Literacies in the more-than-human world: Elementary aged learners in an outdoor learning community
Invitation up the path
Before traversing academic landscapes, you are invited to walk up to the woods. It is a cool morning and we have our warm, waterproof layers on. We leave a couple of large, wooden buildings behind, and pause at three totem poles created and offered as a welcome by local Coast Salish NationsFootnote 1 . We offer our thanks and ask for permission to visit this land. We notice the moon, a thunderbird, and an orca on the totem poles and reflect on their possible messages – we need to invest more time to learn.
Beyond the totems, we notice an empty nature playground up a small grassy hill: large logs stacked haphazardly, yet they look stable, on a bed of damp wood chips. A picnic table nearby. Is it empty? We nearly missed the Canada geese honking into this dewy, gray morning. We walk up the long, gently inclined, gravel path towards the woods. There’s a hint of fog highlighting the horizon, smudging the grass with the trees. We notice a few slugs along the way as we look down at our feet. Some are slowly inspecting and glazing the path. A couple of them look torn, likely by curious, hungry beaks; guts spilling out. Small lizards scatter into the grass as we walk. We hear the bouncy double-croak of ravens flying overhead.
We hear human voices in the distance and notice a yellow pickup truck far behind us with tools and landscaping equipment. We also begin hearing children’s voices singing with a gentle, clapping rhythm coming from the woods. We keep going and as we step into the forest, the path becomes paved. It’s a short, but steep incline on this paved path and we are instantly enveloped by tall, majestic trees of this coastal temperate rainforest. Cedars, firs, and hemlocks with endless ferns in between. Shades of green and rich browns. We hear the song growing louder with each step. We take a moment to breathe in the fresh oxygen from the woods around us. We feel it enter our nostrils as we release our carbon dioxide in reciprocal exchange.
We turn left and find a large, circular, wooden structure that contains the children and a few adults. A group of perhaps 40. There are multiple, thick pillars holding up the shelter. We quietly join the group and notice a circular opening in the very center of the roof. We see evergreen tree canopies, and a few clouds in a milky gray sky. Children sit on long benches arranged in a circle around a small fire, and sing a call-and-response song to align their heartbeats with the forest:
I can feel my heartbeat…
(I can feel my heartbeat)
Beating to the rhythm of the forest song.
(Beating to the rhythm of the forest song) Footnote 2
Introduction
This case study was born in response to three problems and a research gap. First, this study responds to and resists attempts to narrow and standardize literacy influenced by deficit-based, “gap discourse” (McCarty, 2015, p. 70 in Avineri et al., Reference Avineri, Johnson, Brice-Heath, McCarty, Ochs, Kremer-Sadlik, Blum, Zentella, Rosa, Flores, Alim and Paris2015). Following school disruptions and shifts that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic as well as recent socio-political trends, there has been renewed momentum in Canada and the United States to strip literacy education to a basic, print-based form (Yurick et al., Reference Yurick, Council, Telesman, Musti, Gardner and Cartledge2024; Zhu, Reference Zhu2024). Literacy approaches such as the science of reading have resurfaced in this climate of perceived learning loss and delays, stressing basic skills such as phonics (Aukerman & Aiello, Reference Aukerman and Aiello2023; Aukerman & Chambers Schuldt, Reference Aukerman and Chambers Schuldt2021; Hruby, Reference Hruby2020). This is consistent with social trends that are further politicizing and attempting to narrow literacy through book bans and political attacks on curricula in Canada and the United States (Goncalves et al., Reference Goncalves, Langrock, LaViolette and Spoon2024; Jimenez, Reference Jimenez2025; Pawson, Reference Pawson2024; Wong, Reference Wong2024). These trends are in tension with literacy research that has emphasized the value and importance of multimodality and diverse meaning-making practices since at least the 1990s (Kress, Reference Kress1997; New London Group, 1996), in addition to critical, culturally informed, and Indigenous literacies (Freire, 1970/Reference Freire2000; Battiste, Reference Battiste, Barman, Hébert and McCaskill1986, Reference Battiste1998; Hare, Reference Hare2001, Reference Hare2012; Kaya et al., Reference Kaya, Dressler and Lenters2022; Kelly & Djonko-Moore, Reference Kelly and Djonko-Moore2021). When pressures to narrow literacy grow at the expense of diverse learning experiences, what literacies and stories become silenced?
The second and third problems are intertwined and point to longstanding trends in education research. The second problem highlights that most education research happens within the context of indoor classroom environments with limited research in other settings such as community spaces, museums, and outdoor places such as forests. A quick academic database search easily reveals that education research is overwhelmingly done within the context of public schools and indoor learning environments. These learning environments come with routines, structures, and assumptions that differ from other spaces. Sometimes referred to as “the grammar of schooling” (Tyack & Cuban, Reference Tyack and Cuban1995, p. 85), the education system is structured in standardized ways. Students are divided by age groupings in buildings containing boxy classrooms, usually sitting at desks and chairs signaling print literacy time, and learning according to subject-segregated timetables. Most learning happens in largely indoor settings despite multiple health and academic benefits of nature-based learning (Mann et al., Reference Mann, Gray, Truong, Brymer, Passy, Ho, Sahlberg, Ward, Bentsen, Curry and Cowper2022). Furthermore, the third problem highlights that most literacy research focuses on print-based literacies and digital literacies, despite the multiliteracies turn since the ‘90s. While research on other diverse meaning-making practices exists, it is overwhelmed by many more studies highlighting print-based and digital literacies.
Why are these research trends problematic? Most educational spaces function to propel a story that upholds the current socio-economic system (modernity/coloniality) predicated on unsustainable, extractive practices, individualism, violence, and the twin myths of human exceptionalism and separation from nature (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021). When researchers, educators, and entire education systems privilege standardized, indoor learning environments and print-based literacies, some stories are highlighted and other possibilities are hidden. This is communicated through the content of print-based literacies and through the practices of schooling where the majority of time is spent indoors within a hierarchical power structure (Tyack & Cuban, Reference Tyack and Cuban1995). Donald (Reference Donald2019) describes the homo economicus mythology as the dominant story embedded in the curriculum in Alberta, Canada. A story that emphasizes market logic, individualism, anthropocentrism, and separation from nature. A story that hides colonial violence against human and more-than-human worlds. A story that helps learners to recreate this worldview as adults and limits the possibilities of other ways of living and being. Similarly, Lemon (Reference Lemon2022) excavates the anthropocentric, individualistic, and reductionist root metaphors embedded in British Columbia’s curriculum that influence both learners and educators. And Machado de Oliveira (Reference Machado de Oliveira2021) outlines the single story of modernity/coloniality, and how “formal mass schooling as we know it was created precisely to naturalize and to normalize [this] single story, and it was extremely effective in doing so.” (p. 70) The success of this single story rests on the alluring myth of progress often articulated through linear mastery and logocentric, print literacies (Hackett, Reference Hackett, Lee, Bailey, Burnett and Rowsell2022a, Reference Hackett2022b).
Finally, this study responds to a research gap. There is a lack of literacy research in non-classroom or outdoor settings, particularly with children beyond grade one (in Canada, this means older than about seven years of age). Studies that do exist in outdoor settings typically focus on very young children often in relation to play, ecoliteracy, or place (Häggström & Schmidt, Reference Häggström and Schmidt2020, for example). The implicit message is that relationships with the more-than-human world are the focus of very young children who haven’t yet begun to read and write language-based texts. This made me wonder: what are the implications of schools and other social institutions valuing meaning-making done predominantly indoors with print literacy, and only by the human species? What are we missing in education, and what are we highlighting and perpetuating?
Logocentric literacy and the climate crisis
The wider context of this research is the climate crisis unfolding in real time and impacting every corner of our planet in often chaotic ways. This context is as important as any of the research problems or gaps identified above, because it serves as the urgent purpose underlying the search for literacies beyond logocentrism – other ways of making meaning, learning, creating, and communicating beyond human words. Perhaps one fruitful place to start is to unpack the problems associated with logocentrism and how they have fueled modernity/coloniality and thus the climate crisis.
Logocentric literacies are human language-based practices such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. They are at the heart of schooling, and are often the unquestioned reason for the existence and the appeal of modern education. Logocentric literacies have also been a vehicle for colonial projects through mastery-based education systems set up to propel the single story of modern progress (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021). The problem lies in the twin practice of “wording the world” (ibid., p. 21), or learning through description, and separation from the rest of nature, to the exclusion of other ways of making meaning in diverse settings. Another way of thinking about it is modern education is predicated on learning “about the land” rather than “with the land” (Donald, Reference Donald2024; Simpson, Reference Simpson2014).
Logocentric literacies in mainstream schooling have also defined possibilities for humans and our place in the world, and have obstructed other possibilities from view (Donald, Reference Donald2019). Labeling, ordering, and describing nature in indoor classroom settings reinforces an imagined separation between humans and the rest of nature (Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b), and upholds human exceptionalism (Abram, Reference Abram1996). The story that is implicitly, and at times explicitly, conveyed is one of human separation and dominance over the Earth (Donald, Reference Donald2019; Lemon, Reference Lemon2022). This myth serves as a powerful justification for a modern/colonial socio-economic system built on “colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy” (Stein et al., Reference Stein, Andreotti, Ahenakew, Suša, Valley, Huni Kui, Tremembé, Taylor, Siwek, Cardoso, Duque, Oliveira da Silva Huni Kui, Calhoun, van Sluys, Amsler, D’Emilia, Pigeau, Andreotti, Bowness and McIntyre2023, p. 992). A justification that has also fueled the climate crisis. Logocentric literacies are not solely responsible for the climate crisis, but they have played an important role in the modern/colonial education system along with built environments that have limited learners from forming direct relationships with nature. This system has functioned to separate humans from the rest of nature, to limit possibilities and practices for ways of living, and to hide other ways of being from learners’ imaginations (Donald, Reference Donald2019; Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021).
It seems like an intractable problem. Schooling practices rely on speaking, listening, reading, and writing to such a degree that it almost seems synonymous with the role of teacher and teaching. By and large, teachers carefully create learning opportunities for learners to learn about the world through description, or “a single heavy blanket of interpretation” (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021, p. 46). How might we, educators, instead facilitate learning with the world? Or perhaps, how might we not stand in the way? This is where a broader, deeper, and more flexible understanding of literacies is helpful.
Logocentric literacies are important and they can even be used in ways that do not “word the world” (p. 45), but instead open possibilities for worlding (Mika, Reference Mika2017; Mika et al., Reference Mika, Andreotti, Cooper, Ahenakew and Silva2020). Based on Maori philosophy, Mika (Reference Mika2017) offers worlding as ways in which the world is continually manifesting, co-constituting, and how “one thing is never alone, and all things actively construct and compose it” (p. 4) including language itself (Mika et al., Reference Mika, Andreotti, Cooper, Ahenakew and Silva2020). Put another way, worlding suggests the use of language beyond describing and indexing the world with one static story, and opens possibilities for stories as “living entities that emerge from and move things in the world” (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021, p. xiii). Stories that invite participation, affect our bodies in sensory ways, and evade one assigned meaning. Often this is the realm of oral storytelling and all genres of prose and poetry. Magnason (Reference Magnason2021) captures a similar idea when writing about the difficulty of grasping many concepts related to climate change: “Words have different charges to them; it takes many years for concepts to reach full charge.” (p. 77). This suggests a shifting, a movement over time through experiences.
Logocentric literacies, then, have the potential for both wording and worlding. Wording has promoted the story of modernity/coloniality, hidden other possibilities from view, and supported the separation of human beings from the rest of nature. Worlding offers an ontology of possibilities, of practices and ways of being that might be necessary in a precarious world, of “literacies yet to come” (Hackett, Reference Hackett, Lee, Bailey, Burnett and Rowsell2022a, p. 131). To conclude, I am guided by a more flexible definition of literacies that reaches beyond logocentrism as articulated by Lenters and McDermott (Reference Lenters, McDermott, Lenters and McDermott2019): “[c]ommunicative practices for forming and making sense of the world through intentional and sustained encounters with human and more-than-human entities and for opening spaces for new becomings” (p. 4). I believe this definition allows for practices of worlding through logocentric literacies and beyond that are necessary to imagine living differently and adapting to an increasingly precarious world (Waliszewska, Reference Waliszewska2025).
Possibilities in the weeds
Despite the endurance of the single story of modernity/coloniality upheld by institutions such as the education system, humans and the rest of nature have reached a pivotal point in Earth’s history. The prevailing socio-economic system is threatening our collective survival as effects of climate change have spiraled into a climate and nature emergency (Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b; Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021; Stein et al., Reference Stein, Andreotti, Ahenakew, Suša, Valley, Huni Kui, Tremembé, Taylor, Siwek, Cardoso, Duque, Oliveira da Silva Huni Kui, Calhoun, van Sluys, Amsler, D’Emilia, Pigeau, Andreotti, Bowness and McIntyre2023). This pushed me to investigate what might exist outside of this powerful story. If we imagine public schools as manicured, meticulously maintained lawns, what can we find in the weeds of education? What possibilities might exist there to help us survive, and indeed thrive, in the precarious “knots and pulses of patchiness” (Tsing, Reference Tsing2015, p. 6) of contemporary capitalism?
Before turning to the case study itself, I aim to contextualize this research within scholarship on Indigenous literacies and posthuman literacies. While each of these areas is distinct, they are compatible and form a multifaceted lens that invites pedagogical possibilities. The following are general snapshots of each perspective and are by no means comprehensive or exhaustive. First, Indigenous scholars in education and beyond have stressed the importance of learning from and with the land and noted the general absence of land-based practices from mainstream schooling (Cardinal, Reference Cardinal2015; Donald, Reference Donald2021; Grenz, Reference Grenz2024; Marom & Rattray, Reference Marom and Rattray2022; Simpson, Reference Simpson2014). Donald argues that this omission along with curricular stories that are predominantly told in schools facilitates “The Great Forgetting” (Donald, Reference Donald2019, p. 114) of existing outside of economic productivity. Similarly, Anishinaabe arts leader Jesse Wente calls for a time of “deep remembering” of cultural skills and practices not typically taught in schools (Ayed, Reference Ayed2024).
In the landscape of literacies, Cardinal (Reference Cardinal2015) resists standardized, parceled approaches to literacy, arguing for culturally-relevant literacies that allow learners to participate in multiple areas of day-to- day life: public, cultural, political, as well as on the land. This includes language-based literacies and equally so multimodal, arts-based, and land-based literacies. Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (Reference Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Goodyear-ka‘ōpua2013) argues for aloha`āina, a Hawaiian concept for what the author calls land-centered literacies (p. 34). The framework of literacies is carefully chosen, because both print-based and multimodal literacies have been integral to the Hawaiian people’s culture and their resistance to systems imposed by colonialism. The definition of land-centered literacies is multilayered and emphasizes human and more-than-human communication capacities, multiple possibilities of meaning-making, as well as the sustained, intimate relationships with the land understood as political praxis (Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Reference Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Goodyear-ka‘ōpua2013). Similarly, Styres (Reference Styres, Smith, Tuck and Yang2019) calls for a literacies of Land that honor the sentient and emergent aspects of Land in longstanding relationships with Indigenous cultures. For Styres (Reference Styres, Smith, Tuck and Yang2019), “Indigenous literacy is based on reading the cosmos” (p. 25) that in turn become “storied Landscapes” (p. 29) through cultural stories. Furthermore, critical literacy can be extended to Land literacies through “self-in-relationship” (Styres, Reference Styres, Smith, Tuck and Yang2019, p. 28) with all beings, human and more-than-human, as well as place. Land is understood as a fundamental philosophical, material, and relational foundation for Indigenous literacies.
Posthuman literacy scholars argue for more-than-human literacies that question human exceptionalism (Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b; Kuby et al., Reference Kuby, Spector and Thiel2019; Lenters, Mosher & MacDonald, Reference Lenters, Mosher and MacDonald2022; Lenters & McDermott, Reference Lenters, McDermott, Lenters and McDermott2019). This captures a complex notion that literacies extend far beyond the skillset of the human species alone to include multimodal, emergent, embodied, sensory, affective, relational, place-based (Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b), and even metabolic capacities (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021). I see it as an umbrella term to highlight the multifaceted practices possible when literacies are unshackled from their longstanding bondage to human language. I will highlight a couple of the facets listed above, but a previous article offers a deeper engagement with this understanding of literacies (Waliszewska, Reference Waliszewska2025). Literacies are understood as emergent, because learners often do not follow linear, developmental, mastery-based paths, and communication is often not rational or premeditated (Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b). Literacies are understood to be deeply relational and entangled with the world as opposed to separate and found in individual meaning-makers. This complicates the idea of individual learners as distinct from the world, agency as embedded only in humans, and acknowledges the possibility for learning shaped by and initiated by the world (Hackett & Rautio, Reference Hackett and Rautio2019; Hackett & Somerville, Reference Hackett and Somerville2017). These ideas are deeply reminiscent of relationality and reciprocity with the land that are at the heart of many Indigenous worldviews (Wilson, 2008 as cited in Grenz, Reference Grenz2024). The emphasis on relationality in posthuman literacy is also similar to kinship literacies that amplify Indigenous worldviews and scholars (MacDonald, Lenters & Mosher, Reference MacDonald, Lenters and Mosher2024).
Parallels ripple out between Indigenous literacies and worldviews, and posthuman literacies. Each perspective brings essential pieces of the overall puzzle without one necessitating to subsume the other. Each approach invites learning and inquiry from a slightly different angle, and centers the Earth/land/more-than-human world/nature, regardless of preferred word choice. However, I think it’s critical to center Indigenous literacies and scholars in this discussion, because all of this work is built on and expanded from Indigenous ways of knowing (Smith, Reference Smith2012). This is a connection that is often respectfully acknowledged, sometimes embraced, but at times forgotten. This is particularly the case in the posthuman theoretical landscape extended from Western philosophical traditions. These traditions stole Indigenous philosophies centuries ago (Graeber & Wengrow, Reference Graeber and Wengrow2023), and continue this epistemic violence today. Nonetheless, posthuman literacies offer valuable tools for how to learn in ways that embrace the full diversity of meaning-making and sense-making that might enable possibilities for surviving and thriving in a precarious world. And so, following Grenz (Reference Grenz2024) I aspire to epistemic openness that can amplify Indigenous knowledges alongside Western ideas when it is compatible to do so to the best of my, albeit limited, ability as a white settler. Similar to the “transepistemological perspective” taken by Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. (Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Brown, Osborn, Blom, Brown and Wijesinghe2020, p. 107), I aim to highlight the “concurrence of knowledges” between posthuman literacies and Indigenous knowledges without one subsuming the other, and positioning them within an anticolonial critique of modernity/coloniality (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021; Simpson, Reference Simpson2004).
Previous relevant research
There is limited research focused on literacy practices of older children in nature-based settings. One notable example is a recent, multi-year study that engaged several classes of multi-aged children in forest-based arts practices in efforts to disrupt colonial narratives (Hill, Bailey & McKay, Reference Hill, Bailey and McKay2024). The theoretical orientation is similar to my study as authors employed Indigenous worldviews and posthuman theory. It is a unique example of collaborating with older children, with the land, and of finding common ground between posthumanism and Indigenous perspectives to “inform one another in generative ways” (Hill et al., Reference Hill, Bailey and McKay2024, p. 1065). There are also a few examples that investigated multimodal literacies with older Indigenous children in Australia partly or entirely on the land (Mills & Dooley, Reference Mills, Dooley, Rennie and Harper2019; Mills et al., Reference Mills, Unsworth, Bellocchi, Park and Ritchie2014; Mills et al., Reference Mills, Davis-Warra, Sewell and Anderson2016). Lastly, there is a multi-year, ethnographic study of an outdoor school for youth (Gleason, Reference Gleason2022). The study focuses primarily on science education and the political and environmental implications of this program within the context of the climate crisis, and less so on literacy practices of the learners.
Most studies about literacy practices in nature-based settings are focused on younger children and there are several excellent ones. Some investigate the entangled relationship between children, objects and places from a posthumanist perspective (Hackett & Rautio, Reference Hackett and Rautio2019; Hackett & Somerville, Reference Hackett and Somerville2017; Harwood & Collier, Reference Harwood and Collier2017). Others look at ecoliteracy and place-based learning (Häggström & Schmidt, Reference Häggström and Schmidt2020); multimodality in a forest setting (Streelasky, Reference Streelasky2019); and outdoor, multimodal library programs from a posthumanist lens and a relational, kinship literacies lens (Lenters et al., Reference Lenters, Mosher and MacDonald2022; MacDonald et al., Reference MacDonald, Lenters and Mosher2024). My study is inspired and informed by all of the above research and seeks to add to the emerging research area of older children learning with the land and through a diversity of literacy practices.
An emergent methodology
This is the provocation and challenge of post-qualitative inquiry – to create different worlds for living. (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2018, p. 604)
Study overview
This study includes one group in an outdoor, elementary, multi-age program that operates in partnership with the largest, online, public school in British Columbia, Canada. The program is run jointly by two teachers employed by the public school and Forest Mentors employed by a small non-profit organization. The stated goals of this nature-based program are cultivating children’s attachment to self, others, and nature; embracing Indigenous ways of knowing; honoring children as co-teachers, among others. At the time of this research, there were 32 children in the program and several supporting adults, including two certified teachers. In this study, I focus on one group of 15 children, between the ages of approximately 7 and 11, supported by one teacher and two Forest Mentors two days a week, and by three Forest Mentors one day a week. The program runs three days a week in total between 9:30 am and 2:30 pm, and is located in southern British Columbia entirely outdoors in a lakeside forest setting. I visited eight times over two months in spring 2025 to co-gather and co-generate data with the children, adult facilitators, and the more-than-human world. Each visit was for the entire day and I observed children during different activities including circle time, adult-guided activities, child-led activities, and free play. Data consists of field notes and photos as well as occasional reflections between visits. The research question that anchors this study is: What kinds of literacy practices do learners in an elementary outdoor program engage in, and how are they shaped by the more-than-human world? This research was completed in partial fulfillment of a Master’s degree (Waliszewska, Reference Waliszewska2026).
Leaning on Dennis and Huf (Reference Dennis and Huf2020), I situate my research within an approach that aims to create flexible spaces for children’s participation to emerge in their own ways. In practical terms, this meant that I did not ask children to create additional artifacts for the study, participate in activities of my choice, or respond to prepared questions. Instead, I joined them on their terms, in their activities (by invitation), in their conversations, and offered the option of taking photos of their creations only upon their request. It also meant that the focus of the study wasn’t always human – it included the more-than-human world and invitations from all beings on the land. This study was reviewed by and has received approval from the University of Victoria’s Human Research Ethics Board(HREB) (24-0033). Written informed consent was obtained from the school district, the board of directors of the non-profit organization that runs the program, as well as educators, and caregivers. Ongoing, oral informed consent was obtained from children.
Positionality
I have interrogated my multifaceted white settler/immigrant/educator positionality in more depth in a recent article (Waliszewska, Reference Waliszewska2025); however, I think it is important to highlight here that as a white immigrant and a lifelong learner/teacher, I have benefited from colonial institutions, especially the education system. Therefore, I believe I have a responsibility to help decolonize learning spaces, materials, curricula, and education research, especially since the opportunities accessible to me are continually shaped by my relative power and privilege. I also believe that all knowledge is partial, shaped by our positionality, and never neutral, which is why I have a responsibility to learn from important perspectives in education that are being actively silenced (Hooks, Reference Hooks1994).
Furthermore, during every stage of this research I negotiated multiple roles. I am a parent of one of the children in this program, I am a board member of the nonprofit that helps to run this program and employs all Forest Mentors on site, and I stepped into the new role of a researcher. One of the biggest challenges that often comes up in ethnographic research is gaining access and building trust in a research relationship (O’Leary, Reference O’Leary2021; Yin, Reference Yin2018). My familiarity with the program and the community facilitated access, and seemed to reduce the unease that can occur with case study or any in-depth research. I was able to quickly establish trust in the research relationship given that it built on pre-existing relationships of reciprocity, responsibility, and accountability in the community. I was also able to lean on my teaching experience to collaborate with relative comfort with the learning community and my teacher lens was helpful during data analysis.
The entanglement of research design, methods and data generation
In the initial stages of planning this research, I envisioned a classic qualitative methodology for this case study: a critical ethnography aimed at documenting children’s diverse practices with the land through description. Initially, I was inspired by sensory ethnographic approaches (Pink, Reference Pink2015), and “the arts of noticing” (Tsing, Reference Tsing2015, p. 37). I was guided by my understanding of critical ethnography as theory-driven and I aspired to interrogate adult/child power relations (May & Fitzpatrick, Reference May, Fitzpatrick, Atkinson, Delamont, Cernat, Sakshaug and Williams2019), but from the beginning, there was a mismatch between qualitative methodology and my theoretical orientation steeped in posthumanism. I didn’t set out to do post- qualitative inquiry, but like St. Pierre (Reference St. Pierre2018, Reference St. Pierre2025), I felt a deep tension between the philosophical assumptions of qualitative methodology and my theoretical orientation that questioned concepts of agency, rationality, human exceptionalism, atomization and separation of objects and beings from the world, and recognized the dangers and limits of symbolic, abstract representation of the world through language (Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b; Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021; MacLure, Reference MacLure2013b).
Given that my fieldwork was infused with my theoretical orientation, I was necessarily pulled towards post- qualitative inquiry and the tug became stronger still during the sense-making (“analysis”) and writing process (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2018). It could not have been otherwise. Just like my understanding of literacy shifted over time toward diverse practices including and beyond language (Waliszewska, Reference Waliszewska2025), so too my research practices needed to shift beyond human-centric, language-based practices, and into the deeply entangled, more-than-human world. It was naive for me to think that I could keep the methodology neat and tidy within distinct qualitative themes and categories, but as a novice researcher, the entire process was new, complex, emergent, and at times challenging.
My post-qualitative inquiry process has centered on the challenge to think/feel/imagine differently to remember new ways of doing/being (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2025). During fieldwork, I was open to invitations from all research participants, human and more-than-human. After fieldwork, I spent months thinking, reading, writing, viewing photos from the visits, identifying relationships (that often overlapped and could not be disentangled) to the field notes, re-reading, and writing some more. According to St. Pierre (Reference St. Pierre2018), the writing process creates the field and “is, after all, a method of inquiry” (p. 607). Furthermore, MacLure (Reference MacLure, Coleman and Ringrose2013a) argues that there is no separation between researchers and their inquiry, and warns against reductionism, Western rationality, and symbolic representation of children’s embodied, sensory, and material experiences. Yet deeply engaging with data, when it is flexible, slow, and relational, allows for data to emerge with intensity over time in ways that seemingly choose the researcher (MacLure, Reference MacLure, Coleman and Ringrose2013a, Reference MacLure2013c). To MacLure, this is data that “glows” (Reference MacLure2013b, p. 661). In this way, data can be seen as “sense-event[s]” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2013b, p. 663), or more specifically “literacy as event[s]” (Burnett & Merchant, Reference Burnett and Merchant2020) that defy disentanglement from the world in which they live, or fixing still in one, neat description. From this perspective, data can remain alive in sensory, relational, and affective ways enabling movement and worlding.
Invitation into the forest
To enlarge what is possible, we need other kinds of stories – including adventures of landscapes. (Tsing, Reference Tsing2015, p. 156)
Do you recall the circular, wooden structure you happened upon at the beginning of our journey together? Below you will find a collage containing two images of the Roundhouse and two more images of the lands around and beyond it (see Figure 1). Local Coast Salish Nations in what is colonially referred to as southern British Columbia have long lived in relationship with these lands – lands that have never been surrendered. Teachers and students in the nature-based program in this case study have a daily practice of greeting, acknowledging, and thanking the land and the rightful caretakers as part of their ongoing learning practices. I, too, asked for permission, offered gratitude, and acknowledged the land, more-than-human beings, and the local Indigenous Nations as part of my practice during the visits.
Figure 1. Title: The land.
These daily, relational practices of greetings, offers of gratitude, and territorial acknowledgements are important literacy practices in the nature program. They are oral, embodied, and deeply relational with the human and more-than-human participants of the forest with the implicit aim to make “sense of the world through intentional and sustained encounters with human and more-than-human entities” (Lenters et al., Reference Lenters, McDermott, Lenters and McDermott2019, p. 4). Furthermore, these practices reach beyond descriptive understandings of the world and step into the realm of worlding – enacting possibilities into existence through daily experiences. I offer a snapshot of this daily practice with gestures in italics:
Thank you to Earth, (adult educators and children speak together in unison, standing in a circle, and reach down to touch the earth)
Thank you to sky, (everyone speaks and reaches up to the sky)
Thank you to trees, (everyone speaks and poses like a tree)
And birds in the sky. (everyone speaks and flaps their wings)
Thank you to water, (everyone speaks and moves hands like water)
And fish in the sea. (everyone speaks, puts palms together and swims like fish)
Thank you to you, (everyone speaks, reaches hands out, and sweeps around the circle)
And thank you to me. (everyone speaks and puts hands on heart)
And thank you to the [local Coast Salish] Nation on whose land we live, play and grow.
[Thank you spoken in the local Coast Salish language]! (everyone speaks and holds their hands up in gratitude – a gesture practiced by many Indigenous cultures locally)
One way to understand experiences such as this one is through Burnett and Merchant’s (Reference Burnett and Merchant2020) concept: literacy as event. Compatible with the definition of literacies outlined above as well as with the concepts of worlding and sense-events, literacy as event gestures toward the complex experiences that underpin literacy practices and seeks to make sense of the moving processes as opposed to finished, fixed products (Burnett & Merchant, Reference Burnett and Merchant2020). Literacy as event, then, is a process-based concept that understands meaning-making and sense-making as occurring relationally, often in surprising ways that defy prior predictions, and therefore containing multiple possibilities. The collective, embodied, repeated, and land-based aspects of these practices (above) are as important as the specific words spoken. They interact to create powerful meaning-making and sense-making literacy experiences that transcend language. The sensory, embodied aspects cannot be reduced to gestures alone, because they are always interacting with the more-than-human world – the sounds of the birds, sensations of the rain or wind or sun on particular bodies with unique experiences, unique affects, etc. These daily practices, then, are always slightly novel and “exceed what can be conceived and perceived” (Burnett & Merchant, Reference Burnett and Merchant2020, p. 49) offering multiple possibilities for experiences. The same is possible for literacy practices in indoor spaces with printed texts, but outdoor settings open up a wider realm of experience rendering land acknowledgements more salient when experienced in direct, sensory contact with and informed by the land. Indigenous scholars, as well as knowledge keepers have emphasized since time immemorial the strong connections between land, self, culture, and language (Cardinal, Reference Cardinal2015; Donald, Reference Donald2021; Grenz, Reference Grenz2024; Prince, Reference Prince2025). Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, learning “about the land” and learning “with the land” is an important distinction that shapes meaning-making and sense-making experiences (Donald, Reference Donald2024; Simpson, Reference Simpson2014). Outdoor settings are more conducive to learning with the land as the example above illustrates, although this is not automatically the case. Learning with the land happens when lands shape learners’ activities and when they understand themselves to be in relationship with the land. The daily ritual described above is one way that land relationships are cultivated and maintained on an ongoing basis.
Shaped by the land
As we step back into the forest, I offer the following entry points (see Figures 1 and 2) to address the research question: What kinds of literacy practices do learners in an elementary outdoor program engage in, and how are they shaped by the more-than-human world? I offer these photographic examples as a way of trying to highlight some of the sensory intensity and complexity entangled within the data. I resist the temptation to describe them purely in words and I offer them to point to recurring, “glowing” (MacLure, Reference MacLure2013b) moments that emerged from my reading of the data. These snapshots are not exhaustive nor representative of all of the possible experiences and literacy practices. As one researcher entangled with this data, they are but one possible pathway at this time with many more to come.
Figure 2. Title: Literacy as events: Invitations from the land.
This collage captures snapshots of some of the diverse, forested lands where the forest school usually happens. The edge of the Play Forest can be seen in top left, where free, unstructured play sessions happen on most afternoons. There are some built structures as depicted in the bottom right and in the circular photo (the Roundhouse); a temporary tent in the top left photo; and the majority of the land is lush with plant life, fungi, and many other kinds of more-than-human beings, both perceptible and not easily detected by the children (top right; bottom left). Every day children step back into their unique relationships with these lands and these lands are more than places or settings – they are more-than-human teachers with stories and lessons to share (Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and Sitka-Sage2018). Figure 2 below explores land-human relations more closely through four examples.
This collage captures four events with multiple, overlapping literacies deeply entangled in children’s experiences. Top left shows a shelter built, used, and regularly maintained by several children. This shelter was involved in elaborate, multi-month, recurring pretend play full of opportunities for multi-species communication, rich meaning and sense-making – literacy as events. It was hard to tell where the line was between an invitation from the land for this built structure at the bottom of a small, rocky hill, and children’s imposed imaginations on the land. During my visits I wondered where the idea for this construction came from. Was there a lone log resting on these rocks, stretched across the hill, that inspired the children to add more? Or did they wander with the idea to build a shelter for their preconceived game and found a spot that fit? Did the land inspire a plan or was there a plan imposed on the land? I will never know – the logs, the ideas, the games were there as long as I can remember – but my sense is that it is likely the land that invited this kind of play. I witnessed the ways in which children’s acute observations and experiences attuned them to the land and the beings in their midst, and inspired their stories and activities many times throughout my visits in other contexts (see the next two anecdotes for specific examples).
Regardless of its origins, this one shelter offered many opportunities and prompts for storytelling; oral, dramatic, embodied and emergent play and experimentation; relational; and multimodal design and construction. Over multiple visits, I witnessed children repairing their shelter, adding to and altering its design, using it as a basecamp for an ongoing battle game, and on one occasion children invited me over to quietly explain the medicines they were “mining” for in a log that had specific, invented healing purposes in the battle game. It provided a glimpse into some of the backstories, mythologies, and shared logics of the game, inspired by the land, and negotiated and co-created by the children. Some of the most spirited, high-energy children were drawn to this place and their battle game which facilitated relationship building and communication with other children in ways not always possible during quiet or adult-facilitated activities.
Sometimes it was clear that children’s stories were shaped by the spontaneous experiences on the land, while other times children’s stories spilled onto the land through a search for medicines for the game or additional sticks to reinforce the structure. Other times still, it was a back-and-forth movement so dispersed and entangled that it was impossible to tell what inspired it and how. It was deeply relational and messy: the human and more-than-human storytelling was entangled and agency was distributed between all participants. These recurring, interwoven invitations from the land described above underscore emergent meanings and the distributed agency of human and more-than-human participants common to literacy practices with the land argued for by Indigenous and posthuman scholars (Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Reference Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Goodyear-ka‘ōpua2013; Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b).
Top right shows rainboot imprints in a rotting tree stump. Children found this significantly rotten tree stump one day in the Play Forest, a large forested area usually visited for free, unstructured play time. They found it to be of similar consistency as quicksand. Initially, this experience was sensory and embodied as the children reveled in its consistency as the rotting stump tried to suck their boots into itself. They stomped and squished repeatedly. They marveled at its novelty and uniqueness. They became delightedly dirty and covered with a rich, muddy rot! After some time, this led to questions and conversations about decomposition. An adult joined the conversation and allowed the children to take the lead, think out loud, and share their scientific hypotheses about how the stump became this way and what might happen next. The adult responded when needed, shared thoughts about decomposition adding nutrients to the soil and its general importance within a forest, and soon this initially embodied, sensory experience lived side by side with scientific learning. This rotting stump invited and shaped learning in deeply surprising and emergent ways. One might be tempted to label this as “child-led learning,” but that would deny agency within the stump and an entangled relationality with more-than-human beings (Dennis & Huf, Reference Dennis and Huf2020). This literacy as event represents how a diverse repertoire of literacies (in this case: embodied, sensory, oral, emergent, relational, and place-based) can become pathways to deep learning, particularly when invited and shaped by the more-than-human world.
Bottom left shows a tree bridge made of live roots. Children invited me to cross this live bridge one day over a small creek nearby and excitedly explained how they found it and how exciting it was to find out that the tree was alive. The land holds many such opportunities for exciting, surprising discoveries and invites children into learning through ongoing relationships with the more-than-human world, with the land (Donald, Reference Donald2024; Simpson, Reference Simpson2014). I noticed that children often returned to familiar spots or previous, surprising experiences and these repeated visits seemed to deepen their attachment to and understanding of place, seasonal changes, and other species. For example, repeated visits to the creek that flows under this tree bridge sometimes resulted in noticing tiny Pacific tree frogs, despite their perfect camouflage in surrounding greenery. On one special occasion, children even spotted a “pregnant” frog, carrying eggs, in that area resulting in excitement and revelry. I recall one adult and one child initially spotting the little frog and drawing a few more children in with their excitement. The other children were engaged in hopping across the creek or their own pretend play at the time, but they paused, drawn by the possibility of connection with this little frog. It took sustained attention, patience, and attuning to the moment that lasted at least ten minutes of near silence and hushed, whispering voices as we waited for the frog to reveal herself. I remember reflecting on my years of teaching in brick-and-mortar schools and how rare these quiet, focused moments are in busy, indoor settings. When we finally spotted the tiny frog, we gasped and giggled and she became part of many more conversations for the rest of the day and a few days ahead. Children were curious about how the adult could tell that she had eggs and what kind of frog she was. Children drew her in their nature journals. She appeared in their play scenarios.
This attuning to the land through sustained, repeated encounters provided possibilities of noticing (and connecting with) something unexpected and shaped children’s understanding of themselves and their relationships with the more-than-human world. In a small, nascent way this is reminiscent of what Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (Reference Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Goodyear-ka‘ōpua2013) describes as land-centered literacies as opportunities for diverse meaning-making through repeated, sustained, and relational encounters with the land. Encounters such as these are micro in scale compared to the thousands-year-old relationships that Indigenous peoples have sustained with the Land and preserved through storied Landscapes, as Styres (Reference Styres, Smith, Tuck and Yang2019) describes. But it makes me wonder about what might happen if more children could be provided with opportunities to form sustained relationships and make meaning with their local lands.
Bottom right shows a dragon nest created by one child. This nest was part of long-term, recurring activities about nature dragons and their mythologies involving a few children. While the nest was created by one child as a spontaneous art project, the stories that shaped it were co-created by multiple children and the nest was used in their storytelling. Some children shared with me that “no one owns a nature dragon,” and showed me where they live with a mama dragon, near children’s sit spots in an area of the forest that they visit regularly. The dragons themselves were uniquely shaped trees and logs. One day, I was invited into a family of dragons storytelling sequence that incorporated my research activities. The children informed me that I was a researcher observing the dragons (them), but needed to earn their trust by being patient, gentle, and offering them fish. When I acted out the role accordingly, the dragons learned to trust me and invited me into their home. This literacy as event points to a practice of worlding whereby children take inspiration from the world around them, including the land and their lives outside of this program, and creatively blend them to see what might happen. Worlding is a practice of new becomings and possibilities that invites participation and evades one ascribed, fixed meaning. It is a flexible process that opens spaces for “new becomings” (Lenters et al., Reference Lenters, McDermott, Lenters and McDermott2019, p. 4) aligned with our definition of literacies above. On the surface, this recurring pretend play sequence may appear unimportant in the context of literacy practices that are generally adult-planned and adult-led with the assumption that children progress toward mastery defined as adult literacies (Hackett, Reference Hackett2022b). Upon deeper reflection, though, these kinds of emergent, worlding, oral storytelling and pretend play practices weave together embodied, sense-making, and meaning-making (Burnett & Merchant, Reference Burnett and Merchant2020). They are rich with multimodal, place, and arts-based literacies that are relationally entangled with human and more-than-human worlds.
Entangled literacies
As the examples from Figure 2 show, more-than-human literacies in this study were often entangled with one another (embodied, place-based, relational, emergent, and multimodal) and with the land (Donald, Reference Donald2024; Simpson, Reference Simpson2014) as sense-making and meaning-making mingled. Another example of this was during the regular practice of sit spots during which children enjoyed a few quiet, solitary minutes in nature to practice their own “arts of noticing” or being, or to write and draw in their nature journals in structured, guided, or loosely guided ways depending on the day. This practice is deeply embodied and place-based as children were encouraged to attune to their bodies and senses as they were held by the land in all seasons and all kinds of weather, and deeply relational with the more-than-human world. Sometimes children noticed familiar wildflowers such as shooting stars returning in early spring reminding them to steer clear of their seedlings; other times they noticed geese nesting nearby. This practice is also emergent and nonlinear since it is open to possibilities that time spent with the land offers. Even adult-guided activities were open-ended by design such as nature journaling activities with the prompts: I notice, I wonder, It reminds me of (Laws & Lygren, Reference Laws and Lygren2020). Lastly, this sit spot practice is multimodal. Sometimes the multimodality was expressed through an activity of learning to notice, identify, and record bird calls in writing and/or artwork. Sometimes children could choose to read. Children expressed themselves in ways that worked for them and had the option of sharing their creations in circle. Shared entries included poems, observations, artwork, and even lyrics – all forms of expression were welcomed and received equally well. What I noticed throughout my field notes was that logocentric, print literacies were present, but not privileged. Children’s diverse ways of expressing themselves were welcomed and celebrated. Figure 3 shows a wheel diagram of more-than-human literacies at a glance.
Figure 3. Title: More-than-human literacies.
Note: This diagram is a visual representation of understanding literacies rooted in posthuman and indigenous perspectives. A prior version appeared in the author’s Master’s thesis (Waliszewska, Reference Waliszewska2026).
Forest literacies
More-than-human literacies share the fertile soil of Critical Forest Studies. Nourished by the life force and wisdom within Indigenous worldviews, anticolonial scholarship, posthumanism, ecofeminism, environmental education at large, and forests themselves; Critical Forest Studies “invite learners into critical, creative, and relationally embedded ways of knowing, doing, being, and becoming with forests” (this issue, p. #). More-than-human, forest literacies offer pathways for this becoming. These pathways are diverse, nonlinear, and negotiated through many relationships cultivated with the land, with forests as teachers. These pathways create opportunities for worlding and openings for new possibilities that, if explored, could help us thrive in a precarious world.
What do forests want to teach us if we are willing to listen and experience? Forests might reveal possibilities for living differently from what is usually obstructed by “a single heavy blanket of interpretation” (Machado de Oliveira, Reference Machado de Oliveira2021, p. 46) of modernity/coloniality. They might offer one pathway to remembering other ways of being human (Donald, Reference Donald2019). They might cultivate more-than-human relationships and ecological accountability that question human exceptionalism. And they might very well surprise learners and educators alike. Opportunities for time spent outside are more easily available to the youngest of children in daycares, preschools, and with their families, but this study demonstrates that older children benefit from learning with the land as well. These experiences open up a world of diverse literacies to learners that allow for sensory and affective attunement and relationship building with the more-than-human world. And while diverse literacies can be practiced in indoor spaces to some extent, the land offers a wider repertoire of experiences in direct, sensory relationship with and shaped by the land. Learning with the land also flattens hierarchical power relationships between adults and children as everyone attunes to the distributed agency between the human and more-than-human world and the inherent unpredictability that accompanies learning outside (through, for example: the open spaces, the endless diversity of animate and inanimate beings, the weather, the many things to notice and find, the changes, etc).
Yet access to the outdoors, let alone forests, is typically restricted with the majority of learning occurring in indoor spaces (Mann et al., Reference Mann, Gray, Truong, Brymer, Passy, Ho, Sahlberg, Ward, Bentsen, Curry and Cowper2022). This reinforces a myth of separation of humans from the land and the rest of nature. In this unique moment in Earth’s history of human-caused climatic and ecosystemic disruption, it is time for a “deep remembering” (Ayed, Reference Ayed2024) of reciprocal, responsible, and accountable relationships with our more-than-human kin (Grenz, Reference Grenz2024). This requires a diverse repertoire of literacies, language-based and beyond, and a recurring practice of learning with the land, not simply about it, especially in these critical times of significant change.
I will not walk back with you. Instead, I invite you to stay awhile in these woods. They contain deep time mysteries, lessons for survival, opportunities for diverse practices, and also lessons in decomposition, death, and transformation. I wonder how the forest will hold you and transform you.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Dr Cher Hill and Marie-Ève Chartrand who engaged in the collaborative review process with kindness and generative feedback. Special thanks go out to Dr Cher Hill as well as to my Master’s committee, Dr Lyndze Harvey and Dr Ruthanne Tobin, for their ongoing, supportive, constructive feedback that strengthened my thinking and expression of ideas entailed in this article. I also wish to thank the rest of the editorial team for their tireless efforts on this issue. Lastly, I wish to express gratitude to the human and more-than-human community that has made this work possible.
Ethical statement
This research was reviewed and approved by the HREB at the University of Victoria (Ethics Protocol Number 24-0033).
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Author Biography
Aleksandra Waliszewska (she/her) is an educator, parent, and graduate student at the University of Victoria in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction. Her MA thesis focused on more-than-human literacies in an elementary outdoor program. She has learned with Gwich’in, Nuxalk, independent school, and public school communities. Aleks completed a collaborative project funded by the inaugural Climate Education Fellowship Program in 2024 and has been serving on the Board of Directors of a nature-based program since 2023. Aleks feels a responsibility to explore learning models based on cooperation, decolonization, social justice, ecological accountability, and entanglement.
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