This article is a small piece of a much larger and still evolving project. Herein we focus on six touchstones for wild pedagogies. The article begins with a short orientation to the larger ideas behind the project and then focuses on exploring six current touchstones with a view towards early childhood environmental educators. The six explored here are: (1) agency and the role of nature as co-teacher; (2) wildness and challenging ideas of control; (3) complexity, the unknown, and spontaneity; (4) locating the wild; (5) time and practice; and (6) cultural change.
This article draws from the experience of outdoor and experiential educators working in the context of a radical, long-term formal public education research project. One of the accidental findings from the research is that experienced outdoor educators may have particular pedagogical skills, likely honed by the contexts in which they work, that can be of use to mainstream educators trying to expand their pedagogical repertoire, teach outdoors or be more environmentally focused in their practices. The article begins by contextualising the Maple Ridge Environmental School Project, describing the researchers and methods and explaining how the research team came to their insights. A discussion follows of five pedagogical skills identified by the researchers that outdoor and experiential educators may possess which might be offered more clearly to classroom teachers and formal teacher training processes and/or be more clearly enunciated for those involved in formal and informal outdoor and experiential training contexts.
This paper begins with an assumption that the natural world is literally able to speak. What follows is research around a new place-based, ecological and imaginative public school in Maple Ridge, BC. The school has no building to speak of 2 as there is an attempt being made, as part of the day-to-day pedagogical practice, to listen to the more-than-human as an active voice and co-teacher thereby moving from human teachers/researchers speaking in, about and for the more-than-human towards speaking with and listening to it. Drawing on our lived experience as researchers, theorists, and ecological educators, this paper proposes to draw on the student voices 3 at the Environmental School to posit a series of five distinct orientations. Each of these orientations is potentially available to us and each offers a different way to understand, attend to and communicate with the natural world. These orientations have implications, if taken seriously, for educational practice and content. In this paper, we focus on clarifying these orientations and anchor them with examples from interviews done over the course of several school years with three different students. We end the paper by pointing out some of the educational implications that might arise if we are to take these students and, as a result, the proposed orientations seriously.
Blenkinsop & PiersolA theory of place that is concerned with the quality of human world relationships must first acknowledge that places themselves have something to say. Human beings, in other words, must learn to listen (and otherwise perceive). (Gruenewald 2003, p. 624) The world and I are of one Mind. -Chief Joseph He [the tree] often talks to me about my day and feels inspired by what I share. Then he tells me about his day… kids were climbing on him and stepping on his roots which he doesn't like. To him this is an insult. Even when my friends [sitting in the tree] are talking to me, I can hear the tree say 'hey, they are sitting up here, did you ask? -Julianne, seventh grade student, Maple Ridge Environmental School
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.