«A work of attention». Place based writing in upper secondary school as an eco-pedagogical practice: an educative research

Abstract

The ecological crisis pushes us to think differently about school, starting from the relationships between subjects and the natural world. This educational research developed and analyzed some place-based writing practices in an upper secondary school. Poetic-metaphorical placebased writing is explored as an opportunity to give voice to the encounter between adolescent students, places and nature. Emerging processes and themes were explored from a phenomenological perspective, combining grounded theory and art-based research inquiry approaches. The analysis emphasizes the complexity of the outdoor learning experience and highlights the perception of discontinuity with respect to the indoor school context; the relevance of the embodied and sensorial dimension in the writing process; a broader sense of attention for what is other. A deeper sense of relation with the natural word emerged, but the explicit emergence of environmental issues was less relevant.