Nature as Co-Teacher
We believe that development is richer, for all involved, if the natural world and the many denizens that co-constitute places, are actively engaged with, listened to, and taken seriously as part of the development process.
This reminds us to acknowledge, and then act, on the idea that those mentors capable of working with, caring for, and challenging young people’s development include more-than-human beings. This is more than just learning from the natural world; it includes learning with and through it as well.
Through this process, the experience is de-centering the taken-for-granted human voice and reconnects to the more-than-human voices. All of the beings - the water, plant life, geography — participate in the process of our coming to know the world and ourselves in it.
We must be willing to recognize and make space for these co-teachers to engage participants meaningfully. This means when these moments arise, we need to provide time and space for the lessons to run their course.
Time and Practice
We believe that building relationships with the natural world will, like any relationship, take time. We also believe that discipline and practice are essential to this practice.
Developing a well understood concept of Nature as a Teacher requires the process of habit change, understood as one of deep examination of self and culture.
Environmental relationships and deep experiences spent outside produces intuition which plays a more important role than reason, which is a product of more recent cultural history. Finding a place for intuition, sustained by organic time, is needed to allow for more expansive wild encounters.
Complexity, the Unknown, and Spontaneity
We believe in re-negotiating development practices to open up possibilities for embracing complexity and spontaneity. We believe that development is richer for all involved, if there is room left for surprise.
If no single mentor or learner can know all about anything, then there always remains the possibility for the unexpected connection to be made, the unplanned event to occur, and the simple explanation to become more complex.
We challenge ideas of control in development by embracing complexity, inviting risk, and allowing for emergence. This involves overcoming mainstream education's reliance on defined outcomes, known standards, and measured results.
Building Alliances and the Human Community
We seek alliances and build community with others, not only in the environmental world but across all peoples and groups concerned with change. In the context of wild pedagogy, democracy of this type helps us remember that there are communities, made up of humans and more-than-humans, affected by all decisions, and that all involved ought to have a say, in whatever language, voice, and form.
As much as community is everywhere, it can often be forgotten or neglected in a culture that is predominantly individualistic. Hence the suggestion for educators to foster a community in which the complex composition of local communities includes all members.
When we have hard and uncomfortable work to do, communities can be positive spaces to simultaneously encourage and challenge us. Multiple perspectives allow each of us to see beyond our own limitations.
Locating the Wild
We believe that encountering the wild provides us with complexity, opportunity, and challenges. Given that the growing majority of us live in super-urban, urban, and suburban places where the wild may not be easily and immediately apparent this presents both fertile ground and difficult work.
In bringing participants to encounter the wild there are no educational guarantees: there is no simple solution to the problem of how to facilitate participants' encounters with the wild, the self-willed, and self-arising others that surround us.
Socio-Cultural Change
We believe that the way many humans currently exist on the planet needs changing, that this change is required at the cultural level, and that education has an important role to play in this project of cultural change. We believe that education is always a political act.
Current norms of the dominant Western culture, many of which infuse mainstream education, are environmentally problematic. And because the future may no longer be predictable, we must disrupt current trends and prepare learners for an unclear and virtually unknown future. This requires a conscious shifting of values and educational priorities that is fundamentally political in its purpose and practice.
Wild pedagogies are explicitly and deliberately about enabling mutually desirable socio-cultural change. We hope for human relationships with the natural world that are much more equitable and interactive, that pursues flourishing for all beings for the express purpose of stopping the massive destruction being wrought and to mitigate accompanying problems such as climate change.