Wilding wilding

How can you wild a special issue on wilding pedagogies, and engage in theorising, practicing, and imagining towards a changing, decolonising, and reconciling world (Paulsen et al., Reference Paulsen, Wilhelmsson, Blenkinsop, Jickling and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2024)?

Where humans are nature living with nature, highly sedentary academia and imposing school curriculum reforms necessitate dancing out of convention for climate health which is also human health. Being moved. State curriculum reform has requested pedagogies provide “instructional, knowledge-rich” brain-focused learning (AERO, 2024). Meanwhile as children’s advocates we are dreaming beyond imposed desk-based curriculum-centred teaching and learning protocols to remember our embodied relationships with/as Earth. These require other ways of knowing, doing and being (Martin & Mirraboopa, Reference Martin and Mirraboopa2003). We have corresponded with Earth to reach the roots – What can we (re)learn as Earth?

A postal post-qualitative inquiry

A postal post-qualitative inquiry could “re-imagine being a wild educator, [as] always an ethical task” (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2013, p. 646). With a multiplicity of voices situated in the specifics of their relations, when written down new concepts for education can be etched with “immanent research methodologies that work (from) the middle, where data, researchers and events are mutually emerging” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2022, p. 637). A non-linear stream of meditations are data bodies and places analysed with thoughts and theory into letter-data, which show up in the paper’s correspondence as data again (Crinall, Reference Crinall2019). This unfolding mode of becoming as research (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2013) forms new ideas, poses new questions, and pauses at publication on a new possibility for the reader (and writers!) to live with. This scholarship style scribes over…

“Not always comfortable to conduct or to read” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2022, p. 637), these conversational rambling-rumblings with Earth are purposefully co-composed with imperfections and out-of-order elements promoting a shift in any intention to etch at Earth for cognitive understandings (MacLure, Reference MacLure2022). Being Earth in this education/research is instead, an ongoing correspon-dance of embodied sustenance (Crinall & Vladimirova, Reference Crinall, Vladimirova, Henderson, Black and Garvis2020) — with Earth, as, and for Earth.

Discursively, silenced and quietened scholarship maintains its primary voice without fixed interpretation in post-inquiry to hear a new perspective on love for school classrooms (e.g. Crinall, Reference Crinall2023). Earth as co-teacher offers the conversation some touchstones inviting non-human writers to shift human centrisms (Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop and Morse2024; see also Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Hawke2022; Crex Crex Collective & Jickling, Reference Collective and Jickling2018).

Writing with pen-pals across places and race, here are two colonised humans speaking with unceded and unsurrendered lands, seas, skies and sands.

To become differently on the page engage in your own ways.

Please be guided by the dates, and to whom the letters are addressed.

What’s love got to do with it?

Less philosophy (the love of wisdom) and more love (the wisdom to love) (Irigaray, Reference Irigaray2001) please!

Irigaray proposes love as a verb toward a kind of knowing that remembers it matters what we do with our time with/on/as Earth and “child.” This comes after First Nations philosophies speak up on embracing knowing, doing and being for millennia (Martin & Mirraboopa, Reference Martin and Mirraboopa2003). This custodial ethic for taking care of Country is as Country and as kin (Graham, Reference Graham2023). Wilding a loving ethic that is ongoing and active into pedagogies could “utilize all the dimensions of love – “care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge – in our everyday lives” (hooks, Reference Hooks2001, p. 94).

Co-loving could bring about co-caring, with caring in-between, Vladimirova (see Vladimirova, Reference Vladimirova2021)? We desire this earthly feminist co-mentoring love for (our) children’s learning futures.

Irigaray’s verbaceous term ‘to love’ dynamically embraces the other (2001), making room for multiple definitions of ‘love’ (Hooks, Reference Hooks2001) that accentuate possibilities for pedagogies that are active in reciprocity and exchange, emotion-rich (Brṻckner, ; Stanger, Reference Stanger2016). and a practice of paying conscious attention (Crinall et al., Reference Crinall, Blom, Williams, Wijeyekoon, Blom, Rowbottom and Rowbottom2025).

Let’s compose a loving letter to enact this loving ethic as pen-pals, correspon-dancing lovingly with Earth, as one way of living for a while…

A love letter emerging!

Dear Reader∼Earth, are you still there?

Can you tell — even this moment finds a love letter emerging!

There is a raven carwwk-ing over here.

What about where you are?

What Earthly love letters are you co-writing with the world as we speak?

What is emerging among you, and others?

To ask could be your task?

In Sophie’s World (Gaarder, Reference Gaarder2025) a series of letters arrive anonymously. They invite a young girl to love wisdom. Irigaray (Reference Irigaray2001) asks for philosophies that love wisdom to flip their focus, and ask: What other wisdoms of love can a society emerge? We are curious — what kind of letter exchange would this promote and provoke?

One beyond patriarchal assumptions about love? (like the letters that disrupted assumptions that beauty is a metropolitan affair unavailable to women in rural everyday life — see Rautio, Reference Rautio2009).

One for formal education settings too?

Enveloped in this special issue’s request for submissions of the most wilding pedagogies, some questions slide to the floor:

What are your first ideas for loving pedagogies?

No rubrics?

No time limits?

No “learning outcomes”?

What’s wild?

Look about you now.

Who else is there?

Lift your attention to sense their powers.

Conjure your own “version of wildness” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2022, p. 638).

What is ours, you ask?

Hmmm, our “rewilding” finds process philosophies accompanying us, “looking for modes of thought, being, and action to counter the human exceptionalism that has poisoned planetary futures” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2019. p. 631) by decentring the human into nature. Yes, that’s right – here, humans are nature (Rautio, Reference Rautio2012). We’ve asked for help from artistic post-qualitative inquiry, First Nations knowledges, and rebellion so wildly unkempt pedagogies can consider senses first, moving us to engage with an education that is physically and emotionally rich surrounding knowledge-richness. We would like to unbox ‘pedagogy’ (the theory of how to teach and learn with children) with this messy-pile-of-love-letter methodologies and see what ideas we can find for re-wilding pedagogies right now. MacLure’s crone methodology rewilds theory (via Jack Halberstam & Tavia Nyong’o, Reference Halberstam and Nyong’o2018, in MacLure, Reference MacLure2022) with “a version of wildness that has forgotten its manners” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2022, p. 638) which gives us confidence to not seek a protocol or framework.

Could this cheeky correspondent conversation exhibit possibilities cronely – be evocative but not instructional? Is it okay to wildly un-inhabit conversations about pedagogies that don’t centre taking care?

We think Grosz (Reference Grosz2011) will be excited about colonial education becoming undone with care. Sending ourselves outward with these letters, we render ourselves, intentionally, unrecognisable to a system that has “gone to seed, … failed to thrive, [for] those who are both in and out of the game …” (Jack Halberstam & Tavia Nyong’o, Reference Halberstam and Nyong’o2018, p. 456 in MacLure, Reference MacLure2022, p. 638), as unconventional as it might be, for us, this experimental composition communicates life-giving possibilities as it is penned. For poet, Rupi Kaur, home body helped to love herself out of the dark picto-poetically (2020).

Out we go, to love schooling systems out of the dark picto-poetically!

Look around.

Can you find a loving letter from Earth in the poetics of a place close by?

Which messages are coming your way?

Which messages are you sending out?

Let’s go there.

Here are two provocations as stamps of our ongoing thoughts:

How can we refuse to teach individualist streams of content-craven education in the hyper-flight of neocapitalism, at a time deeply distressed by intersecting geo-humanitarian crises?

How are we loving our more-than-human selves and others out of the dark (Kaur, Reference Kaur2020, n.p.), in/outside education settings?

It feels time for a stretch, we’ll be back soon.

Love from Nick and Sarah

October, 2024

Re: Wandering into a loving correspon-dance with Earth

Hi Earth,

Recently, we’ve been wandering together wondering what would it be like to receive a love letter from you, Earth.

Join us at the kitchen table?

How do you take your cup of tea?

Our chattering while steaming sips warm insides.

Let’s walk

wilding pedagogies are

an out-and-about off-the-beaten-track kind.

We were just chatting about how Nick was introduced to the concept of Love Letters to you, Earth, twenty years ago. Prompted by Dr Elin Kelsey (Reference Kelsey2020), Nick was asked to write a love letter to you, Earth with inspiration from Nhất Hạnh (Reference Nhất Hạnh2013) (see figure below) as part of his Masters degree in environmental education and communication. This concept is not new - Western, Eastern, and Indigenous philosophies have all been co-writing love letters with you, Earth, for milennia. Some traditions understand humans as separate from your Earthly systems but many traditions do not. And marginalised narratives hold so much knowledge as you, Earth, particularly in the inner, complex workings of poetic meditations and litanies (e.g. Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020; Haddad, Reference Haddad2023; Ihmoud, Reference Ihmoud2023; Kaur, Reference Kaur2020; Lorde, 1978). Nick had a hard time writing with his ‘own voice’. At the time, Earth, he was heavily influenced by the Heiltsuk First Nation at Koeye Camp, on the mid-coast of so-called British Columbia. He composed a multimodal love letter to your earthly sea serpent, sisiutl. This multimodal letter engaged Nick in empathetic orientations to the world. Since then, Nick has continued to compose love letters to you, Earth, through painting, writing, videography, and song (Stanger et al., Reference Stanger, Tanaka, Tse and Starr2013; Stanger, 2011, 2014, 2016).

For Sarah, love letters are a new way of sending indeterminacy into the world with poetics (Barad, Reference Barad2021; Bennett, Reference Bennett2021). This sprang from a bodyplacetime tethering sustainability to art along with science (Crinall, Reference Crinall2019). Here bodies were given the right to know place (Somerville, Reference Somerville1999) and you, Earth, were agentially-determined spacetimematter, always welcoming of change (Barad, Reference Barad2010). Modes of making with people and places found their “well-being [was] part of the same dynamic” (Sterling, Reference Sterling2001, p. 22). This sustainable education studied waterway health creatively and crafted lovingly with Earth. It was one she could live with. The pictopoetics in this case took the form of bodyplaceblogposts — unedited bodyplacetime-stamped Earth emerging. They were recognised as post-qualitative inquiry by others (St. Pierre, pers. comm; Koro, pers. comm); or a kind of qualitative research emitting sustenance affectively, fluidly (Wolgemuth, pers. comm; Wolgemuth, Reference Wolgemuth2016). Either way, living a post/qualitative life between human and other as a daily affair, these ‘love letters’ eeked evidence of un/entangling decentring human spaceplacebodies at work in the mothering, researching realm (Crinall, Reference Crinall2019). Peekable in lines like,

“I am a shearwater” …and

“I am the stuff in a bird’s beak.” (Crinall, Reference Crinall2019, p. 187)

Each week, Earth, ‘Emergence’ arrives (emergencemagazine.org). This week posed

“what does it look like to create space for, and tell, stories that hold, a relationship of kinship and love for the Earth (Loften & Vaughn-Lee Reference Loften and Vaughn-Lee2024, n. p.)?”

Earth kin, what does this look like in educational contexts?

This kind of class would be wild (def: undomesticated) with want, wouldn’t it!

Love from, Sarah and Nick.

December, 2024

Re: A practice of noticing loving letters as Planet

Dear Nick and Sarah,

“Wilding” (un-restraining) the conventional academic paper structure as the Planet, might be akin to wilding a lesson sequence in penpalship with me, the Earth. This is not so wild, not so violent, given Paulsen et al. (Reference Paulsen, Wilhelmsson, Blenkinsop, Jickling and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2024), invited you to mess with your human-centered education. To re-centre relationships evaporates fixed classroom instruction that bookends learning — can you imagine a lesson that you wish wouldn’t end? Not just any programs wild or free an educational heart (Blenkinsop et al., Reference Blenkinsop, Morse, Jickling, Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Hawke2022). Shall we peruse which do together?

Love, From Earth

Dear Earth,

We are learning. Jickling et al. (Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop and Morse2024) offer touchstones that ask human∼Earth to wildly wend toward “Nature as co-teacher with complexity, and an unknownness, along with spontaneity while locating the wild (or free), conscious of time and practices for cultural change while they form alliances and build community. And hooks is keen that we learn to be loving, caring, compassionate, and expand our imaginations (hooks, Reference Hooks2001). Crinall & Vladimirova (Reference Crinall, Vladimirova, Henderson, Black and Garvis2020) correspond-danced with im/material in an event that found reams of im/materials exchanging across continents as virtuo-actual conversations with mothy, dotting, bananamoons that were sustenance-rich. These texto-visual non/human exchanges were empathetic and playful across space altering local place engagements for each (and more?). Could instigating imaginative waltzing conversations between communities soothe, and align Earth into spontaneous situated shows of love? Let’s have some more creatively complex conversations across virtual and actual realms in this post-pandemic climate-care era. Read on! …

Love from, Sarah and Nick

*p.s. from here, at times, letters attempt to evoke the tradition of scribbled notes and folded sheets sent as good enough grams. They resist the tidying up, and editing out of our human imperfections that ‘word-processing’ has brought to letter-writing via spellcheck and Grammarly’s accompaniment in emails (see also Crinall, Reference Crinall2019).

^#p.p.s. Images are embedded in these multimodal letters. They are not figures with captions that follow academic convention. All have permissions.

Earth’s Love letters (as lines and utterances)*

Letters 1 – Re: Pitter patter litter letter blue wren blues lovingly

Dear my love of sisuitl

This excerpt of the original love letter to you, sisuitl, 20 years ago, helped frame my understanding of storied love. Unexpected voices come out in relationship to the land, to the Earth, to other ways of knowing.

In many ways we become ourselves more thoroughly by being in and with the world that sustains us, that is us. Looking back at this piece now, constructive feedforward is still useful: whose voices am I allowed to interpret? How might this be construed as cultural appropriation? How might settler-colonists engage in knowledge from time immemorial without fetishising the wild, the Indigenous peoples, the Land that is so new to us? These dialogues came much more fully centred in later research and teaching, and yet are the heart of Earth’s Love Letters. Through these questions a resounding value of deep curiosity has emerged, or is maintained, gathering energy as we sense and stride together on different lands. There is incredible respect in curiosity (withheld judgement?), but there is also a disturbingly fine line between the white gaze at other-than-whiteness and humanness and one of genuine curiosity mixed with respect. Is there a word that is both curiosity and respect?

Love From Nick.

Dear Nick and Sarah,

I am with your question: Is there a word for curiosity and respect?

I’ve been seen though subtle in a series of snapshots.

I am seagrass-sized-plastic-corkscrew.. . ..

sand-soaked cellophane.. . .

tissue-tainted-cystophora-floats… .

& almost-jelly-bandaid.. .

I am also known as, a wake-up call (according to12yo Edith).

Evelyn Araluen (Reference Araluen2021) wrote in the ‘inland sea’:

“The waves still break on the shore

the bodies still break on the floor” (p. 73).

Don’t look away from the oppression (c. kotsanas, pers.comm) means seeing the stories of the struggling sea, and of first so-called australia in the sand as you walk, too.

Yours, the litter letters.

Dear litter letters,

The swift flit of the superb fairy wren’s

exquisitely blue salute

pierces the malaise of a summer’s walk.

On land unlike your sea-sand-sky-scape.

Their

rewinding-tape-song

seemingly

seeks

a response

from the

distracted-hum-drum-mumblings

of human animals.

A timing that perfectly stunts

shuffles, and bumps our gaze

from inwards to “awe” wards

and in the space between

(un)recorded letters of love.

Concurrently aware

of the lands we are on

and how and whose sacrifices

have made this moment

Love from a superb fairy wren

Dear superb blue fairy wren

you are so blue

reminding me of camping trips you flitted through

my dad’s favourite bird is you

there’s a subtle sadness here too

Is it a boundary you’re setting to perch there solo? Are you surrendered, scared or attuned to the environment? “Going with earth’s flow instead of struggl[ing] against it” (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020, p. 121) might mean meditating more with animals close-by to practice postcolonial care “what are the boundaries that we choose and do not choose and what privileges do we receive from those scenes? Paying attention and not looking away might mean reducing “the distances we need” and naming “the walls that will isolate and destroy us” (p. 87). Araluen’s dropbear poetics hears from earth and not the poem who “do wrong.” A de-centred human leaves four-walls to walk, walk, walk and talk with the land and its old and first stories? Once the sea said to me

Keep looking at me, love the sea

A stranded seal-pup died on my sand-spread sprawl as first pups do when microplastics build up in their mother’s-seal-organs along this coast, or so a ranger told the mother of the rangering-children close by – I came up depressed as their salty tears fell. What a wild lesson on heartbreak nestled outwards into “nourishing forms of adaptation” (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020, p. 87) that involve feeling – the feel

the feel

the feel

because it’s an emotional thing and a physical thing (Crinall, Reference Crinall2019)

Gumbs calls you to commit to three forms of care and communicate it to three loved ones (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020). The first is finding the first stories of the land and feeling them, for me

Love from

An iphonography series of litter letters

(wellbeingsdotcommunity.wordpress.com)

Step

Step

Step

written with the tap of thumbs

Tap

Tap

Tap

A book here is called ‘Bright wings’ and hides birds, but you, superb blue wren, are not there. Have you vanished?

Lorde’s poetics, on vanishing and on love, say

“when we are loved we are afraid

love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive”

(A litany for survival, Lorde, 1978, p. 32)

Blue wren — are you silent, are you afraid to speak? Are you safe in there? What is a collective noun for superb blue wrens? And for school children? A speak of school children? This noun then fits a wild idea: How to make pedagogies that hear across power relations. Which pedagogies hear our Indigenous children and all cultural identities and beings, so they can all give their gifts, and we can give them ours?

Dear Lorde’s poetics on love and vanishing,

Are you familiar with School Note?

From, page 58.

School Note, Audrey Lorde

“My children play with skulls

for their classrooms are guarded by warlocks

who scream at the walls collapsing

into paper toilets

plump witches mouth ancient curses

in an untaught tongue

test children upon their meanin

assign grades

in a holocaust ranging

from fury down through contempt.

My children play with skulls

at school

they have already learned

to dream of dying

their playgrounds were graveyards

where nightmares of no

stand watch over rented earth

filled with the bones of tomorrow.

My children play with skulls

and remember

for the embattled

there is no place

that cannot be

home

nor is.”

(1978, p. 58)

Dear Lorde,

What place-based pedagogies can become a home that is for ALL children including yours?

Love from, (rented) Earth

Dear rented Earth,

One where we find out our, know our, and tell our own stories as cultural beings, whoever we are.

Love from, Martin (Reference Martin2006, Reference Martin2017) and Phillips & Bunda (Reference Phillips and Bunda2020).

Look. Our convo with Earth as Earth has left a light, sandy pedagogical print: Sense what silent spaces say. We can hear the urging utterance from Earth to pay attention using all our senses and attending intentionally to peering and feeling around for less loud lingering phenomena to ensure their voices are lifted and listened to…

Letters 2 – Re: Correspon-dancing with western red cedar cypress in multilogue

Dear Sarah,

I sit at a scarred kitchen table, creaking under the weight of my elbows. It is a rough, square winged wooden table and likely much older than me. Many family meals have been enjoyed on this table. Despite its age, it is a “recent” visitor to turtle island. Built from oak in the eastern provinces, and travelled across so-called Canada to perform its breakfastly duties. And now work duties. With every keystroke on my computer, the wood grunts up to meet me. I have moved into a tiny studio suite with my wife and son all crammed in as well. We are experimenting with familial cohabitation as a way to support my wife’s ageing and sickly parents. Intergenerationality mixed with grief and Lorde’s fear, mixed with love, mixed with living on a farm in the middle of the Western red-cedar forest. Another permutation of Kaur’s loving out of the dark, but a different darkness, or maybe similarly experienced. It is the teetering edge of love as a tragedy, both death and life live here.

It’s these trees that flow, that sway, caressing my eyes, through the windows. They are dark green waterfalls of life. Quite literally the tree of life to many Coast Salish Nations in the area. These trees represent life in its deepest form: transportation — canoes, protection — clothing, function — rope, food — fishing nets, and culture — ancestors. These beings are also massive sentinels of photosynthesis; candelabras of habitat. Their layering verdant scaley branches sway in the Northern windows of the suite. If I pay close attention they are speaking to me in a way that is non-verbal. Not even visual. It’s energetic. The energy of brushing.

Over the many years of working with First Nations and Indigenous communities, I have had the great privilege of participating in a diversity of ceremonies. Many ceremonies (or even protocol) requires “brushing off” typically with cedar, and typically done by an Elder, self, or a young member of the community. This cleansing is an act of renewal and connection to the relationships with the tree of life, with all that they represent. The cleansing is the acknowledgement of trauma, an act of healing through aligning the spirit with good feelings in the heart and mind.

And here in this little suite, with its curtains of cedar, they too are brushing off, sending a letter of love, and love is something that is received, it is reciprocal, it is related, and it is respected. I am in the letter, co-writing it with the cedars. We say:

everything will be okay

love and loss,

and life and light all coexist.

Even in this place,

even in this time.

Especially in this place-time.

Western redcedar — Thuja plicata —taχamay (in ʔayʔaǰuθəm, language of the ɬəʔamεn people)

Love taχamay and Nick.

Dear taχamay and Nick,

Your offcut imperfections are here. They were unwanted by the mill, and now westernredcedar,

You have made your way to our old boat shed that became ‘a barn’

You stayed here once, Nick, and gave my 12-yo daughter a football

which she used to lead a team to small town soccer victory with

‘alright boys, come in close’

Those little boys (and this little girl with the clipboard gathered in)

So did the ball!

They all kissed the ball and gifted it to their school

To please put this in a cabinet in your foyer for everyone to see.

And they did.

Your dangling fronds are dewy westerncedar –

Are they tears? Of victory or sorrow?

I walk out a westernredcedar-lined door

Westernredcedar made canoes for the people of western red cedar

You my amber glow,

My gateway from safety to sea

Earphones and hat

Walking shoes on

Go!

Tonight 30 women will attend the ‘Stories and Women: Earth’ event

Stories of you, Earth, will be shared by Earth’s women…

I’m wondering what story I’ll tell…

I might tell ‘you’?

Later

I told a story of my family as anglo-Indian Australian. How I am the first generation of children born in Australia on my father’s side. And how we traversed colonies of Earth to find a place to call home here on Boonwurrung lands, though now I know them as not my lands. I told of learning more about other Indigenous peoples’ colonial conflict and that it all returns to a desire for earth specifically on millowl where sealers took “hundreds of Indigeous women” (Briggs & Parker, Reference Briggs and Parker2021, n.p.) which is attributed to the loss of Yallock Bulluk peoples here, where I dwell. Drooping sheoaks weep outside my window as I type, and now I know why, nilecedar.

Later again

‘Stories of Air’ (Jury, Reference Jury2024) is coming up on Wednesday night, nilecedar. Barn-clad tales between women again. This time I will tale ‘what are heirlooms?’ and the way our familiar companions through death and life best loom around us, in the air and around our feet. I wrote to you last night:

“I consider our paper closed now, to edits but can you believe yesterday I found this (loving) letter from my dad in europe to his mum in canada in a drawer as garbage bags filled with 50 years of no-longer-neededs.

This letter pile contains a letter post marked Istanbul and features descriptions of flights into a peaceful Lebanon and encounters with the PLO on the disrupted, planned way to kabootz.”

Sheoaks drip over coastal cliffs too not far from where I write this. The rockface is middened with ‘kitchen’ and ‘dining’ (Briggs & Parker, Reference Briggs and Parker2021, n.p.) and blood red and…

I locate here the privilege I have to not know more.

What I didn’t learn at school (nothing) I find online…

And know in body/place already

Sun on face

Deep breath in

Focus on the oppression∼

Walk around the headland

What do I see nest (next)?

∼ Sarah.

Dear Sarah and cedar,

that cedar has traveled around the Earth reminds me of the silliness that we have when we think about invasive species. By the same notion, my ancestors should be called the same, yet who calls their great-grand parents invasive? Grumpy, yes. Conservative, sure - but invasive. Oh wait, Yes, literally invading, colonising, waging war, upholding oppression, erasing.

∼ love from nick

Dear nick and cedar,

Your raining redcedar fronds drip down the page, now, and remind me of a drip, into our mouths once. When my children wouldn’t want to reach the beach at the end of our street. In place, muddy swales, and cedar fronds with water lollies were all they needed (Crinall & Somerville, Reference Crinall and Somerville2019; Crinall, Reference Crinall2019). How wild!

I must find you the video!

Here it is:

Can you hear the cyprus fronds speaking.

They say…

“That’s a riverwater”;

“drip into our mouths”;

It’s a swale feast”;

“It’s a lovely day for planting in the morning…”

https://youtu.be/eXW1k0x4mTI (Crinall, Reference Crinall, Malone, Tuong and Gray2016)

∼ love from swales

Dear sarah and nick,

Revisiting this moment with the children I am caregiver to, takes me to an intense time of un(home)schooling “immersed in the queerness of forms of life” that refuse the usual and being understood (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020, p. 109). Leaning into informal learning my boughs opened up to their climbing, climbing bodies. Our not-schooling and our westernredcedarcypress hydrated deeply loving lives abundant with learning. Araluen bows:

Its hard unlearn a language:

to unspeak an empire,

to teach my voice to rise to rise and fall like landscape,

A topographic intonation

Taking careful note of the subtle, the not so loud, the vanishing and the staying solo.

Not with judgement, but curiosity and reciprocity. That might be liked;

Taking the tangents with open, bowing arms and letting them unlearn. That might be liked?

From your fr(ie)ond xo

Look again. Our convo with Earth as Earth has left another light, sandy pedagogical print: Following feels and fascination. A two-step with you Earth, encourages us to continue to open our souls up to help highlight the deviations of delicious distractions where embodied, desired, and other ideas go. How do love letters help focus education across space-time? If we go deeply enough, will we be able to spelunk between the lines of meaning?

March, 2025

Letters 3 – Re: Evening thoughts on Earth’s loving letters, hope and despair

Dear Reader∼Earth,

The fire is warm, cedar crackling. Flames, rich red.

What are you doing now, while you read?

What on Earth does ‘wild’ mean to you?

Our co-written curated letters fan across the table, with their collective resistance to persistent attempts of educating-AT future generations of whom the Earth is already their co-teacher (Blenkinsop & Beeman, Reference Blenkinsop and Beeman2010; Rautio, Reference Rautio2012;), and we co-mentor. Wilding the need for ‘pedagogies’ are everyday moments on Earth swapping ‘loving letters’, committing to caring back.

It is wild to us now to have accepted notions that a human could write a love letter ‘to’ Earth, given we are Earth (Barad, Reference Barad2010; Rautio, Reference Rautio2012).

Let’s go there.

A wild, decentred human might understand that before the colonial conquest, we were mammal, and listen back while looking forward re-imagining ourselves “identifying as mammal” (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020, p. 5), and as part of our Planet — “we are not [and were never] alone” (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020, p. 1). For whom/what is wild, if all things are indigenous to Earth? Wildness and wilderness can still be conflated, yet wild pedagogues have helped complicate wildness as a state of being free or having freedom to flourish (Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and Sitka-Sage2018). Schmidt (Reference Schmidt2022) invites us beyond the preconceived notions of pristine wild to consider ruined landscapes and places to help “illuminate some of the ways in which past human actions, values, and relationships toward the land, water, and more-than-human world can cultivate ruin or wilderness, and ultimately this insight can foster new ways of being in all spaces” (p. 60). In the world, in ruin, in our bodies, we can find wildness.

There are long histories and knowledges of decentred humans, spiritually known but for the ‘natural’ human urge many of us feel to trouble “wild” as a normative orientation; and engage everyday life with body and place, time and space specificities which decentre human (Elwick & Heggert, Reference Elwick and Heggert2025). Alexis Gumbs is “ascending with and shaped by a whole group of people who were transubstantiated into property and kidnapped across an ocean… attracted to the wonder of [other] marine life” (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020, p. 5), seeking kinder kin? We hope, as Earth, to be kinder kin as kin custodians (Graham, Reference Graham2021, Reference Graham2023), and offer children, access, accordingly — to their already, kinder selves — and according to Karen Barad, already, always just (Barad, Reference Barad2010). Through this lens, look at the stories in this submission and across the special issue — all also letters created by relationships of kinship and the Earth for loving!

It’s hard to stop… do we ever?

Here are two more before we post the final package…

Love, From nick and sarah

Dear Hope,

While writing this letter, an opportunity arose for me to work with a High School in Istanbul, Türkiye. The theme of the work is Hope Matters, an ambitious framing for the beginning of the school year to support student-driven ideas by responding to the overall question: What on Earth Makes you Hopeful? In the two weeks of working with these extraordinary students, some who come from crisis enmeshed cities in the Near Middle East, I am also asked this same question by students. My answer changed every time I am asked, which is telling of my hopeful stance and the notion that Hope is hard work, since it requires swimming upstream against cynicism, doomism in Media, and the “rigour of negativity.” I see it in the faces of the students, their reactions to the activity introduced to them. It is their refusal of pollyanna that fascinates me. Their refusal of status quo. This is Ihmoud’s love. And to me, that love is hope.

Despite my multitudinous answers, one thread sticks out to me in this moment, while I sit in this old school, in this ancient place, looking over the palimpsest of Istanbul, of Mosques, jumbled terracotta roofs, the Bosphorus gleaming like a guidance mechanism for not only humans, but birds too, seeking to transit from Europe through to Asia, and vice versa. I see Dolphins “making do” with one of the busiest bodies of water in the world, still porpoising around the 18-million-people transiting by ferry every day from one continent to the other. Are the dolphins also refusing status quo, finding love in their ancient habitat?

All of this is happening here while only a breath away, bombs land in Beirut, people are fleeing, or are trapped unable to avoid the atrocities - avoid the genocidal rampage that is eradicating whole cultures, whole lifeways, some say for the whim of stealing resources like water, oil, and agricultural land. Others say for their own lifeways. So hard. And still I see the news of people refusing to allow, to engage, they love each other, their country, their traditions. These are people of love.

I sit with a new-found friend, one of those people that I have overlapped with in many ways without knowing, but as I come together our connection and values grow sympatrically. He is Lebanese, a science educator at this school and living in Istanbul, Türkiye. He came here to be closer to Beirut, after living and teaching in Canada and Beirut for most of his life. Understandably, he is massively preoccupied by the conflict going on in his home. Yet, when I asked him, “what do you need at this moment? Would it be helpful to take a leave from work?” “No” he said “The kids are what brings me hope. My connection with my friends brings me hope. Cycling to work brings me hope. I love these kids. I love working with them, supporting their ideas, and their learning. This is what I need at the moment. The work keeps me going.” He continues to teach from his love of Earth, through outdoor activities, about science from a solutions perspective, and with a framing that students’ wellbeing is critical and essential to the wellbeing of Earth.

Love, from nick

Dear undrowning Hope,

What brings you hope, brings me to hope that we can become toward an Earth undrowned (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020).

For all to feel seen,

and feel home on home lands,

with hope anger and despair will be welcomed along with happiness and hope –they can dissipate then?

Watego’s last chapter in ‘Another Day in the Colony’ is without hope but with belief in kin:

“Fuck Hope, be sovereign” (Watego, Reference Watego2021, pp. 189–218).

Gumbs’ ‘guide to undrowning’ (Gumbs, Reference Gumbs2020, p. 1) is writing new histories, her-stories and their-stories as a practice of processing hurt-stories, hope-stories and heartful-healing stories – marine mammals have them all, so hopefully, so can we?

Love from, Undrowned.

Dear wild and weathered,

Queensland and NSW await landfall of Cyclone Alfred tonight – a category 2 cyclone, and are bracing for floods, again. Trees open your doors with wind, and men you’re mud-sliding with Earth and water. We watch, Country conscious (Crinall et. al. 2025). What letters are you writing us, Alfred? Are we open to receiving this w-mail?

Government curriculum authorities have asked we make some cross-curriculum priorities – sustainability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and histories, to drench your discipline delivery, so here’s a wild idea – let’s start there?

For example, science learning, as instructional activity (e.g. Atkin & Karplus, Reference Atkin and Karplus1962; BCSC, 2006) entangled with the Anthropocene (White et al., Reference White, Ardoin, Eames and Monroe2023), student attitudes and values (Tytler & Ferguson, Reference Tytler, Ferguson, Lederman, Zeidler and Lederman2023) in australia, brings curricula richly into future focus. It might be powerful to start science pedagogues with a local care ethic of curiosity and respect? A 5Es approach (BCSC, 2006) might be otherwise, for example, when locating themselves on unceded lands to relate (just be relatable, thank you, E. Rowbottom), investigate and inquire, experience and experiment, and explicitly act toward adapting? This idea is imagined with First kinds of education who so superbly address “why? what? for who? and when?” (Hudson, 2021, p. 121, in Kirk & Ferguson, 2023) — a loving science is required. A bad girl version for science learning is definitively loving at its base and all around!

Gumbs has more ideas with meditations to “help you listen to me” - breathe; remember; practice; collaborate; be vulnerable; be present; be fierce; go deep; stay black…. (2020).

Find your calm centre with your own chosen formula that flows.

And, in decentring colonial knowledges as colonial descendents, when I get it wrong, I start again with sorry, listen, and go from there.

Back soon – I’ve been blown away.

Dear loving, in despair,

Your refusal as love writes a litany for survival as a swathe of love letters with a Palestinian woman who died last year in her home. Thank you for sharing it:

We must continue to love and affirm each other, and our communal struggle for life — the very thing our colonizers can never exterminate.

(Ihmoud, Reference Ihmoud2023, p. 93).

As wind, I write back to Ihmoud and the children, women, and men who’ve died over Earth:

Silent sand my winds,

whirl, in solidarity,

and for sovereignty.

Stay with discomfort,

Oh, the colonisation,

Do not look away

Okay, Kotsanas

Allow for hope and no hope.

I won’t whirl away.

∼Wind.

https://youtube.com/shorts/xIRq4uv8-5Y?feature=share

(Crinall, 2024)

Maggie MacLure, you wild woman (2022), you permit our not tidying up. We are in despair for those lifted away too soon not to return: Which educational pedagogies make more room for following hearts unable to let go — whether its hope or no hope. How can we teacher educators teach staying still, staying with, so those loving can live through it? Hope and Despair are both present here.

And look, another sandy print, perhaps a rakali, perhaps a brown bear? It is a message in array: Being at peace with bothness and becoming is a moment-to-moment affair.

Dear Earth, despite learning over and over again that hope and despair are entwined, we seem to keep needing to re-learn. How might Earth’s Love Letters help co-learning classrooms catch all cultural beings no matter their kinds? Can’t we let lessons linger and let learners be Earth with you?

Letters 4 — wilding your own pedagogies

8 ^th March, 2025

p.s. On loving your Pedagogies

We found three lines of utterance as Earth’s love letter for us and offer it here as our porous and ephemeral pedagogical rationale before we seal the envelope and place it in the post box: In our pedagogical planning we will take care,

∼ Sensing what silent spaces say, aware of subtlety and sadness, and saving space for this

∼ Following feels and fascination, checking for choice and unlearning prescriptivity

∼ Being at peace with bothness and becoming as a moment-to-moment affair, with presence and responsivity

Answering our two stated provocations is temporary and produces more questions. Pedagogically, we feel alive — our roots drawing water and nutrients from daily doings in a multitude of directions!

9^th march, 2025

p.p.s. living (with your) pedagogies for a loving education system

Regularly reviewing and reshaping our pedagogical positions with Earth and poetics is one possible way to prepare a loving practice. To practice a more felt, active allyship with those often silenced and quietened advocates for young people and the Planet in these climate-careful times. This process of ‘wilding’ your own pedagogies in earthly and poetic practice presents a more daily living pedagogy, or pedagogies. As loving pedagogies, they feel worth considering — this being our wildest wondering about wilding pedagogies, as we wander

off

the

page.

Love from Earth.