Education and the mycelial matrix of critical ecohermeneutics, or eat and be eaten, mean and be meaning

This work conceives of critical ecohermeneutics as an ecopoetic encounter with the world aimed at germinating place-based approaches to education informed by a sense of resonant interrelationality. Ecohermeneutic inquiry aims to inspire an ecological ethos by eliciting attention to our interwoven ecological-ontological relationality with an animate more-than-human world. Utilizing mycelium as a central metaphor, I envisage this process as mycoremedial; enacting both a deliquescent and remedial effect on the calcified epistemic norms of modernity. Drawing upon the hermeneutic tradition, I address the cultural-linguistic historicity informing our being-in-the-world and consider the role of metaphor in provoking ontological attention and cultural transformation. I juxtapose ecopoetics and ecolinguistics in order to work towards a critical, yet lyrical, ecology of language and offer a modest ecoexegetical rendering of the hermeneutic tradition itself. Finally, an ecohermeneutic approach to curriculum is conceived as re-indigenization, a return to place-based consciousness, that necessarily entails decolonization and ethical relationality.