Tending the Net: Collaborative Tree Net Cultivation as Outdoor Pedagogy

Traditional classrooms often position students as passive recipients of knowledge, disconnected from the living world. Barefoot Biology is a place-based course in Isla Vista co-taught by undergrads that focuses on collaborative cultivation of a class tree net - a living ecosystem students tend together over the quarter. Drawing on embodied learning, funds of knowledge, and place-based education, we ask: how does tree net cultivation foster ecological identity and communal belonging outside traditional classroom structures? We argue the tree net functions not as a subject of study but as a shared responsibility - a living anchor drawing students into a relationship with place and one another. Every student arrives with existing outdoor knowledge; together they practice slow, reciprocal observation that formal education rarely allows. When students look deeper - into soil, into canopy, into one another - the classroom becomes the world itself.