Introduction
In 2025, the world continues to experience record heat temperatures, climate crises and environmental hazards forcing humans to reckon with our relationship to the earth. These harms pervade schooling spaces as educators attend to the lived experiences of students who face unclean drinking water, exposure to toxic waste, smog and fragile infrastructure as part of their daily living. These environmental injustices are not theoretical to students; they shape their daily living experiences. Exposures to such environmental injustices often correlate along the lines of social positionalities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, citizenship status and social class. The embodied social injustices students face are enmeshed with embodied environmental injustices, pressing educators to consider how to address these experiences in classrooms so that students might be agents of change. We recognise becoming agents of change requires a reorientation to land as community, rather than resource and position as argued by several Indigenous scholars (Bang et al. Reference Bang, Curley, Kessel, Marin, Suzukovich and Strack2014; Cajete, Reference Cajete2000; Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Simpson, Reference Simpson2017). Rather than focusing on developing cognitive knowledge of environmental justice, we are interested in utilising embodied engagements with the more-than-human (Abram, Reference Abram1997) world as part of knowledge construction and reorientations to land. What might it look like to offer these practices to teachers in their pre-service years as they prepare — and they themselves live — in a world saturated with environmental injustices? What embodied experiences might be situated in teacher education or professional development that invite educators to reorient themselves to land in embodied ways?
As graduate students and former K-12 classroom teachers, we seek these questions for ourselves, too. We each continue to seek ways to learn about and be in a relationship with land, and we find ourselves dialoguing about this often as researchers and friends. This research study is born out of these dialogues and shared experiences, particularly with forest therapy. Forest therapy was developed from the Japanese practice of Shinrin Yoku, or immersing oneself with nature. We were introduced to this practice as graduate students in our early 30s and found many of the qualities of forest therapy spoke to our own experiences growing up in rural or environmentally accessible areas. We also found the practice to disrupt some of the Western, capitalist and colonial ways of learning we both grew up with as white, able-bodied women. In our coursework with classes such as postcolonial feminisms, we sought ways of being in the world that engaged decolonial methods, bringing us to forest therapy as a practice. The practice, through contemplative and mindful engagements, supports careful consideration of the more-than-human world as co-learners and co-teachers.
In this study, we engage in a collaborative narrative inquiry of our (the researchers) own experiences engaging with forest therapy as a lens toward critical forest pedagogy. We draw from Rousell and Tran (Reference Rousell and Tran2024) who posit critical forest studies as a “relational framework for analysis and praxis within a place-based, anti-colonial approach” rooted in an “ethics and pedagogy of imminent care” (p. 259). In our collaborative effort, we ask what forest therapy, as a lens for critical forest pedagogies, might offer embodied learning as part of ecojustice education. We are guided by the following research question: how might forest therapy offer rememberings, reorientations and reimaginings of ecojustice and social justice for educators?
This paper engages our experiences and engagements with forest therapy as a pedagogical practice and site of invitation. We draw from embodied learning theories, ecojustice education and Kimmerer’s (Reference Kimmerer2013) conceptual framework of human-land relationship restoration drawn from Indigenous epistemologies to explore how forest therapy offers rememberings and reorientations of ecojustice and social justice. We argue forest therapy offers meaningful implications for educators, environmental education and pedagogical possibilities in addressing environmental justice as social justice.
In the following sections, we detail a literature review of ecojustice education, embodied learning theories and forest therapy. We provide an overview of our conceptual framework and narrative inquiry methods approach. We outline three core findings from our narrative analysis and discuss their interconnected meanings for forest therapy’s pedagogical reorientations. Finally, we discuss implications, limitations and future research directions.
Conceptual framework
To address our research question, we draw from the following bodies of literature: forest therapy literature, embodied and contemplative pedagogies, Indigenous framing of human-land relationship restoration and ecojustice education and pedagogy.
Forest therapy
Forest therapy is a nature-based therapy encouraging slow, guided walks within a forest space to connect with nature through the mind and body, which we see as tied to critical forest studies’ emerging practices and pedagogies. Forest therapy is an extension of the Japanese practice of Shinrin-Yoku, which translates to “forest bathing,” though may also be referred to by several similar terms, including mindful outdoor experiences, nature therapy, forest walks, among others (Gobster et al., Reference Gobster, Schultz, Kruger and Henderson2022). Forest therapy practices are described as “slow, multi-sensory, immersive experiences in forests and other natural and semi-natural environments” (Gobster et al., Reference Gobster, Schultz, Kruger and Henderson2022, p. 1). Generally, research on forest therapy has pointed to its influence on positive psychological and physiological outcomes (Gobster et al., Reference Gobster, Schultz, Kruger and Henderson2022) and creativity (Krigstin et al., Reference Krigstin, Cardoso, Kayadapuram and Wang2023). For example, Kim et al. (Reference Kim, Jeon and Shin2021) found participants experienced a positive increase in mood and subjective well-being after being in a forest. In a study specifically considering teacher well-being, spending time in nature was found to positively affect pre-service teachers’ reduction in rumination and improvement in mood (Allen et al., Reference Allen, Crim, Sosnaud, Barnett and King2023). However, other benefits of forest therapy point to the practice as reshaping orientations to land. Woods et al. (Reference Woods, Nelson, Yazbeck, Danis, Elliott, Wilson, Payjack and Pickup2018) write how being in nature has the potential to reimagine the pedagogy of care about the more-than-human world. Krigstin et al. (Reference Krigstin, Cardoso, Kayadapuram and Wang2023) found forest therapy sessions raise the ecological consciousness of university students, or the “awareness of the interconnections between humans and nature” (p. 9), with students feeling greater kinship, empathy and awe towards the natural world. These discussions point to the ways in which forest therapy might be able to tie social justice and ecojustice together for reorientations, reimaginings and rememberings. Although forest therapy has a range of benefits, no studies have explored how it might be used in teacher preparation to connect and reorient teacher candidates to social justice and ecological justice issues. In our own work, we continue to discuss forest therapy as a pedagogical model.
Embodied and contemplative pedagogies
Embodied learning theories have emerged from scholars that have attempted to push back on the Cartesian dichotomy of mind/body, which privileges the mind over the body or simply views the body as a means to verify knowledge (Macedonia, Reference Macedonia2019; Stolz, Reference Stolz2015). Learning has generally been assumed to be only carried out as a result of “mental or behavioural processes” (Stolz, 2015, p. 475). As a result, education systems are often dominated by a tendency to promote pedagogies that involve cognitive processes, like abstract reasoning or conceptual thinking (Stolz, 2015). Instead, embodied learning seeks to acknowledge the body as integral to learning and to make meaning of our experiences. Several scholars argue educational scholarship should consider — and even centre — the body as a crucial part of pedagogical engagement (Ellsworth, Reference Ellsworth2005; Perry & Medina, Reference Perry and Medina2011). In embodied learning, practitioners consider how bodies are in a relationship and shaped by structures, discourses, time and more. Embodiment recognises the inseparability of the mind, body and spirit, given that all information is “perceived, organized, interpreted and filtered through the body” (Munro, Reference Munro2018, p. 5). In other words, embodied learning recognises that understanding is the result of our own experiences and understandings. As Stolz (2015) writes, we “come to knowledge and understanding through human experience [like sensory experiences] first before coming to understand abstract or intellectual concepts” (p. 481). Contemplative practices, like forest therapy, are also crucial to critical forest studies (Allison, Reference Allison2023; Doshi & Osborne, Reference Doshi and Osborne2023). Contemplative practices hold space for unknowing, centre the body as part of the more-than-human world and deepen personal awareness and critical self-reflection (Allison, Reference Allison2023). Contemplative practices foster connections to local and global community members and, through an ecojustice framework, can foster connections to the more-than-human world (Doshi & Osborne, Reference Doshi and Osborne2023).
Indigenous framing of human-land relationship restoration
Indigenous scholarship centres non-hierarchal engagement and interconnected relationships with the more-than-human world so as to reject and reimagine anthropocentric worldviews. Core to this is an ethic of reciprocity through which humans and more-than humans — such as land, water, animals, bacteria, fungi and others — exist in webs of entangled relationships. Kimmerer (Reference Kimmerer2013) writes that, when these webs become fractured by harmful systems, such as colonialism, capitalism or heteropatriarchy, humans must reorient to move in relationship with land. This reorientation includes a move to reciprocal gratitude and care (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013) and direct relationships as a process of place (Cajete, Reference Cajete2000). Additionally, this reciprocity opens us to “land as pedagogy” (Bang et al., Reference Bang, Curley, Kessel, Marin, Suzukovich and Strack2014; Lees & Bang, Reference Lees and Bang2023; Simpson, Reference Simpson2017) or understanding land as both context and process through which embodied, relational engagements with more-than-human kin as our teachers opens up new pathways of imagination, creativity and technology toward more just, decolonial futures.
Indigenous scholars write that central to reorientation and relationship are embodied interactions, embodied experiences and embodied responsibility of caring for one another: the earth and more-than-humans care for humans, and humans care for more-than-humans in return. This is not to say that this is a transactional relationship, but rather a practice of a “gift economy” (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2024). This relational entanglement, responsibility and learning from and with land are central to critical forest pedagogies. As a lens of critical forest pedagogies, forest therapy invites humans into one particular pathway to engage embodied relationship and gratitude with the more-than-human world.
Ecojustice education & pedagogy
Beltrán et al. (Reference Beltrán, Hacker and Begun2016) name environmental justice as social justice in education, arguing for many communities, environmental racism is a social justice issue rooted in institutional and structural oppression that must be addressed. In response to issues like these, we might consider ecojustice pedagogical practices. Bowers (Reference Bowers2002) proposed an ecojustice pedagogy to teach and learn how social justice is environmental justice. Bowers (Reference Bowers2002) argues for a pedagogical practice expanding notions of community to the natural environment and one in which community is non-commoditised for the sake of marginalised communities. Ecojustice education takes critical aim at what Bowers (Reference Bowers2002) refers to as “root metaphors” or those “assumptions upon which the Western mind-set is based” such as individualism, anthropocentrism and progress as our highest calling (p. 28). By interrogating these root metaphors, Bowers (Reference Bowers2002) argues classrooms can more readily draw connections between the cultural, social and environmental experiences. Several scholars speak to ecojustice pedagogy in science teacher preparation to connect environmental content to social justice issues (Burrell, Reference Burrell and Martin2022; Makrakis, Reference Makrakis and Jimoyiannis2012; Wakefield et al., Reference Wakefield, Weinberg, Pretti, Merritt and Trott2022). Laird (Reference Laird2017) argues anti-racist teaching - as a social justice pedagogical practice - must include teaching toward the experiences of diverse children in the age of climate crises and environmental injustices. In response to similar notions, Martusewicz (Reference Martusewicz2018) describes an ecojustice introductory course for pre-service educators including embodied engagements with land and environment in learning about social and cultural justice issues. This last example provides a promising direction for schools of education and pre-service teacher engagement for more holistic pedagogies speaking to and support the lived realities of all communities.
Methods
We approached this study through collaborative narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry has been conceptualised in different ways, though it broadly speaks to studying the human experience by deriving meaning from story and the storying process (Goodson & Gill, Reference Goodson and Gill2011). As Barkhuizen and Hacker (Reference Barkhuizen and Hacker2009) describe, narrative offers the potential to see the whole story, and “the process of making sense of the stories means unravelling this complexity” (p. 3). Narrative inquiry challenges hegemonic assumptions of legitimate research as having “objectivity, neutrality and distance” (Miller, Reference Miller, Brown and Strega2005, p. 183). Thus, narrative inquiry pushes back on traditional forms of research by using storytelling, dialogue and relationality as a site of resistance (Thomas, Reference Thomas, Brown and Strega2005).
We used Barkhuizen and Hacker’s (Reference Barkhuizen and Hacker2009) collaborative and boundary narrative inquiry design as a framework for our study. Their data collection and analysis design includes the following facets: 1) living the stories, 2) telling the stories in written narratives and 3) analysing and interpreting the stories. We, the researchers, were the participants in this study. We are both fourth-year PhD candidates. Jessica studies teaching and curriculum with focus on teacher preparation and multilingual learners. Amanda studies cultural foundations of education, with a focus on eco-justice and eco-feminist pedagogies. Both authors worked in K-12 and community education for almost a decade before starting PhD coursework. As graduate students, we sought forest therapy for physiological and psychological benefits. We found the practice restorative, though together, we wondered what forest therapy as a practice in teacher preparation might look like, particularly related to orientations around social and ecological justice.
Context
We separately enrolled in forest therapy sessions, with Jessica attending in September 2023 and Amanda attending in January 2024. Throughout 2024 we attended additional sessions, led by our local guide, Susan (pseudonym), who is certified through the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT). Susan regularly leads participants in two-hour sessions through a local nature preserve or state park. Each session is similarly structured, with similar activities, or invitations, woven throughout each session. We present the context as a singular description.
Each session began with an overview of the background of forest therapy and the expectations that the session would be silent and contemplative. Throughout each session, we were offered invitations or opportunities to attend to the land through guided meditations. Some invitations were followed by a sharing circle, where we, along with a small group of participants, shared what we noticed or what we were feeling. We also were given the space to share in whatever way felt most comfortable: any language, embodied expression or silence would be welcome. At the end of the session, Susan offered us a final invitation in the form of a tea ceremony.
In each session, we engaged in 4–5 invitations. These invitations included noticing with the senses, where we sat for 20–25 minutes, and were led through a sensory meditation. With our eyes closed, Susan invited us to listen, smell, feel, taste and move in ways called our bodies within the forest space. In other instances, we were invited to explore the forest floor. Susan gave us magnifying glasses and told us to explore whatever might interest us. Separately, we were drawn to different features, with Jessica exploring moss, lichens and the particularities of fall flowers; Amanda was drawn to exploring the intricacies of leaves. In another invitation, she invited us to make friends with a tree, offering some ways for getting started: gentle introductions, sharing whatever comes to mind and listening for a response. After each of these invitations, we gathered in a circle and Susan presented us with a sharing stick; inviting us to share what we noticed, experienced, felt or even to hold space for silence. In this sharing circle, Susan dissuaded us from commenting or responding to any of the participants sharing, but rather listen intently. Our final invitation was a tea ceremony. After gathering together around a circular mandala blanket on the forest floor, we sat silently as Susan brewed us hemlock-tree tea, which she foraged from a local old-growth forest. As the tea was brewing, we shared our final takeaways and feelings from the session. Before Susan poured us a cup of tea, she first offered a cup to the earth in recognition of and reciprocity towards the natural world and all that the forest offers humans.
After our respective forest therapy sessions, we continued discussing our mutual experiences. We began to meet biweekly to discuss the possibilities of connecting this experience to graduate school, formal schooling places and more extensive conversations about environmental education and social justice. After some months, we settled on a narrative inquiry methodology to explore our experiences and set out to collect formal data about our experiences.
Data sources
Data collection took place over five weeks. Each week, we met to share our stories and experiences with forest therapy. We considered what forest therapy offered us in remembering, reorienting and reimagining what ecojustice and social justice could look like in teacher preparation. Our conversations lasted 30–60 minutes and were recorded and transcribed through AI software, with additional revisions to clean the transcripts. After meeting, we each wrote one-page narratives reflecting on our conversation. We used these narratives as fodder for continued conversation the following week. Our data corpus included 81 pages of narrative transcripts from our recorded conversations and written narrative responses.
Analysis
We analysed the data using thematic deductive analysis. We developed 16 initial codes based on our research question. For example, our initial code list included personal teaching experiences, feelings conveyed, forest therapy practices, forest therapy pedagogy, personal reorientations from forest therapy and personal reorientations outside forest therapy, among others. We separately coded one piece of data, explained our coding choices and came to an agreed upon coding scheme. We independently coded all the data and developed two emergent codes. We recoded for the new emergent codes. We developed eight categories for our initial list of codes. We merged all coded data into separate categories. Given the goals of our initial research question, we revisited the categories to determine which categories would be helpful to explore for themes. We included the categories of Forest Therapy and Reorientations. Finally, we independently developed emergent themes from the categorical data.
Findings
Through narrative inquiry and thematic analysis of the data, three interrelated themes emerged regarding the reorientations Forest Therapy offers:
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• Embracing new modes of perceiving the world
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• Expanding definitions of community
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• Engaging in whole-body learning with an emphasis on humility and vulnerability
We discuss each theme and data pointing to each theme’s conception, followed by discussing the themes’ interrelatedness.
Theme 1: Embracing new modes of perception
Forest therapy emerged as a practice which helped to transform our perception of and relationship with the more-than-human world. Rather than viewing the forest as a passive backdrop on a walk, this practice opened avenues for us to perceive the world around us with a recognition of its agency and capacity for kinship relations. Embodied engagement, which positions the whole body as a source of learning, was especially important in opening up these new modes of perception. Through the embodied and corporeal experiences offered through the invitations — and the attentiveness to the land that came as a result of these sensory experiences — our perceptions were given the space to shift. This included perceiving the wisdom of the trees, or seeing the similarities between our own bodies and that of a leaf.
During one invitation, we were guided to “sit with a tree.” We were told to walk slowly in the forest and find a tree that we were drawn to. Susan gently encouraged us to introduce ourselves to the tree, and get to know the tree for the next 10–15 minutes. We each had different experiences, though both perceived a shift in our relationship towards this animate being in our reflections. Jessica commented:
It does feel completely unfamiliar to do something like that, at least for me, but I found myself open to the process. I will say my gratitude for the tree and… I mean, it sounds ridiculous. But it felt like there was this connection, conversation.
Amanda continued:
It did not feel like the tree was teaching me a lesson, but rather we were having a conversation: We’ll look at my community, [and you] tell me about your community — this back and forth.
Through this invitation, our perception of communication shifted toward inclusion with the more-than-human world, expanding our capacity for community and relationships.
Through these sensory engagements, the body was a source for learning, which shifted our perception of the capacity for knowledge beyond intellectual or cognitive understanding. In another forest therapy invitation, we were offered the opportunity to engage with the forest floor using a magnifying glass. We spent 10–15 minutes on the forest floor, silently examining mosses, leaves, lichen, trees and other critters, noticing with intention and slowly. Amanda describes her experience:
She told us to look at the forest floor [with the magnifying glass]. At some point, I was looking at leaves. I was holding on to the leaf with my thumb. [I was noticing] the stoma and the way the veins of the leaf are splayed out. It was interesting to look at that and [notice] how my skin also has the lines in it the way the leaf does.
Jessica described her experience of perceiving a different world after noticing a taken-for-granted aspect of the forest:
I think it was not too long after I read Gathering Moss that I went on this forest therapy walk. And so, of course, I was interested in the moss. I realised then that I had never actually examined moss to understand what it looked like or how it is this little micro forest.
Thus, engaging in embodied and contemplative practices through forest therapy allowed us to perceive the more-than-human world in new ways, including having capacities for communication and in highlighting our deep interconnectedness. It also opened ways of remembering the body as sources of knowledge, challenging a mind/body dualism and shifting our relationship to forest spaces.
Theme 2: Expanding definitions of learning in community
Forest therapy offered us expanded definitions of learning in community. This included how we conceptualised the human community through the sharing circles within Forest Therapy and the bonds made through the group experience. We also understood the more-than-human world as partners in knowledge construction and knowers in their own right. For example, in a week 2 memo, Jessica shared:
I’m thinking about our ability to be in community with a tree … Being fully present in the moment gave us this opportunity to connect to the more-than-human world.
We felt these more extensive connections to the more-than-human world, and other participants pressed us to consider how community is cultivated in schooling spaces. At its core, we found that forest therapy holds learning as a communal act through which individuals come together to engage with the more-than-human community and the other participants. Amanda wrote:
I don’t think forest therapy is rooted in individualism — both with a group of human persons and then the personhood of trees, moss, slugs, etc., we are experiencing and engaging forest therapy in the community and through community practice. Second, with the other humans, the invitation to share is embedded in the work (and is vulnerable!), and listening to the sharing is part of what we might take away — we always return back to the community at the end of each invitation.
This return to community is not just part of learning — it constructs what learning is and how knowledge is generated. Knowledge occurs within communal structures and is never independent outside of relationship. We found that in learning in community, the purpose of learning is toward communal flourishing rather than individualistic, extractive causes. Amanda summed this, saying:
…when you’re in a forest, no part of the forest shuns another part. It all exists together, and it all needs each other. It is a different way of thinking about students who are brought in and out of rooms. What if those students are integral to the community for us all to flourish. So we actually need the student because we won’t grow the same, the soil won’t be the same. But that is a takeaway from forest therapy as well, but orientation to and of community.
As we connected this to schooling spaces and reorientations, we also discussed the necessity of structures for this flourishing to occur. Within Forest Therapy, the facilitator offers structures in invitations, guidelines and norms, timed engagements and more. These structures offer a safe space where participants can engage deeply with forest therapy practices - a pedagogical practice we also find useful in reorienting school spaces. In a reflection, Jessica wrote:
We translated this to forest communities: there is structure, organisation and boundaries within an ecosystem — these unsaid “rules” become ways for proper functioning, but only in community — in community there is safety in structure.
This expanded notion of community pressed us to consider how more-than-humans and other participants engage together in learning and knowledge production, learning as a practice of a community and the structures necessary for community learning to occur. Ultimately, in these expanded definitions, we came back again and again to the idea that we become through our connection and attention to others — a key tenet also for social justice education.
Theme 3: Embodying learning with humility and vulnerability
Forest therapy emerged as a practice and pedagogy for embodied learning that hinged on dispositions of humility and vulnerability towards the community of practitioners and the forest. Within forest therapy, the body was central to the experience of forest therapy pedagogy. The body was a source of learning and engagement, as we were encouraged to use all our senses — from smelling to feeling to hearing to seeing. By engaging with all our senses, we centred the body as a site of learning, rupturing the mind/body dualism (Nguyen & Larson, Reference Nguyen and Larson2015). Rather than learning about a forest simply through intellectual pursuits, learning emerged with the body’s experiences with the natural world. Humility was central to this process. We cannot necessarily know the land, but we can attend to the experiences and learn. That is, we allowed ourselves to recognise the forest as interconnected — walking slowly, walking quietly, listening to the land, observing with curiosity and allowing ourselves to be wowed by taken-for-granted aspects of nature like leaves, moss or hemlock trees. We became known through the bodies in relation to a larger context, as Amanda notes in a reflection:
just like the slowness and the temporal nature along with the physical nature, like there’s something about forest therapy that is speaking to not just time and not just the body, but time in the body overlapping like there’s something about the body moving slowly… and attending slowly that makes a lot of things more possible.
Forest therapy also relied on the facilitation of embodied learning as a vulnerable practice. Susan, our facilitator, offered invitations but could not force us to learn anything. She holds the space, which is a vulnerable practice, too. Some of the invitations require the body to be fully engaged in ways that may be slightly uncomfortable or novel. In the excerpt below, we see the need for vulnerability in one invitation that asks us to breathe with our tongues out:
Amanda: I think about that initial heart breathing, and she goes through the senses, and she’s like, stick your tongue out, and everyone’s got their eyes closed. And I remember the first time I did it, I was like, I wonder if anyone’s looking at me sticking my tongue out. You know what I mean? You’re like a little self conscious of… I’m not really watching anyone, but I’m kind of watching to see if people are doing it because it’s just so it feels very vulnerable to do things that are like, this could look silly.
Jessica: I was thinking about what other people think or what others will perceive of me standing in the woods and hugging a tree. When you finally quiet your mind a bit of those thoughts and become fully present in the experience it really does offer you just so many different ways of thinking about the world and connection to it.
Finally, through embodied learning theories of social justice, individuals become more aware of how they respond to social injustices and how this affects how individuals see, cultivate and nourish communities of care (Berila, Reference Berila2015). Forest therapy opens up practices of awareness that nurture the development of humility and vulnerability. In humility, we embrace curiosity rather than control. In vulnerability, we embrace a shared experience with a community rather than a limited point of view or experience. Both of these characteristics foster an empathy for trees, for insects and for other humans we share this experience with. We see this empathy as extending toward other beings, sustaining needed orientations for ecojustice and social justice.
Discussion
This study explored how forest therapy as a lens for critical forest pedagogies might offer rememberings, reorientations and reimaginings of ecojustice and social justice for educators. Our conceptual framework human-land relationship restorations, ecojustice education, embodied and contemplative learning theories at the intersection with forest therapy. In line with our conceptual framework, we found that forest therapy as an embodied practice opened up new modes of perception, conceptualisations of community and practices of vulnerability and humility that connected us deeply with the more-than-human world. We found forest therapy offered us reorientations of ecojustice and social justice as educators through these themes.
Two important interconnected findings in the study are how we discussed expanded definitions of learning in community and embodied learning with humility and vulnerability. As connected themes, these emphasise the importance of being with others in our learning practices, be that other humans or the more-than-human world. Our learning — and our transformation occurs through relationships — required vulnerable and humble posturing. This vulnerable and humble posturing only occurs through webs of embodied, reciprocal and direct relationships within place (Cajete, Reference Cajete2000; Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013). Wagner and Shahjahan (Reference Wagner and Shahjahan2015) name embodied learning as essential to more inclusive and socially just worlds that counter oppressive structures so as to engage multiple viewpoints, perspectives and social locations. Here, we discuss how forest therapy, as an embodied communal practice, resists logics of domination, such as individualism and mind–body dualism, two critical structures for upholding interlocking systems of oppression (Warren, Reference Warren2000). While previous research argues for embodied social justice learning, embodied ecojustice learning and ecojustice education as core to anti-oppressive pedagogies, here we find these as enmeshed. Participants are invited to embody resistance to socially unjust structures of individualism and mind–body dualism through engagement with the more-than-human world and then listen to other humans’ experiences as part of this practice.
If researchers call for more approaches to embodied learning in social justice and anti-oppressive pedagogies through contemplative means (Berila, Reference Berila2015), we might consider how forest therapy provides new modes of perception: whose bodies are part of the community? Whose knowledges are core to our practices of critical reflection? How are our bodies sites of knowledge production? And, as Simpson (Reference Simpson2017), how do we understand land as pedagogy? Indeed, by engaging with the more-than-human world as co-creators and co-conspirators, we choose to attend to our embodied relationships with the earth rather than through extractionism or subjugation to land as a resource (Kimmerer, Reference Kimmerer2013; Reference Kimmerer2024). Instead, we operate through what Kimmerer (Reference Kimmerer2024) calls those “gift economies” in which resources move freely through webs of relationship. In this shift of perception, a contemplative engagement with the land welcomes a pedagogy of unknowing (Ellsworth, Reference Ellsworth1989) in which participants do not have access to all knowledge - what human can truly know the wisdom of trees?- but does have space to listen, attend and learn with. How, then, does this change the way I engage with my own body? With other humans? How do I learn to trust, believe and advocate for the most vulnerable around me?
Finally, we found that these interconnected themes provided new pathways forward as educators and graduate students. As educators, we are encouraged to commit to embodied learning and engagement in our classrooms with undergraduate students, particularly in fostering spaces of vulnerability and humility through dialogue, attention and care. We also found that this strengthens our approach to eco-justice and social justice education with a more holistic practice by considering how all living beings are subjugated under systems of oppression and how this subjugation is directed at the most marginalised and vulnerable communities.
Implications
Our study explored how forest therapy as a lens for critical forest pedagogies might offer educators rememberings, reorientations and reimaginings of ecojustice and social justice. As researchers, we attempt to name the implications of this work in our theorising and praxis and what this might mean for environmental education and larger pedagogical possibilities.
First, we name how forest therapy continues to offer us new ways of seeing the world and learning in community. These ethic-ontological reorientations open up pathways for transforming our relationality to forests, water, more-than-human kin, as well as the ways in which humans relate to one another. These transformations speak back to the colonial, capitalistic, heteropatriarchal structures that orient humans to destructive environmental practices, and instead, move us to ways of being with embodied and entangled webs of community and cooperation. This study alone as a collaborative effort offered us new ways of practicing vulnerability and humility in the community of scholarship and caused us to reflect on how we might carry the forest therapy’s pedagogical practices in our own classrooms.
Second, forest therapy’s reorientations have two implications for environmental education. First, forest therapy is an avenue by which environmental and social justice educators might couple efforts to address structural inequalities. By these we do not mean that we simply learn about inequalities, but that forest therapy offers pathways of repair and healing that address relational fractures rendered by these inequalities. Second, as an embodied practice, forest therapy emphasises communal learning by engaging with other humans and the more-than-human world. This epistemological embodiment seeks to “teach” students about environmental justice but also offers reorientations to being with the environment in new and connective ways beyond human-centric ontologies.
Third, in critical forest pedagogical possibilities, forest therapy’s reorientations suggest meaningful climate action does not necessarily emerge from knowledge alone, but from reorienting and re-membering mind, body and land. In these conceptualisations, more-than-human kin become co-agents of resistance and community-building rather than extractive resources or sites of despair. We do not suggest that forest therapy is the only means of enacting critical forest pedagogies, but rather this is one small pathway to advance this area of inquiry. Forest therapy models effective critical forest pedagogical approaches that could be transferred or reinforced in classroom spaces, including mindfulness engagements, embodied practices, slowness, attention practices, postures of vulnerability and humility and learning in community. Forest therapy also offers possibilities of blending embodied social justice and ecojustice work. Finally, forest therapy might situate well for practitioners of place-based education as a localised practice in attending to trees, mosses, birds, sounds, etc., through intimate embodied engagements. As such a localised and intimate practice, this may foster a desire and will to engage in climate change in meaningful ways.
Concluding remarks
This narrative inquiry sought to explore how forest therapy as a lens for critical forest pedagogies, as an embodied contemplative learning practice, offers ontological reorientations to community and learning practices. Through our thematic data analysis, we identified three reorientations: embracing new modes of perceiving the world, expanding definitions of community and engaging in whole-body learning emphasising humility and vulnerability. These reorientations point to possibilities of embracing embodied learning methods as a site for environmental justice as social justice.
In any study limitations exist, and ours is no exception. We recognise that as a small-scale qualitative self-narrative study to hold space for a deep analysis process; however, this comes at the sacrifice of breadth. Broader research is needed with social justice practitioners and teacher educators about the long-term impacts of forest therapy on teacher and student orientations to the more-than-human world. As white, able-bodied women with settler status, we recognise our access and engagement with land looks and feels differently, particularly so in approaches within Western contexts. As we continue our work, we also seek in our scholarship to understand forest therapy as a practice of inclusivity and accessibility.
As we and others continue moving this work forward, we have several considerations and possibilities for future work. First, we seek to understand how forest therapy practices and critical forest pedagogy could be embedded in social justice classrooms at both the K-12 and higher education levels and the affordances of having learners engage in such practices. More research is needed to understand how forest therapy might be embedded within curricular instruction and how students connect forest therapy to larger conversations on climate change. We also consider how forest therapy and critical forest pedagogies might be implemented in US curricular contexts. We also seek to uncover how forest therapy may be constrained by teacher education and the neoliberal reforms that have standardised and homogenised curricula, standards and requirements. We also seek possibilities for where this practice might create new pathways and opportunities. Finally, as a source of hope and emergent possibilities, forest therapy sessions would be an excellent space for employing positive discourse analysis to uncover how hope and transformation can be understood through these practices.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the guest editors for their labour, energy and care with this special issue and to the reviewers and peers for providing feedback and encouragement to strengthen this piece. Lastly, we extend our deepest gratitude to the forests, land and more-than-human who gave us inspiration for this manuscript.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Ethical Standard
Nothing to note.
Author Biographies
Jessica Fundalinski (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Teaching & Curriculum program at Syracuse University. Her focus is at the intersection of teacher preparation, multilingual learners and humanising educational practices. She is a former public school teacher and Fulbright scholar.
Amanda M. Kingston (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Cultural Foundations of Education program at Syracuse University. Her research draws from eco-justice studies, ecofeminist inquiries, peace studies, postcolonial studies and collective memory studies along an interdisciplinary foundations of education approach. She has worked as a classroom and community educator since 2012.
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