As ecological scholars situated within a dominant educational system that privileges human-centred, competency-based education, we problematise its tendency to promote singular, monologic narratives of environmental education rooted in scientific and technological knowledge. In response, we offer interpretations of relationships with the more-than-human world (e.g., trees, insects, rivers, mountains, animals, rocks) through dialogic inquiry informed by Asian worldviews, specifically the Indian principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam meaning that the whole world is one family and the Japanese Shinto-Buddhist belief that all entities, living or non-living, embody spirits or deities. Beginning with a narrative grounded in one author’s lived experience as a forester – compelled to view forest as commodity, we explore its deeper significance for environmental education. Writing to one another in ways that attend to Asian relational and ecological perspectives, our work emphasises reciprocity, intercorporeality, and embodied immersion in forest, offering transformative possibilities for reimagining environmental education within planetary interdependence.

Ecocriticism often employs a mimetic, text-based model that includes literary analysis of canonical nature writings complemented with wilderness excursions seeking verification of literary representations and place-based experience. I suggest that in order to better integrate ecocriticism within the Environmental Humanities’ decolonial and material turns, a pedagogy of “entangled material literacy” should be explored. This approach, grounded in biosemiotics and new materialist thought, enables a relational reading of nonfiction forest writings like Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, positioning the forest as a co-author in these works. Aligning with critical forest studies, this project examines the forest’s biosemiotic intelligence and agential multiplicities in human–nonhuman communicative meaning-making. Moreover, as reflected by the authors’ personal connections to forests, I argue that teaching entangled material literacy necessitates embodied experience, where the forest becomes a co-teacher, cultivating students’ competency for responsive engagement with a sentient more-than-human world.

New challenges and opportunities are emerging to support young people to learn about socio-ecological risk. While experiences with risk are a daily occurrence, a new phase of history defined by global environmental change will transform lives in complex ways. All young people need to be provided with the knowledge and skills to critique the failings of modernity and learn to manage risk. For that reason, environmental pedagogies need to be balanced with critical understandings of risk across different societies. Forest research in Australia, Nepal and Switzerland highlights that understanding local perceptions of value and risk generates vital knowledge to inform conceptions of sustainable forest management, while providing critical knowledge and processes to support active learning. There are opportunities to guide education systems to help people develop understandings of how beautiful, biodiverse, forested landscapes can be managed sustainably within local socio-cultural contexts. Educators can utilise constructivist pedagogies to identify the values and risks of forests with walks, rides, explorations, monitoring, and analysis of different conceptions of sustainable management. In such a manner, learning about socio-ecological risk develops knowledge and skills, but also supports young people to become advocates and actors for positive change in the forest and beyond.

This article establishes forests as sentient pedagogical communities through four autoethnographic vignettes drawn from parent-child forest school encounters. Rather than presenting forest as co-teacher as a conceptual claim, this work animates these ideas through lived stories in which acorns, fungi, winds and fire participate in teaching alongside children, parents and educators. Grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that recognise land as first teacher, posthumanist notions of intra-action and ecofeminist ethics of care, this study develops Situated Forest Inquiry as a methodology of relational accountability between human and more-than-human worlds. The findings illustrate how forest pedagogies can redefine care, enact species interdependence, nurture multispecies kinship and deepen engagement with Indigenous knowledge, offering educators clear examples of how environmental education might be practiced differently.

As a possibility for critical forest-based pedagogies, our study explores the pedagogical implications of forest therapy to address environmental justice as social justice in teacher preparation (Beltrán, Hacker and Begun, 2016). Our research question is: How might forest therapy offer reorientations and reimaginings of environmental and social justice for teacher educators? We draw from human-land relationship restoration (Kimmerer, 2013), ecojustice education, embodied and contemplative learning theories and forest therapy. We utilise Barkhuizen and Hacker’s (2009) narrative inquiry design as a framework for the design and data collection of our study. Their data collection and analysis design includes the following dimensions: 1) living the stories, 2) telling the stories in written narratives and 3) analysing and interpreting the stories. We, the researchers, are the participants in this study. Using thematic deductive analysis and constant comparison methods, our study generates three interrelated themes: forest therapy offers new modes of perceiving the world, expands definitions of learning in community and embraces embodied learning with an emphasis on humility and vulnerability. Through exploring these interconnected findings, we explore implications for educators, environmental education and ongoing pedagogical possibilities for meaningful climate action for the flourishing for all living beings.

Through this post-qualitative inquiry, I explore what kinds of literacies do learners in an elementary outdoor program practice, and how are they shaped by the more-than-human world? I situate my research within the context of a socially and ecologically precarious world, from a posthuman theoretical perspective in conversation with Indigenous literacies, to build an argument for an embodied, sensory, multimodal, emergent, relational, and more-than-human conception of literacy. The study focuses on the experiences and literacy practices of fifteen elementary aged children in a multi-grade, forest school program in southern British Columbia, Canada. Using photographs and field notes, this study interrogates logocentric literacies and employs literacy as an event, a process-based concept with meaning-making and sense-making occurring relationally, often in surprising ways that defy prior predictions, and therefore contain multiple possibilities. Meaning and sense-making interact to create powerful literacy experiences that transcend language.