Earth’s Love Letters: Locating loving pedagogies

Abstract Dear Reader∼Earth, How can we refuse education as a content machine stream? How can we love our more-than-human- selves out of the dark into education spaces that care? Instigated by a love letter to Earth, the collaborators in this ‘letter to the editors’ enter a correspon-dance with place about co-mentorship and sustenance. As a post-qualitative inquiry this piece resists mining the world for meaning, and instead, the authors (and Earth) creatively compose this conceptual paper with some image and text-rich conversational ramblings alongside poetics of feminist black scholars and poets. The letters meet places, spaces and bodies on the page – data analysed is data again. Four letters emerge informed by contemporary environmental philosophy, wilding pedagogies, and place-based education. They speak to researchers and teachers on unceded, unsurrendered, colonised lands, themselves an act of solidarity from the two settler∼authors. The pile of loving letters tell the tale of two people on Earth, as Earth, re-imagining pedagogical theory and practice in relation to Earth in an exhibition of living with pedagogy. This process of ‘wilding’ your own pedagogies regularly – as loving pedagogies – is offered as worth considering. Please enjoy this compilation of letters addressed to you, Earth. Love from Earth.