Michael D. Datura is a humanities teacher on the unceded territories of the Salish peoples, a doctoral candidate, and occasionally a poet. He is a member of the The Centre for Imagination in Research, Culture and Education and regularly instructs graduate level teachers about an Imaginative Education approach to learning.

In 2015, he published his first book, under alias Michael Derby: Place, Being, Resonance: An Ecohermeneutic Approach to Education; and in 2018, he co-edited a collaborative writing experiment called Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene. His research draws primarily on lyric philosophy (Jan Zwicky) and the hermeneutic tradition (David Jardine) to examine place-based education, indigenous ways of knowing, and ecological ethics in the context of settler colonialism and the sixth extinction. His work aims to cultivate an ecosophic disposition to recognize the significance of wisdom traditions, contemplative practices and critical reflexivity in a more-than-human world. He also likes long walks in the forest.