Sensing, weathering, making, mushrooming: ecopedagogies with student teachers

Through multisensory ecopedagogies, models of environmental land art and place-responsive or ‘part of the place event’ art-making in outdoor spaces or the ‘outerness’ (Cobbs), this article explores the importance of student teacher engagement outside comfort zones and shedding their schooled baggage into the ‘existential territories of childhood’ (Traffi-Plats). Taking up feminist materialist practices such as Haraway’s inseparable ‘natureculture’ and ‘kinship affinities’ and that of ‘childing’ -where getting down on the ground is both literal and methodological (Osgood)- it reveals how the ecopedagogies of weathering, observing, mushrooming, storytelling, recording and making can lead to engaged, unforced and aesthetic learning about playful arts practices through and with the natural environment. Following Braidotti’s ‘micro-narrative’, or small stories and observations that may not have large research significance but as a method tend to nurture educational values, the article includes ecocritical analysis of student experience of an art session held outdoors on their university campus in London, UK, along with micro-narratives of the artists’ work featured as models, notes from the sessions’ observers (Victoria and Clare) and Fiona the session teacher’s reflections, within Primary (ages 4–10) teacher education art programme as a whole. Observing the student teacher’s walks and spirals of growing understanding, an eco- pedagogy or teaching/learning sympoesis becomes possible, as creative methods of accumulative making-with and reflecting-with allow for deeper understandings of the mycelium entanglements involved in making art with children with the environment.