Question

What can we all learn with and from the woods to develop a more embodied understanding of eco-social justice?

In this blog post I summarise the readings and theory underpinning my curiosity in the question above.

In this blog I intend to respond to learning outcome 1: Critically analyse how a social justice issue within your academic practice context impacts student experience.

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Towards respect
The botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about Learning the Grammar of Animacy (Kimmerer, 2013, p1). Where pronouns are used for all living things, dissolving barriers between the human and the more-than-human world. Kimmerer explores how language holds the power not only to restrain our mindless exploitation of land, but also to establish a renewed relationship with the natural animate world based on awe, respect, exchange, appreciation and love.

“Imagine walking through the richly inhabited world of Birch People, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as people worthy of our respect… Imagine the possibilities, imagine the access we would have to other perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.” (Kimmerer, 2013, p20)

It is in this imagining that my Action Research question was born.

In quite a different piece of writing by American ecologist Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature challenges us to understand nature as a socially and culturally constructed concept, critiquing the ways in which nature is presented as something separate from the human experience. Evernden too wants us to understand how the language of ‘Nature’ signifies a human desire for domination and control. “That which cannot be named cannot be controlled” (Evernden, 1995). Failing to reference perhaps the ways in which the Citizen Potawatomi Nation people – along with maybe others – have been using the language of entwinement and human/nature interdependence long before his books.

Language and origin matters. Entwined within my research question above I am exploring how our students could start imagining and embodying the possibilities of learning with and from the wild in ways that replicate the language of the trees.

• We read, think, write, and debate design for environmental and social justice. But in doing so are we replicating the dangerous myths of human control and intellectual superiority as we sit with our theoretical frameworks in a temperature controlled LCC classroom?

Towards entanglement 
While indigenous communities around the planet recognise this interconnectedness and the fragility of the human body and mind, societies rooted in neoliberal and capitalist ideologies believe people can live beyond nature’s limits, that people are smarter than the trees, and that humans are separate from – and more valuable than – the rest of the living world. “We feel that we are adjacent to the complex web of life itself” (Martínez & Pethick, 2022, p 25).

The homogenous duality in our language also works to separate us: humans v’s nature, man v’s woman, intellect v’s emotion. And within these binary opposites are hierarchies (explicit or unconscious), where we feel like one is inherently superior to the other (Amoros, 1985). How to escape categorisation, thinking and being non-binary, is also a key concept explored in Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez’s writing, where lessons from fungi challenge normative binary narratives and elevate queer ecologies “It is the mutability and adaption that we see in fungi that are the crutial survival skills for the instability ahead. By being and thinking less binary, we prepare ourselves to trans-form.” (Ostendorf-Rodriguez, 2023).

In Staying with the Trouble, feminist theorist Donna Harraway suggests the current spiralling planetary crisis requires sym-poiesis, which means “making with” rather than auto-poiesis “self-making” (Haraway, 2016). And it is from this damp fungal mutable place that I proposed my research question above. 

I am interested in developing a ‘making with’ pedagogy where we explore and dismantle power hierarchies between us.

• How might removing the built environment of a university building dismantle the power dynamics, and delineations, between the teacher and the taught? How might this encourage more inclusion and pluriversality in our curriculum and pedegogy?
• How might removing the familiar walls / rules / behaviours of being at a university building encourage students and tutors to challenge binary dualistic ideas within themselves and their relationships?

Towards vulnerability 
“The more people get plugged back into their bodies, each other, the more impossible [it] will be for us to be dominated and occupied. That is the work right now” (Ensler, 2013).

The third dimension in my research question is one of embodied practices in learning and teaching. We live in vulnerable and dependent bodies, on a vulnerable planet with finite resources. We need to move towards a way-of-living that is conscious of its limits and the need for interdependence among all living beings.

The complexities of social and environmental justice requires us to question the effects of binary dualism and the patriarchal structures where some knowledge(s) are more valued than others. We need to start asking what our bodies know. Our emotions and perceptions (Friends, 2015).

In chapter 2 of Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy Beth Berila talks about the damaging legacy of the mind / body dualism, similar to Amoros’s work referenced above, Berila explores how these binaries place a much greater emphasis on the intellect than on most other aspects of our being. In learning and teaching we need to be understanding our complicity in replicating and compounding these damaging knowledge hierarchies (Berila, 2015).

Berila explores how the body holds the traces of societal oppression and trauma, and uses mindfulness in education not just as a tool for personal well-being, but as a means to reconnect with the body as a powerful site of resilience and healing against systemic violence. 

Feminist pedagogy tells us that knowledge is not something that exists outside of us, we participate in producing it (Berila, 2015, page 38).

• Can the body in which we learn, and the spaces in which we learn be more consciously explored within our pedagogy as we seek to dismantle the systemic structures that oppress and exploit?
• How can the shifting emotions of our students as they journey through a new city and a new course, be somehow held / supported / reflected by the cyclical nature of this woods? 

I can not reasonably think I will find the answers to these questions in the 4 months research project, but I am using these questions to help frame my enquiry and root me to the social and environmental injustices that I seek to address within my teaching and learning.

My instincts tell me this is a longer term piece of work.

Sources of further inspiration:

• Tree School : International movement rooted in the work of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (DAAR Decolonising Architecture and Art Research). I am looking at this as an example of experimental and non-hierarchical organisation. Rooted in art-based practice. Led by DAAR collective.
• natRural Lab : An architecture school in the rural Mexico started by Carlos Cobreros at Tec de Monterrey Campus Querétaro. I am looking at this and the example below as an example of situated design education in the global south / global majority. Still rooted within higher education structures.
• Talca Escuela de Arquitectura : At the University of Talca in Chile, learning and practice rooted alongside rural communities. Universities with a social purpose within their everyday activities.
• UAL Forest School : Using the forest as a tool to explore the climate and ecological emergency. This is a research space created with support of Forestry England, had an architectural leaning too and explored how the woods can be a material to work with. Extractive perhaps.
• Hooke Park : Architectural Association’s woodland campus in Dorset, UK. It contains a growing educational facility for design, workshop, construction and landscape-focused activities. Interesting that a lot of examples within Higher Education are connected to architectural teaching.
• Forest School Movement : Born in Scandinavia, developed into a network of child-development practitioners who teach children and families about learning within the woods. Interesting here to explore how intergenerational practices could be used in this context – tools + methods to engage people across barriers of age with the wisdoms of the woods. Forest School is a industry. How does this open up and be shared more generously?

References:

• Berila, B. (2015). Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education. Routledge.
• Ensler, E. (2013). In The Body of the World. Random House India.
• Evernden, N. (1995). The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
• Friends (2015). Why Women Will Save the Planet. Zed Books Ltd.
• Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Hilal, S., Petti, A., Al Lahham, A., Barbary, I., Kostenwein, D., Sanjinés, D., Lucena, C., Messina, J., Mussi, J., Leona, R., Solon, W., De, A., Neto, O., Ferreira, D., Lima, E., Breyer, F., Tomazoni, G., Racco, G., De Oliveira, J. and Zatz, L. (n.d.). CAMPUS IN CAMPS GRUPO CONTRAFILÉ. [online] Available at: https://www.campusincamps.ps/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Tree-School_Digital-Book_FINAL.pdf [Accessed 02 Jan. 2025].
• Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Y. (2023). Let’s Become Fungal!. Valiz.
• Pethick, E., Martinez, P., & How, W. (2022). Artistic Ecologies. MIT Press.
• Robin Wall Kimmerer (2021). Democracy of Species. Penguin Books.

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