Seeing Trees: Investigating Poetics of Place-Based, Aesthetic Environmental Education with Heidegger and Wittgenstein

It is common in environmental education literature to read about 'transforming' mindsets; for example, moving from humanist to post-humanist viewpoints, or adopting Indigenous Knowledge perspectives. To illustrate how complicated such conceptual shifts are, both philosophically and pedagogically, the paper explores how we come to see and regard trees, using the evergreen oak tree in the cloister at New College, Oxford. Philosophically, the case builds upon Stephen Mulhall's work on seeing aspects, drawing on Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Pedagogically, the author illustrates what place-based environmental education can offer by narrating a session conducted with participants at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain conference. Discursive interventions are described in order to demonstrate the philosophical, aesthetic and cross-disciplinary work needed to alter (even slightly) perspectives that have become second-nature ways of seeing beings such as oak trees. These vignettes are genealogical, juxtaposing past/present landscapes and bringing participants to examine conceptual/emotional binaries like inside/outside, human/animal, enculturation/education, and environmental science/poetics of being. Wittgenstein's anthropological parable of how oak trees came to be venerated illustrates the way concepts, perceptions and practices are interwoven in the rituals and second-nature reactions of people sharing a form of life, changing gradually throughout their cultural and natural history.