In Northern Finland, including sparsely populated Finnish Lapland and the small city of Rovaniemi, the widespread clearing of old trees has degraded the boreal environment. Disrupting the diverse relationships between people and trees, climate change will continue to alter the country’s northernmost forests, as is widely known. In this urgent context, we propose that the collaborative project Gifts from the Sentient Forest (GSF) has developed new modes of interacting with Northern Finland’s trees and appreciating their biocultural legacies. At the project’s core is arboreal sentience, a concept illuminating the capacities of trees to sense, communicate, behave, learn and remember. In the project, other-than-human sentience provides a basis for cultivating tree-human communication while expanding Lapland residents’ awareness of sylvan communities through painting, photography, film, music, poetry and performance. In this article, we present an account of three methods leveraged in the GSF programme to facilitate experiences of tree sentience in Northern Finland: sensing, interviewing (speaking) and remembering.

There has been an understanding of a disconnected relation between humans and nature in modern liberalism. The disengaged relation is closely tied to dichotomous perceptions of realities with a widening gap between humans and nature, subject and object and culture and nature. This article considers the disconnected understanding as a sense-making crisis of modernity and qualifies this as a metacrisis. Instead of the disengaged views and the dichotomous relation between humans and nature, this article claims that the relations between the human self and nature is culturally, socially and politically mediated. To elaborate on these phenomena, this paper examines the writings of two thinkers with diverse concerns: Charles Taylor and Antonio Gramsci. For Taylor, the self is mediated with nature through social imaginaries, language and reconciliation in labour. For Gramsci, the self is mediated with the natural world via common sense, socio-historical elements and work. This article argues that cultural and socio-political elements that mediate human-nature relationships are essential in environmental education.

As usually conceived and practiced, education – sustainability, environmental and beyond – is embedded in an overarching narrative of progress: increasing human knowledge leading us to make wiser decisions about our behaviour, as individuals and societies. This article outlines an alternative story that draws on the work of two Indigenous scholars, E. Richard Atleo (Nuu-chah-nulth) and Leanne Simpson (Nishnaabeg), who approach living well as a quest to co-exist in harmony and balance with all our relations (that is, the living world of which we are an integral part). Among the core principles they identify are self-determination, consent and sacred respect, understood both as operative in the functioning of healthy ecosystems and as guides to human development and relationships. We show how these principles are grounded in a quest for the mutual beneficial flourishing of free beings and trace some of their implications for environmental education. While stories of this kind are at odds with the current dominant conception of schooling, there are many ways in which they could begin to influence how we move beyond the metacrisis and further, how wethink about and practice education for eco-social –cultural change and the future world/s to come.

Digital oratory skills have become essential for academic and professional success in today’s digital world, making it imperative to integrate digital oratory training into public speaking pedagogy. This study examined second language (L2) speakers’ public speaking anxiety and nonverbal speech performance in the context of digital oratory. Participants were 40 English as a second language students enrolled in a public speaking course at a Hong Kong university. Each student recorded and uploaded an 8-minute speech to a digital learning platform. They also completed a questionnaire measuring digital oratory anxiety and participated in semi-structured interviews sharing their perceptions of digital presentation. Nonverbal speech performance was assessed, and correlations with digital oratory anxiety were analyzed. The results showed that cognitive and physiological factors had a greater influence on digital oratory anxiety than behavioral and technical factors. Although no significant correlations were found between digital oratory anxiety and nonverbal speech performances, the technical factor had the least impact on L2 students’ anxiety, leading to positive outcomes regarding the technical quality of the speech videos. Comparatively, eye contact and gestures attained much lower mean scores than voice control and facial expressions. Interview results further elucidated the benefits and challenges students experienced during digital presentations. Pedagogically, the findings highlight the need of a holistic approach considering cognitive, physiological, behavioral, and technical factors to address L2 learners’ digital oratory anxiety. Given its affordability and accessibility, digital oratory can be effectively integrated into instruction to develop L2 students’ multimodal communication and nonverbal delivery skills.

The past decade has seen a blossoming of emotion research in applied linguistics, which led to a deeper understanding of the crucial role both positive and negative emotions play in the context of foreign language (FL) learning. In this paper, we will outline a research agenda arising from the rich knowledge gained so far, which we hope inspires researchers to pursue future directions which we consider highly relevant for both researchers and practitioners alike. Firstly, we review the development of foreign language learner emotion research and identify research gaps. This will be followed by a discussion of four broad areas in which we perceive the pressing need for future research to advance our understanding of the role of emotions in foreign language learning. These include 1) the diversification of emotions studied, 2) a better understanding of emotion dynamics, 3) the need to diversify research contexts, and 4) bridging the research-practice gap. For each of these areas, we will outline tasks, taking into account the latest developments in theory and methodology, which we hope will advance our knowledge gained from this dynamic, thriving field of study.