Remarkable‐tracking, experiential education of the ecological imagination

Abstract

Imagination might be understood as letting our senses, perceptions and sensibilities run free for no apparent reason. Here, for this special edition what might be ‘remarkable’ is the ‘opening’ of our imagination provided orally through storytelling. This opening involves the ‘placing’ of our own and our listeners’ embodied selves in the spatio‐temporal geographies of those stories and their more‐than‐human natures. The remarkable opening is an important experiential dimension of becoming aware of the ecological otherness of nature’s places. Yet, opportunities for such embodied and storied encounters with nature’s places, in the wildly imagined other, are less available to children in what, increasingly, is a fast, literate, urban, technologically saturated and consumptive postmodern world. Story, storytelling, art, illustration, song and poetry provide animated means that, pedagogically, might re‐place children within an ecocentric sense of self. For over 30 years, the author has told gnome‐tracking stories in mysterious places so as to invite young school children and pre‐service teacher educators to sense, perceive and (re)imagine their (un)tamed ecological otherness and their intimate connections with more‐than‐human natures. This article briefly outlines the author’s ‘significant life experience’ encounter with Robert Ingpen, illustrator and author of gnome stories. It highlights how the embodied dance of visual illustration and oral storytelling experienced in natural settings provides a playful means for listeners to explore, discover and relate to their inner, social and more‐than‐human natures and places. The article concludes with a series of cues about an ‘ecopedagogy of imagination’, whose end‐in‐view is to establish some grounds for artful pedagogues to nurture the still elusive reconciliation of human, social and more‐than‐human natures.

Keywords:

• ecopedagogy
• environmental criticism
• children’s literature
• story
• imagination
• illustration
• experiential education
• autoethnography

Acknowledgements

Robert Ingpen, Thomas Nielsen and Rosie Rosengren are thanked for their contributions to earlier drafts of this manuscript and for their longstanding friendship and support for the more‐than‐ordinary and untamed. Thanks to the Faculty of Education at Monash University for grant D01009 225 8520 that supported the color reproduction of plates for this publication.