Students internalize ecological kinship most fully through creative response

Evidence

When the students start to leave the fire circle with their flashlights in twos and threes to whisper, I sense a conspiracy. Before I know it they are lined up with makeshift song sheets like a choir in the firelight. “We have a little something for you,” they say and start a marvelous anthem of their own creation, filled with crazy rhymes of spruce roots and hiking boots, human needs and marshy reeds, cattail torches on our porches. The song crescendos to a rousing chorus of “no matter where I roam, when I’m with plants I’ll be at home.” I couldn’t imagine a more perfect gift. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 868

Categorization

• XREF: An example for teaching practice — creative synthesis (song-making) as evidence of genuine learning; connects to place-based, arts-integrated pedagogy. — connects to: The plant species one notices reveals that person’s ecological education — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 165; Potawatomi extends family kinship grammar to the whole living world — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 196; Students readily devise concrete ecological reciprocities once asked — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 865 (+2 more)
• SEED: A teaching essay angle: student-generated creative artifacts as the truest measure that a land-based course took hold.

Broader Connections

• Nature’s kinship is affirmed in difference, not only by mirroring the self #expands (0.78) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 508