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Paper short abstract

This paper presents how students’ interactions with plants can be fostered or rekindled through a teaching approach that integrates research, drawing, mapping, and storytelling.

Paper long abstract

Epochal spatial and social transformations have led to the weakening of human-plant interactions and caused a generational rupture in both embodied plant knowledge and environmental responsibility.

This paper presents an approach that incorporates human-plant interactions into the curriculum to enhance students’ understanding of urban ecological relationships. The approach was implemented twice in a university teaching module (Oct 2024–Jul 2025), focusing on houseplants in the winter semester and outdoor plants in the summer semester. In the module, each student selected a plant and used a keyword to frame their relationship with it. Based on this keyword, they wrote a personal story describing their choice, encounter, learning (e.g., names, features, habitats, uses), and how the plant fostered connections with people and places. These stories, documented through photos, drawings, maps, interviews, and texts, were compiled into a booklet.

In total, twelve houseplant stories and nine outdoor-plant stories were collected. They reveal that fragile bonds between students and plants persist, though often obscured, and can be unraveled through narrative. The connections extended beyond plants themselves to families, hometowns, childhood, and ethnic culture, as reflected in keywords such as “nostalgično,” “friendship,” and “memories.” Other keywords, including “new beginning,” “reconnect,” “healing,” and “solace,” highlighted students’ openness and appreciation despite limited prior experience. Yet a closer reading also showed that these ties had once been disrupted by factors such as military conflict, emigration, life pressures, and social prejudice.

By doing so, the teaching approach contributes to sustaining young people’s bonds with plants and nurturing emergent ones.