Twa Chiels, rowed in a Naturish Bosie: A shared language of Embodied Learning in Nature

This article describes combining embodied meaning-making with the written and spoken words of two languages to surface novel, nuanced understandings of children’s connections with nature. Grasped literally and figuratively, children’s unique learning with nature at a beach was ‘handed’ to the adult authors of this article to be transformed from a one-hundred-thousand-word thesis, written in English, into a spoken three-minute thesis in Doric. Although each author had a personal connection with the Doric language, one of the Indigenous languages of Scotland, their lived experiences of the language were very different. Their challenge was to come together to co-create joint meaning to share with others.

As if to mirror the authors’ embodied experiences with each other of meaning-making with language, the reader is invited, through a carefully constructed bodymind provocation, to experience their own dynamic and shifting engagement with learning. Arising from the tension created by a juxtaposition of situated sociocultural experiences of nature, Doric, and English, it is rendered very likely that each reader will find unique, situated, and deeply personal meaning as they read.

Using Goethian principles of scientific observation (Holdrege, 2005; Seamon, 2013) as a lens to understand better the authors’ joint work with English and Doric to interpret children’s embodied encounters with nature at the beach, translation experiences are unpicked. A close critique of the authors’ experiences focuses on birthing the three-minute thesis title ‘Rowed in a Naturish Bosie’ from its English counterpart, ‘Becoming Naturish’ (Francis, 2023). Thus, this article connects a written account of a thesis, which surfaced learning often overlooked in Scottish education, with a three-minute version capable of voicing learning frequently unheard.