Would you lay me low beneath your feet?
Listen to my sap mutter.
Hear my heartwood beat.
Would you throw me on the log-pile cutter?
Would you toss me to the steel saw blade?
Listen to my leaves flutter.
Hear my heartwood break.
Heartwood, Spell Songsi
Knowledge in the Heartwood
A tree’s heartwood is the dense, mature wood found at the centre. It is the oldest part of the tree, which has often observed centuries of life. Heartwood might be considered as the embodiment of a collection of deep-rooted memories that have captured the stories of our Earth in the form of particles, communicated in annual tree rings. If we were to look closely, we might reach into this cavernous environmental knowledge it has preserved, alongside the stories told through roots, trunk, branches, and flowers.
Environmental education, including the research and scholarly literatures it has elicited, has much in common with the heartwood of a tree. In the book, The World We’ll Leave Behind, Bill Scott and Paul Vareii remind us that since the beginning of the biosphere all education was environmental, as our survival rested on this knowledge – for our food, our shelter, and our safety. At the forefront of environmental education were Indigenous peoples. They learnt to listen to the inhale and exhale of the Earth and become attuned to the biosphere’s excesses and famines. Today’s westernised notion of environmental education has roots in Rachel Carson’s 1960s book Silent Spring, which turned our gaze to the negative impacts of humans on Earth’s systems. Over the past 50 years, the irony is that whilst the environmental and social challenges have become ever more pressing, the expanse in rich, deep, philosophical academic literatures concerning environmental education have similarly grown. Indeed, none so much than in last decade.
In academia, such scholarly work might be considered as our heartwood. Similar to the practice of listening into the stories trees have to tell, scholarly work also requires us to sit still, to listen, and to consider a range of perspectives. This too requires time and patience; it requires guidance. In a busy and noisy world, time can feel like a scarce resource, and guidance can be challenging to trust. The result is that much work has gone unread, and when it has been read, the readership is limited to academics, leaving the important messages and calls for action unheard to the majority. This silent neglect can be witnessed in scholarly repetition, as well as in the conservative and regressive policy and research programmes that keep us entrenched in the business-as-usual practices which have arguably brought us to the climate crisis we find today.
MA Module: Environment, Sustainability, and the role of Education
Here at King’s in the School of Education, Communication and Society, the co-creation of the MA module Environment, Sustainability, and the role of Education, was a direct response to the need to connect a greater audience to the literatures concerning the complex and multi-faceted field of environmental education. The module guides our students, many of whom are professional STEM-related educators, through the historical, political and philosophical landscape of environmental education academic literature. The module opens up our students’ thinking, going beyond discussions of “best practice” and “evidence”, to observe and critique the dominant discourses which are embedded in contemporary environmental-related education. In doing so, we navigate learning through the sticky ground of how capitalism has come to shape our engagement with nature, the role that international and national policies play in agenda setting, alongside the tensions faced when designing an environmentally-just education. We mine ideas of activism, educators’ beliefs and self-efficacy, and alternative forms of practice. We provoke conversations concerning organisational responsibilities, including turning the gaze on ourselves as a higher education institution, to explore how are sector is stepping up to grapple with global emergencies and ask whether educators have the capabilities required to respond. In doing this work, we encourage our students to become attuned to and adept in the language required to broker environmental and social divides.
In essence, akin to tapping maple trees for their syrup, we seek to extract and distil the heartwood of academic literatures. As a consequence, we have been very alert to the irony and tension caused by prioritising the scholarly texts as a product of the mind, over the lived and embodied experiences of the heart. In developing a module within the constraints of a higher education programme, with specific assessment demands, we wanted to ensure that whilst these were appropriately addressed, there were opportunities when the hearts, imaginations and experiences of our students were set free. These openings were gradually threaded through the seminars, where we were all called on to be brave.
Going further
Distilling the heartwood that is locked away in the scholarly texts hasn’t ended with the final assessment. We wanted the module discussions and resulting student research projects to be communicated further. Whilst we encouraged the development of academic writing during the programme we understood that this mode of writing would not necessarily enable our students to communicate their new understandings naturally beyond the gates of the university. Colleagues, friends, family and neighbours were consistently noted as intended recipients for these important, but often complicated issues, bound up in environmental and social change. That’s why, whilst we wished to share the ideas from the module, we knew it needed to be digestible. The result was Heartwood, published in 2023, followed up earlier this year by Heartwood 2; two essay collections written by alumni, current students and staff.
The essay authors have been brave: written from the heart, rather than in the academic style they were used to, they imagined their mum, brother or friend as the audience with whom they wanted to share their work. The process was as important as the outcome. So, whilst the chapters are single-authored, they were all developed communally. Shirin Hine and Sophie Perry (my co-editors), both environmental education PhD candidates, were crucial here in creating an atmosphere that encouraged risk-taking to flex a more heartfelt narrative.
Heartwood: mutter and beat
The blog opened with a verse from Heartwood a song motivated by the decline of nature-based literacy with the desire to reverse this trend. Inspired by the song, the two collections of essays seek to do something similar. That is they aim to distil the knowledge and wisdom of academic literatures from their mutter to reach a wider audience, in the hope that the reader will feel inspired to listen closer to the planetary heartbeat and take action to protect, maintain and support her.