Messily mediating milieu: Enclothed cognition in environmental education

Abstract

This article contributes to environmental education by demonstrating how clothing, understood as mediations, can be used to design embodied, aesthetic and more-than-human learning experiences. As a case of practice-based fieldwork, we stage a forest walk and analyze how clothing reconfigures attention, orientation, and relation, shaping what we call enclothed cognition within an eco-mental milieu. We ask: what do garments do to environmental experience and how can clothing as a mediator support care-full, life-friendly forms of knowing in nature-based education? Methodologically, we present the study as an annotated portfolio combining fieldnotes, reflective writing, and multimodal traces from an event during the International Ecoliteracy Research Festival. Across four cases (personae, a type-writer-as-sound machine, a blue velvet dress, and monstrous writing), we show how clothing operates as a low-tech pedagogical mediator that enables perceptual shifts, ethical attunements, and new relations with environment. We argue that clothing can function as scalable, teacher-adaptable tools for designing sustainability learning as worlding practice, where learning environments emerge through co-performance among bodies, materials, media and more-than-human atmospheres.