explosive and reactive little puppy togetherwith the dog trainers and others that question both my methods and ambitions and are willing to attack Lyra where she is as most vulnerable, is a unique experience, well suited for autoethnographical design. The paper will contribute to the autoethnographical field by connecting it to the self-study methodology (see below) and by using it to explore something that is difficult to grasp with more common ethnographical (or other) methods: namely the teachers/trainers ongoing reflection and inner monologue when trying to realize an educative ambition and especially when this realisation meets resistance and/or unexpected and demanding behaviours from both students and colleagues.There are a few other examples in the field of human-animal-relationship-studieswhere researchers have used autoethnography (see for example Tulloch 2016,Zetterquist Blokhuis 2018, Hagström 2018, Lee 2019). The rich tradition of selfstudies in the field of teacher education also connects to this. Like the self studyresearchers, my focus lie on the self (myself) in action, in an educational context (Hauge, 2020).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".