Letters to Iroimü: When a professor goes to the mountain and education returns as a question

Abstract

BACKGROUND: This study presents a cartographic essay of experience based on an expedition to Mount Roraima/Iroimü, carried out over nine days and approximately 115 km on foot. Continuing previous studies on sensitive knowledge and self-cartography in adventure bodily practices in nature, the text reflects on what the experience continues to make education think.
OBJECTIVE: To reflect on the educational meanings produced through the experience at Mount Roraima/Iroimü and discuss their implications for education, Physical Education, and adventure bodily practices in nature.
METHODS: This study is a cartographic essay of experience grounded in self-writing and self-cartography. The lived experience during the expedition constituted the field of knowledge production and was developed through three letters addressed to Iroimü, understood as a symbolic and pedagogical interlocutor. The analysis was interpretative, articulating lived experience with references from education, sensitive education, and adventure bodily practices in nature.
RESULTS: The first letter problematizes the decolonization of the gaze in the face of rain, fog, and the mountain’s refusal to present itself as an available landscape. The second discusses sensitive knowledge, the time of enchantment, and the recognition of the body as an epistemological territory. The third reflects on the relationship between education, Physical Education, and adventure bodily practices in nature, advocating an education with the Earth, capable of articulating body, territory, care, risk, critique, and belonging.
CONCLUSION: Adventure bodily practices in nature can open important pedagogical possibilities when they are not reduced to technique, performance, or conquest, but understood as ways of reading, feeling, and inhabiting the world without violating it.