Along the riverbank: Place writing and student teachers’ environmental affordance-ability

Abstract

In this paper we follow six Norwegian student teachers and their professor during a hike in the fall of 2023. Through the students’ place writing, we explore their attention to water and the surrounding landscape. Our aim was to experiment with place writing as part of a course on “critical cultural literacy” in the teacher education program at the University of Stavanger. We did not develop succinct research questions from the start, although we searched for parallels between cultural diversity, which was already a theme in our course, and non-human diversity. To achieve this, we designed a research study inspired by participatory action research.