Entangled Material Literacy

Nonfiction Forest Writings and Forest Experience for a Relational Ecocritical Pedagogy

Bibliographic Data

ID17660660
AuthorsChak-kwan Ng (0000-0002-8499-6794, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume42
Issue1
Pages365-378
Publication date2026-01-19
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Journal of Environmental Education (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0814-0626 • E-ISSN: 2049-775X
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/aee.2025.10115
OpenAlexW7124700884
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited21

Ecocriticism often employs a mimetic, text-based model that includes literary analysis of canonical nature writings complemented with wilderness excursions seeking verification of literary representations and place-based experience. I suggest that in order to better integrate ecocriticism within the Environmental Humanities’ decolonial and material turns, a pedagogy of “entangled material literacy” should be explored. This approach, grounded in biosemiotics and new materialist thought, enables a relational reading of nonfiction forest writings like Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees , positioning the forest as a co-author in these works. Aligning with critical forest studies, this project examines the forest’s biosemiotic intelligence and agential multiplicities in human–nonhuman communicative meaning-making. Moreover, as reflected by the authors’ personal connections to forests, I argue that teaching entangled material literacy necessitates embodied experience, where the forest becomes a co-teacher, cultivating students’ competency for responsive engagement with a sentient more-than-human world

Biosemiotics · Ecocriticism · Embodied cognition · Materialism · Posthumanism · Semiotics · Wilderness · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Indigenous and Place-Based Education · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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