Entangled Material Literacy: Nonfiction Forest Writings and Forest Experience for a Relational Ecocritical Pedagogy

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 humannonhuman 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.