Phenomenological writing at an island beach: Encouraging connection with nature . . . and its limits

Abstract

This article explores the value and limits of phenomenological writing aimed at helping students “connect with nature” in outdoor settings. It focuses on a fieldtrip to the beach whose purposes are many-layered: to help students in the social media age be fully present to the natural world around them; to help them recognize, articulate and develop their capacity to perceive the natural world and feel engaged with it; and to feel related to each other as sensate creatures. My ultimate goal is ontological: 1) to help students gather bodily experiences and reflections as fuel for questioning the modern notion of the self as acquisitive, separative, rational, self-interested, and embedded primarily in commercial and social media networks, and 2) to let experiences in nature inspire them to imagine alternative understandings of who and what we are. Students later engage with decolonial writings to put their experiences into fuller cultural context (e.g., Vine Deloria Jr.’s distinction between tourist, settler and Indigenous relations to land). This is where the most serious limits of phenomenological writing activities aimed at enhancing “connection to nature” appear; namely, the need at some point to understand experiences of “connection to nature” in the context of Indigenous/settler realities.