Nonviolent Companionship with Nature

High School Students’ Pathways

Abstract

In this collaborative teacher research project, two high school teachers and a teacher educator explore what nonviolent companionship with nature means for two groups of students who engaged in eight weeks of interactions with nature near their schools. Theoretically oriented by nonviolence theory, the researchers adopted an emergent research design in which students were free to choose their own nature companions and interacted with them while researchers followed the unfolding of these students’ pathways. Two major findings from each group—a sense of belonging and whole-being learning—converged to convey the integrative capacities of nonviolence education.