Teaching with the Forest

During the pandemic, I moved all my university classes into the forest. Although most learners (student-teachers) were not expecting to be outside, I felt it was necessary for multiple reasons. First, I worried about the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical wellbeing of my students, and I knew that being in the forest would be healthier for us all. Second, as the impact of the climate crisis was rapidly accelerating, I realized that we all teachers need to develop capacities to support students in learning from and caring for the land. Environmental education cannot only be carried by those with teaching specializations. Third, as an educator deeply committed to anti-colonial pedagogies, I was finding it difficult to decolonize my practice within institutional spaces. I was drawn to alternative teaching and learning environments.
In the forest, our group is moved by the onslaught of rain and the rising sun, rather than by bells and schedules. When its cool, we gravitate to sunny places, when it becomes too warm, we seek the shade, and when the skies open and the torrential rains begin to flow, we head deep into the forest canopy. My pedagogical approaches are dependent on the weather, seasons, and time of day. Sometimes we sit on camping chairs, basking in the sun, and deep in dialogue. Other times we paint with rain or write poetry with mushrooms. Often, we walk and talk, with questions or quotations related to the themes of our weekly curriculum in waterproof bags. Here our learning becomes embodied with each step (Ingold, 2011) and mapped onto the lush landscapes of this west coast forest. On special occasions we might drum with an Elder at the Lake. The drumbeat closes the spaces between us (Wilson, 2008) and connects us to the land. We befriend trees, and birds, and dogs, and occasionally bears. Community members stop to chat with us and impart their wisdom about the most important qualities in teachers (usually they tell us it is kindness). We look for visual metaphors in the forest that can deepen or disrupt our understandings. The forest is our teacher (Styres, 2019). We stand in awe of trees that are four times as old as us, the sighting of an owl who rarely presents herself during the day, the visit from a heron, moments after we speak his name, and a mysterious crocodile creation that appears deep in the forest.
At the same time, as an educator, I endeavour to foster relationships with the forest that contribute to historical consciousness through the awareness of the sedimented layers of colonial relations on these lands (Donald, 2009, p. 7). I teach the students about the history of this secondary growth forest and how it was logged by settlers 100 years ago. At that time, the Canadian government gave settlers 150 acres of land for a nominal application fee, if they could prove that they had “improved” the land in some way by setting up homesteads, mills, and the like. This encouraged particular types of relationship between settlers and the land, which were very different from Indigenous worldviews in which the land is viewed as a “dearly beloved, revered relative” (Parent, n.d.). We visit other places where the land has been colonized, and learn about the impact on Indigenous communities and on ecosystems — a dam is built on Coquitlam River to provide electricity, Sumas Lake is drained to create farmland for settlers, Katzie Slough is dyked to protect settlers’ properties from flooding. All these acts displace birds, animals, and fish and cause food insecurity for the local Nations. This learning helps students understand current positioning of settlers and Indigenous Peoples in relation to one another and to the land (Donald, 2009).
As part of our responsibility to this place, we participate in acts to care for the forest, which has offered us so much. We pick up garbage as we move through the forest and participate in an invasive species pull to remove ivy which is growing out of control in particular areas and is strangling trees. Inspired by guest teacher Elder Rick Bailey from q̓íc̓əy̓ First Nation, we plant trees near a creek to create shade for salmon and welcome the salmon home as they return to spawn (Hill et al. 2021). For some this is the first time they have witnessed the miraculous and mysterious journey of the salmon, even though they are keystones species and culturally iconic within our community. We make gifts to thank the host Nation. These cycles of gratitude and care deepen our connections and build cultures of care for our more-than-human friends, our neighbours, each other, and ourselves.

References
Donald,.D., (2009). Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2 (1): 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-687-8_7

Hill, C., Bailey, R., Power, C., & McKenzie, N. (2021). Supporting communities in caring
for Salmon and each other: Creek restoration as a site for multi-system change and wholistic re/conciliation. Canadian Journal of Action Research, 21(3), 72-94. https://doi.org/10.33524/cjar.v21i3.479

Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description.
London: Routledge.

Styres, S. (2019). Literacies of Land: Decolonizing Narratives, Storying and Literature.” In
Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education Mapping the Long View, edited by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wang Yang, 24–37. New York: Routledge.

Wilson, S. (2008). Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing.