Conference Program

The paper explores the implementation of the “Council of All Beings” (Fleming & Macy, 1988) as an experiential and ecocentric practice of environmental education for school-aged children. Rooted in the philosophical movement of Deep Ecology, which conceptualizes the human–nature relationship in terms of equality, this tradition articulates the formation of the ecological self as an expanded form of subjectivity that transcends narrowly defined human boundaries and is constituted through relational engagement with the nonhuman world (Naess, 1988). In parallel, it foregrounds the significance of embodied, narrative, and ritual forms of participation in cultivating ecological consciousness (Bragg, 1996; Ohlsson, 2025).

The Council of All Beings was implemented in a primary school in the Pelion region of Greece, situated within an agro-forestry ecosystem of high biodiversity, and involved 10-year-old students. Children were invited to engage with the local nonhuman beings. Through the integration of ritual and drama-based techniques, processes of identification, empathy, and ethical proximity toward the nonhuman world were fostered. The educational process included inquiry into the local natural environment, the adoption of roles representing non-human beings and entities, symbolic representation through mask-making, and the convening of the council across three phases. The intervention concluded with collaborative creative writing and theatrical performance.

The findings, derived from students’ reflective responses and the qualitative analysis of their narratives, indicate the emergence of a critical awareness of anthropogenic intervention in local ecosystems and the vulnerabilities imposed upon nonhuman beings. Concurrently, strong expressions of biophilia (Wilson, 1984), strengthened sense of place (Gruenewald, 2003), and a reconfiguration of their relationship with nonhuman others (Bogan, 2012) emerged. Overall, the results suggest that the Council of All Beings can function as a place-based pedagogical approach that supports a transition from anthropocentric toward ecocentric forms of ecological citizenship, contributing to the early formation of ecological subjectivity within primary education.

Developing ecological awareness in childhood requires educational practices capable of fostering attentive encounters with the living world (Meier, 2020). In outdoor contexts, the ways experiences are observed, recorded and revisited play a crucial role in shaping how children understand natural environments and the life’s diversity they host. Documentation practices can function as pedagogical devices supporting observation, interpretation and meaning-making processes (Dardanou & Karlsen, 2023) in relation to biodiversity.
This contribution offers a theoretical and methodological reflection on outdoor documentation through visual-expressive tools (Moula et al., 2022), with particular attention to nature sketching and photographic practices in early childhood education. Drawing on literature from environmental education and visual methodologies, the reflection explores how multimodal documentation (Luini, 2025) can sustain children’s engagement with natural environments and support emerging understandings of biodiversity.
Research on drawing in educational contexts highlights how nature sketching can act as a cognitive tool that slows down observation and deepens attention (Monteira et al., 2022). When children attempt to represent plants, animals or environmental elements through drawing, their gaze repeatedly returns to the observed subject, encouraging them to notice details, textures and structural differences that might otherwise remain unnoticed. Such processes can support recognition of variation within and between species, an important dimension of understanding biodiversity. Studies analysing children’s drawings of gardens, plants or local environments show that prolonged outdoor experiences can lead to increasingly detailed representations and a greater diversity of organisms depicted (Zaballa et al., 2021). Differences in the number and variety of plants represented, attention to morphological features and the use of colours related to ecological processes have been interpreted as indicators of children’s developing knowledge of the living world.
In addition to drawing, photography can function as a complementary tool for documenting outdoor experiences. Photographic documentation allows children to capture fleeting moments, relationships between organisms, seasonal changes and spatial configurations of environments that might otherwise be difficult to retain (Ardoin et al., 2014). When revisited collectively, photographs can become mediators for dialogue and reflection, supporting children in articulating observations and interpretations about the environments they explore. In some cases, research approaches such as photo-elicitation or photovoice may further enrich these processes, yet photography can serve as a medium for recording and discussing encounters with biodiversity (Walimbe, 2025).
From a methodological perspective, integrating drawing, photography and narrative reflection within outdoor educational experiences may create multimodal documentation processes that value diverse forms of expression and participation. Such practices are particularly relevant in early childhood settings, where visual languages allow children to communicate perceptions and understandings not yet fully articulated through verbal language.
Overall, the contribution suggests that visual documentation practices can support forms of slow, situated engagement with biodiversity, enabling children to notice diversity in everyday environments and construct meanings about living systems through observation, representation and dialogue. By fostering attentive ways of seeing the living world, these practices may contribute to the development of early ecological sensibilities and nuanced understandings of relationships between humans and the plurality of life forms.

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.

The current eco-climatic crisis, made evident by the “intrusion of Gaia” (Stengers, 2013) into public debate, calls for a profound revision of the paradigms through which humanity interprets its position in the world. In this context, the category of “hyperobjects” (Morton, 2013) offers a particularly significant interpretative key for understanding phenomena such as global warming, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification. These phenomena cannot be understood simply as natural “catastrophes”; rather, they appear as entities distributed across spatial and temporal scales that radically exceed human experience. They are ubiquitous, viscous, and nonlocal, manifesting themselves only through perceptual and cognitive fragments. This condition produces a profound epistemological and ontological disorientation, since it dissolves the illusion of a clear separation between the human and the non-human and compels us to recognize that humanity lives “within” planetary processes that exceed its capacity for control and representation (Id, 2018). In such a scenario, education is confronted with a decisive challenge: to rethink its fundamental categories and to overcome a long anthropocentric tradition that has conceived education as a process of emancipation from the natural or animal dimension. Yet attempts to decentre the human may generate new aporias. On the one hand, reductive forms of naturalism risk dissolving the specificity of the human within an impersonal natural order; on the other, processes of anthropomorphization project typically human characteristics onto natural entities (Chiurazzi, 2021). The question thus becomes how to rethink the relationship between the human and the non-human in ways that acknowledge both interdependence and difference. In this direction recent pedagogical reflections (Oliverio, 2024) have proposed extending the notion of world-centred education (Biesta, 2021) to encompass the complex web of relations that includes other “companion species” (Haraway, 2016). From this perspective, a dialogue with theoretical fields such as biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer, 2008) and ecosemiotics (Maran, 2020) may prove particularly fruitful. The idea that processes of signification traverse the entirety of living systems suggest the possibility of fostering experiences capable of making perceptible the web of connections that constitutes the living world (Galimberti, 2024; Luini et al., 2025). In this way, the encounter with hyperobjects does not merely produce anxiety or paralysis; rather, it becomes an opportunity to develop new forms of ecological sensitivity and to initiate a process of re-composing a shared common world.

"Che clima che fa..." is an educational project focused on climate change, involving some 20 teachers and 150 students (primary and lower secondary) in three schools situated in the Venice Lagoon area, belonging to the national school network Rete di Dialogues for Futures (retedialogues.it).The project aims to engage participants both cognitively and emotionally, transforming students into "proactive researchers" through learning paths that acquire and share awareness of the climate crisis and potential solutions. Different aspects of the Venice Lagoon are explored to discover how they change, and how this can be documented with communication technologies. Learning environments are created where schools act as bridges between experts and local communities.

Moving beyond a strictly scientific approach, “Che clima che fa” tackles the often-neglected social, cultural, and emotional dimensions of climate change. It seeks to devise activities which allow to better understand how eco-anxiety and the feelings of helplessness or discomfort young people often face operate and can be prevented.

The main goals of the project are the development of:

- awareness on how young students experience climate change and how they can position themselves in a constructive way.

- teaching tools to integrate climate education into the curriculum

- strategies that enhance students’ agency in becoming global citizens and taking active, informed roles in their communities

- experiences that make students authors of messages to their community

- initiatives to engage families and the local territory and create a widespread "educational ecosystem."

Three integrated learning approaches are adopted:

- Place-Based Education (PBE) that emphasizes the connection between learning and the specific physical location where students and teachers live. Here students are engaged cognitively, emotionally, and physically by using their local community and environment (in this case, the lagoon area) as a "living laboratory." Students become proactive researchers of their own local culture and ecology, applying abstract scientific concepts to real-world local challenges.

- Trialogical Learning Approach (TLA) a Finnish approach assuming that learning is most effective when students work together to build something useful that has impact beyond the classroom. Here learning involves interactions between teachers, students, and a "shared object" (product). In the project, students and teachers work with experts to create multimedia messages to share with peers and the community, illustrating their scientific findings and laboratory experiences in the Lagoon.

- Action Research, an operational perspective where teaching is combined with ongoing observation and the use self-reflective tools by teachers and students. By reflecting on the dynamics of the learning process as it happens, educators can develop new tools and strategies to improve. Meanwhile new knowledge is made available for practitioners and researchers on how things occur in a challenging context such as that of environmental education and climate change education.

Within the framework described above the case study explores the actions enacted and sheds light on the processes elicited, on teachers and students’ reactions and feelings from the field. Hints are offered for research developments and replications.