A Walk in the Forest with Educators

We (educators, pedagogists, researchers) took a walk in the forest with the intention to pay attention, notice, engage in the presence of more-than-human others.

We asked ourselves….

• What and how do we notice when I walk in the presence of others – including non-humans?
• What relations do we notice?
• What logics do we notice and how might we follow these logics?

Our Engagements…

We noticed life, death, playfulness, garbage and plastics, patterns and textures, sounds (wind, squirrels, sticks and leaves under our feet, a plane flying above us), human-made and organic structures, levels and heights, animals (frogs and insects), a wide variety of trees and plants, strength and resiliency. The forest is alive, the forest thinks, the forest reverberates (despite our human presence).

Following the walk, we discussed how we might begin to challenge the separation between ourselves (human/culture) from nature. Paying attention to and noticing what takes place in the forest (despite us humans) has challenged us to think of natureculture entanglements.

As anthropologist Anna Tsing reminds us ‘Nature is not passive and mechanical. Nature is not a backdrop and resource for humans to tame and master’.

We are noticing “the lively activities of all beings, human and not human” (Tsing, 2015).

The modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and not human. World-making projects emerge from practical activities of making lives; in the process these projects alter our planet… Making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers reshape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. (Tsing, p. 22)

We began to think about…

How might we invite children to notice that the forest is alive, that the forest thinks?

How might we invite children to pay attention and listen to the many stories that the forest has?

How do we cultivate the arts of noticing through our pedagogies?

How might we join in with the children in the forests’ movements?