The forest is a place that is both familiar and strange.
Excursions to the forest with preschoolers usually starts with creating a sense of safety. Everything is new despite us knowing these are trees, leaves and bark, the ground, roots and plants, as well as the animals that inhabit the space. What we don’t know is how all of this interacts in this specific place - where are the rocks too steep, where do the roots trip you over, where do the nettles sting and where is that invisible line where you are suddenly lost?
A trust develops between the children, the educator and the forest. We develop a relationship and the sense of freedom grows. Each time we visit there is a sense of friendship, we ask to enter and we reveal our intentions according Skogs Mulle traditions (https://www.owlscotland.org/images/uploads/cluster_groups/Skogsmulle_-_the_start.pdf) we follow our usual route and choose which of our favourite areas we want to play and explore.
Yet each time the forest is strange.
Something new, something unexpected, something never noticed before. Which can mean, as an educator, we have to embrace the strange as our co-teacher rather than fear it.
In a classroom everything is predictable, in its place and the outside world seldom interferes with the plans of the educator. This lack of strangeness weighs the classroom down with a simplicity that can exclude some. The forest’s strangeness provides multiple spaces and experiences which in turn provides more opportunities for the children to identify with, find their needs met and their development suitably challenged.
The experiences in the forest can be brought back to the preschool and expressed through storytelling, science, music and art. These expressed reflections deepens the children’s understanding of the forest, the inter-connectness and their role in it.
The forest is undisciplined… in the sense we cannot control it to fit neatly into our curriculum, yet at the same time every discipline can be experienced here - it is transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary… it is beyond discipline.
As an educator I can never be certain of what exactly will happen in the forest, I can plan and I can have expectations… and sometimes they are met. But there is also the risk of it being something else… something better and also something worse than expected, and sometimes just something different. I have been labelling risky play as
Play with Uncertain Outcomes…
and this kind of play is most definitely in abundance in the forest.
The forest has been a space where I have been trying to slow down… my husband jokes that I am trying to melt into the forest. This is something I have also tried to gift the children I work with.
To slow down, look closely and listen deeply.
To notice what usually goes unnoticed. In a way to “make strange” the forest that I have worked hard to help the children feel they belong to.
This takes us to Moomin Valley - a series of stories intended for children. The darkness of the Finnish Forest is similar to that of the Swedish forest and so the children and I can identify with the landscapes in the books. They are stories that have a powerful adult subtext about gender, sexuality, war, political systems, indigenous communities, whiteness, the liveliness of the forest, and impossibilities of navigation…
How can we work with the generative possibilities presented in Moomin Valley to grapple with the problematics of capitalist logic, capitalist ruins, and community?
Storytelling has been the greatest connecting tool between the forest, myself and the children. The Moomin stories often reflect on the other, and on loneliness and these are things that frequently occupy the children’s minds. Their fear of being alone, their fear of the other, the strange, and also the fear of being othered.
Children are quick to see that “different” or “strange” often results in loneliness.
From a forest perspective there are many different things that create the forest whole, from root to canopy and everything in-between. It is the diversity that makes the whole healthy. New forests and monoculture approaches, singular tree species all planted at the same time means there is not the same woodland wisdom of a natural mixed age, mixed species forest. Many of the groups I go to the forest with have been mixed age groups - and events like the International Fairy Tea Party have introduced the forest to the very youngest together with the older children and the wonder of magic and role-play.
The Moomin forest is also filled with magical and strange creatures. Just as our forests have been inhabited with the fairies, trolls and creatures that we have imagined dwelling there and we have even found “evidence” of them existing. These strange imaginings have been how the children have processed their fears and wonderings and fuelled their curiosity - they are the children’s past, now and future, their ceasing to be and becoming - just as Tove Jansson’s creatures were a way of her processing her past to be able to move forward.
It has been suggested (Heinämaa, 2017) that the autumn forest in Moomin Valley in November is in fact the main character of the book and the story is not simply about the troll family and friends but also about their relationship with the forest as a life form. The forest has agency, it is not just a passive entity that things get done to it. The forest influences those that interact with it.
In this sense the forest shifts from being an object, that can be more easily clear-cut and consumed, to a thing with power. By using “thing” instead of “object” Bennet (2010) positions her theory of vibrant matter outside of the binary of subject-object. Essentially implying that the forest is not “dull” like an object, but vibrant like humans and other living beings. And like the vibrant forest, filled with visitors - co-existing in symbiosis or in competition, the same of humans.
We, as human bodies, could be considered the forest or vessel for microbes, both those who work in symbiosis and those that can bring sickness and even death.
The strangeness is being able to see ourselves as a kind of microbe in the forest - making the decision as to whether we choose to live in symbiosis and promote our long term well being, or whether our need to consume the forest for human gains will ultimately kill the host and ourselves with it?
Heinämaa, Sara. "Strange vegetation: Emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November: " SATS, vol. 19, no. 1, 2018, pp. 41-67. https://doi.org/10.1515/sats-2017-3002
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham (N.C.): Duke University Press.