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This paper presents early insights from an ongoing educational research project that explores how plant-centred reflective practices can support more relational, biodiverse, and world-based forms of education. The work originated in Treesense, a European project developed with product designer Secil Ugur Yavuz, and later evolved into the reflective diary and publication Sentire con le piante. Since 2022, the diary has been administered to student teachers in Primary Education and to in-service educators and teachers; between 2022 and 2025, more than 200 diaries were collected.

The diary accompanies participants through a gradual process of attention, observation, drawing, photography, imagination, and autobiographical writing. In the first phase, participants are invited to choose and observe a tree over time; in the second, they develop a parallel relationship with a houseplant. In the final sections, they are asked to shift perspective and imagine how the tree or plant might perceive human beings, what it might say, and how it might interpret gestures of care, neglect, haste, or attention. This imaginative decentring seeks to challenge anthropocentric habits of perception and to foster forms of interspecies empathy and biophilic connection (Kellert & Wilson, 1993; Barbiero & Berto, 2021; Jones, 2020).

The presentation discusses the first recurring patterns emerging from the initial analysis of the corpus. Preliminary findings suggest that the diary functions as a pedagogical device for slowing down perception, strengthening observational attention, and eliciting emotional, ecological, and autobiographical reflection. Participants often move from a descriptive stance to a relational one: plants are no longer treated as passive background or decorative objects, but as living presences, companions, witnesses, and sometimes teachers. This shift resonates with recent pedagogical work on education and nature, outdoor and ecological learning, and the need to cultivate more attentive relationships with the living world (Guerra, 2015; Antonietti, Bertolino, Guerra, & Schenetti, 2022).

The diaries also reveal memories, attachments, and affective resonances linked to plants, suggesting that plant-based practices may help counter what Wandersee and Schussler (1999) famously termed plant blindness. The use of reflective writing is especially relevant here: journals can support formative learning by making experience observable, narratable, and open to interpretation (Moon, 2006; Bolton & Delderfield, 2018). At the same time, the vegetal perspective emerging from the diaries connects with current reflections in plant studies and environmental humanities, which invite us to reconsider plants as dynamic, communicative, and world-making beings (Marder, 2013; Viola, 2021).

Overall, the project suggests that learning with plants can foster an educational shift from studying nature as an external object to experiencing oneself as part of an interdependent community of life. In this sense, a simple reflective diary can open aesthetic, narrative, and ecological pathways in teacher education, helping participants reimagine education as a practice of attention, reciprocity, and coexistence across species. It also confirms the value of combining observation with imagination: not as an escape from knowledge, but as a way of widening it through sensorial, emotional, and ethical involvement. Such practices may enrich teacher education by integrating scientific attention, narrative inquiry, and more-than-human responsibility.