Children’s and parents’ forest school encounters reveal a forest-led pedagogyEncounters with the forest can “prompt us to reconsider what counts as teaching…and who, ultimately, counts as teacher.” In this article, a mother–educator used an autoethnographic approach to consider how learning through ethical relationships with forests might reimagine environmental education. Guided by the emerging field of Critical Forest Studies, the article asks: “What might encounters within a community-based outdoor school teach us about forest pedagogies?” To answer this question, the mother-educator presents a series of narrative vignettes from a forest school program for parents and young children that consider how forests actively shape learning.
The narrative vignettes presented in this autoethnography are reflections on the authors’ participation in a forest school program for parents and children (age 0–4), in Ottawa, Canada. The author approached this exploration as a science schoolteacher, university researcher, and mother of a young child in the forest school program. The theoretical grounding of the article “braids together Indigenous epistemologies, critical posthumanism and feminist science studies situated within the emerging field of Critical Forest Studies.” Through this framework, forests are viewed not as passive learning settings, but as “living pedagogical communities that teach through entanglement, reciprocity and care.” Everyday encounters in the forest school were analyzed through this theoretical framework that situated the forest as co-teacher and co-researcher.
Four narratives (<em>gathering acorns, listening to the forest, dwelling with decay, and distributed care</em>) explore how forests actively shape learning. The first narrative considers the experience of <em>gathering acorns</em>. Here, the encounters revealed how the forest “teaches in plural ways” that weave together scientific, ecological, Indigenous and relational pedagogies. Through children’s interactions with acorns, the author explains that an oak tree “did not merely provide resources; it acted as co-teacher, guiding us toward lessons in reciprocity, survival and humility.” The narrative<em> listening to the forest</em> considers a “sit spot” experience. Quietly observing the forest positioned the author to recognize their entanglement in the rhythms of the more-than-human world. From the sit spot, the author reflected on nature’s role as teacher: “teaching begins when I yield to the more-than-human presences that are already teaching.” While the author described their daughter’s sit spot experience as “an instinctive immersion,” for the author themself, it was a process of “unlearning” to listen to the pedagogy of the forest. The narrative <em>dwelling with decay</em> concerns learning through encounters with decomposition. Through interactions with a mouse-like carcass and fungi on fallen logs, death was framed as a transformative process through which forest life regenerates. Instances of decay revealed “the forest’s own curriculum of renewal.” The final narrative explored the experience of <em>distributed care </em>in the forest<em>.</em> In this vignette, children and parents first learned to build a fire together, and then the children left with a guide for their own activity, while parents stayed at the fire. The reflection on this experience explores how care was shared in the forest, with the child receiving care from peers, educators and the forest, while the author experienced care from the warmth of fire and the community of fellow parents. This narrative suggests that “rather than reinforcing familiar hierarchies in which adults, especially mothers, are positioned as central protectors and managers of children, the forest environment disperses care across human and more-than-human actors.”
The article demonstrates how forest pedagogies emerged through embodied experiences of care, interdependence and kinship with the more-than-human, and ethical awareness of ecological systems. Through these encounters, forest pedagogies can disrupt human-centered views of nature and encourage learners to view the forest as a community that facilitates learning and growth. Forest pedagogies “offer a pathway for reconnecting with forms of ecological responsibility that have been eroded through settler colonialism, while also honoring the deep relational teachings that Indigenous knowledge systems have long upheld.” Additionally, the narratives challenge traditional notions that educators must control every aspect of learning through planned lessons or predetermined outcomes. The author concludes that “for educators, forest pedagogies invite a reimagining of curriculum as a living, co-responsive process, one that shifts from outcome-driven lessons toward attentiveness to place, where pedagogy emerges through listening, noticing and being unsettled.” Further, for parents, the narratives illustrate that caregiving can be a responsibility shared among humans and the more-than-human world.
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