Wilding liability in education: Introducing the concept of wide risk as counterpoint to narrow-risk-driven educative practice

Abstract

Consideration of risk and liability in outdoor educative practice has normally been limited to the narrow risks, usually to physical health, of incidents that can cause a particular injury. In this view of risk management, the more readily controlled the circumstance, the less likelihood of risk and consequent liability. Thus, to reduce risk, learning in the natural world is often avoided because it occurs in far more complex and less controllable contexts than human-created ones. However, wider and more grave risks to physical, emotional and mental health that may accrue through a life that is lived in separation from the natural world are not often considered or evaluated. In part, this may be because these kinds of risks are less immediately evident, and liability for negative outcomes may be more difficult to measure. Thus, there is less incentive to consider them. However, delayed outcomes are still outcomes. To consider easily discerned narrow risk alone, while ignoring more complex and longer-term wide risk, is no excuse for avoiding the ethical responsibility that public education carries to provide both the safest and most fecund context for learning. This paper introduces the concept of wide risk as a counterpoint to the narrow risk calculations now performed, and argues that in incorporating an understanding of wide risk in educative practice, at least two results are likely. The first is that learning outdoors will frequently be discovered to be a less risky alternative, if a broad range of outcomes over time are considered. The second is that the value of embracing risk in all aspects of learning ought to become a part of the learning process, and part of what is taught in public schools.

Introduction

I just put on my red suspenders and am heading to the courthouse for a latte and a light tort.

Well, not really. But, especially following its title, this paper needs to begin with a disclaimer. I am not legally trained, and this paper is not legally oriented. These factors may perhaps be viewed as positive in this context: I don’t want the potential for the inherent and unpredictable fun found through learning in less human-controlled places to be lost in the necessarily detailed arguments on risk and liability that I will be forming. I will make time for both in this paper. That said, this paper is based on one simple idea with significant repercussions that relate to how risk is considered in public school policy. It is a practical and philosophical exploration of that idea, rather than a legal one.

The idea is this: if the narrowly focused concepts of risk and liability in educative practice are broadened to include longer-term effects of education writ large, then learning that is considered “safer,” will also tend to include learning in outdoor settings or in wilder places. ¹ In this wider/wilder consideration of the effects of education, I mean to include a broad consideration of educative outcomes including cognitive, emotional and physical effects, as well as long-term physical, mental and emotional health. In other words, not just those narrowly defined risks that are so easily measured, such as a cut or broken bone. Natural contexts for learning, as they are sometimes called, may vary from school grounds, to a local park, to places where human participation in the ecosystem is extremely limited. These contexts are “wilder” in the sense that they are less able to be controlled through human intent and design, precisely because they include the unpredictable non-human.

In addition to less human-controlled, natural, outdoor and wilder, in this paper I also use another term: more-than-human world (Abram, 1996). These terms do not all mean precisely the same thing, but to avoid a very long discussion, I will use them roughly interchangeably in this paper, recognizing that there is a virtue in imprecision around the idea of what is wilder. I assert that what is outside the purview of the kind of thought that monitors and controls, may be an asset in designing rich educational experiences.

That learning outdoors may be safer, when all factors over time are considered, may seem counter-intuitive to some. However, it is based on the idea that something that may not be available elsewhere may be gained through learning in wilder settings. Such a claim tacitly disputes risk calculation that is based solely on what is avoided. If this claim has merit, then educators and administrators may face more complexity as they attempt to evaluate risks. Seeing risk in the way I propose means that what I will call the narrow risk (of particular potential, foreseeable incidents) will have to be weighed against the wide risk (of foregoing the rich learning that is likely to occur in outdoor settings, which may contribute more to overall good health). By viewing risk in this way, the educative results may potentially be much more abundant. The calculus of risk, thus defined, may be more difficult to formulate (I will later address concerns with the term “calculus” itself). But it will lead to a more meaningful understanding of what actually happens over the long term in educative practice. Note that this argument does not depend on what are currently measurable outcomes: not all the studies to measure this have been done yet. It depends simply on the current knowledge that learning is likely to be better over the long term if it occurs, at least in part, in wilder places. And the manifold benefits of learning (and being) in natural environments have been well studied and documented (see, e.g., Beeman and Walton, 2016; Dillon and Dickie, 2011; Kings College London, 2011; Kuo et al., 2019; McMahan and Estes, 2015; Sandifer et al., 2014; Stevens, 2010).

In a subsequent section, I will review in more detail some evidence of the cognitive, emotional and physical benefits of learning in wilder places and in natural settings. This evidence carries with it a duty of care to ensure that what is best for students occurs. Regarding liability, until now, school boards have concerned themselves primarily with being sued for negligence if preventable incidents occur. Such concerns are often linked to learning in wilder settings. I believe these concerns should be balanced against another, which ought to countervail them: that of being sued for negligence in what not learning outdoors may now be doing to students. Current evidence carries with it a duty of care to ensure that good learning opportunities are not missed. Thus, it may behove school boards now to think about the broader, long-term effects of sedentary, indoor learning, not simply to avoid litigation, but because of their duty of care for students.

This paper attempts to do a few things. I hope that it will question current interpretations of what counts as risk, pausing only slightly to posit why those interpretations have occurred. I also hope that this paper may be used by parents and students to encourage schools to balance the kind of immediately evident risks like injury that are now given consideration (narrow risk) with those much greater risks to overall long-term health (wide risks) of not learning in wilder places. The latter are rarely considered by school boards and ministries of education, though they are evidenced by researchers. I suggest that these risks are rarely considered because, at least in part, causality becomes less discernible and less provable as time passes and circumstances change. These risks include not just likely later physical effects of obesity and its litany of particular related diseases including, but not limited to, diabetes, heart health and cancer (Kings College London, 2011). They also include the incalculably painful and influential effect of a citizenry almost wholly alienated from the natural world. This same citizenry was at one time a body of students whose well-being was entrusted to government agencies, and through them, to teachers and administrators, who are thus at a personal level in part responsible for ills experienced by students. In addition to the obvious physical risks associated with not learning outdoors, there are also risks to emotional and cognitive health that accrue from flagrantly ignoring the human biological need to move, and think and feel, in complex, less human-controlled environments (Crawford, 2015). It is perhaps ironic that these very spaces, which in today’s educational context are so often prohibited to students, are called “natural” ones. Finally, human disconnection from the world is an environmental alienation, which leaves us bereft of understanding and enacting our primary relationship with the world that contains us and gives us life. This is causing many humans, considered as a species, to act in ways that are harmful not only to discernible other beings, but to the Earth itself. Climate change becomes all the more possible in the Humilicene ² era, as curricula tend to value knowledge that can be abstracted from the world. Students, from a very early age, may, therefore, come to perceive themselves, their learning and their actions, as somehow outside of the world ³ (Mueller, 2017).

Papers such as this one will, I hope, contribute to changing that. Through this paper, I want to open possibilities to school administrators for how to think about risk differently, and by these means, to reduce the deeply deleterious effect of their inclination to limit learning to more controllable spaces. I want also to make arguments that will encourage administrators to see the limitations with which risk and liability are viewed now, and the way these limitations reduce our capacity to see other risks that are seemingly hidden in plain view, as it were. As long as these risks are not named, administrators can claim ignorance. But as soon as this sentence is read – yup, this one; sorry! – this claim no longer holds. This means that administrators cannot both claim to be acting ethically and merely disregard these greater wide risks: they will – at least in a just world – have to come up with reasons why the ideas contained in this paper (and others) do not apply to their circumstance. I think these reasons will be difficult to conjure, although it is equally certain that many will still try.

Later in this paper, I note areas of commonality between a Wild Pedagogies perspective and a shift in how we perceive risk. Let me mention for the time being a few of the touchstones associated with Wild Pedagogies. They are the unknown and spontaneity and agency of the natural world with nature as co-teacher. One of the reasons that administrators may be so worried about learning outdoors is that less human-controlled environments are precisely that: what they will be from moment to moment is less able to be predicted, and the unknown and unexpected can only be planned for in broad orientations, rather than particular rulebooks. What could be a better preparation for life, if not only teachers thought in this way, but if students did as well? Thus, what happens in less controlled environments always influences the lesson. The natural world has been understood by Indigenous peoples for millennia to have its own agency. It therefore becomes a possible strong ally for teachers who are willing to engage with it as a co-teacher.

These are relatively simple ideas, with broad and beneficial implications for educative practice. But they are ideas that stray from the status quo: they are, therefore, likely to get caught in the craw of those administrators who cosset the familiar. Perhaps an even more serious concern is that teaching in less predictable settings confounds learning models that are simply based on “knowledge transmission.” Teaching in less human-controlled circumstances actually requires more skill because one can never with certainty know an outcome. A teacher must respond to what the world offers, while still keeping in mind what they wish to teach. It is a well-known dictum that the carefully prepared lesson plan goes out the window when a teachable moment occurs. Outside that same window is the more-than-human world. It is only composed of teachable moments. That lesson plan is pulled apart at the staple holes by a blustery wind in mere seconds. It is quite literally outside the hands of the human teacher. Their only reasonable response will be to follow the pattern of the wind through watching its many sheets revolve and dance, to see what the new shape of that lesson plan becomes, and whether it may offer up any stories about, say, the wind itself.

From narrow to wide risk

Educational administrators have to consider risk as a factor in any educational activity. Normally, they are apt to consider risk and liability around learning in less human-controlled spaces as applying narrowly to particular circumstances, such as incidents in which particular permissions have been inadequately sought, or mistakes in safety procedures have been made. But risk needn’t be viewed only this way. Responsibility is at the heart of any issue of liability. There is no reason inherent in the concept of responsibility that it should be limited to the narrow avenues to which it has been, hitherto.

In fact, it might be argued that we are in relatively nascent understandings of liability and educative responsibility. At least as far as educative practices go, we would do well to be ahead of the curve that carries with it waves of long-term tort briefs – not at all of the light kind – that will be based on physical, mental and emotional damage caused by an education system that is capable of distorting and sometimes ruining natural patterns of growth and development. These damages are heightened by the frequent permanent severance of students from the natural world, one that begins in youth and is most strongly fostered by the absence of contact with the natural world through the vector of schooling. Thus, a place of meaning making and story generating – an agential universe – is for the most part ignored. A potentially healing relationship and a place of growth is also lost. The effects of this separation may have devastating effects on certain students, including First Nations, Metis and Inuit (FNMI) youth (Alberta Education Aboriginal Services Branch and Learning and Teaching Resources Branch, 2005; Beeman, 2019; Miller, 1996). But the damage of the forced separation of all children from the natural world is increasingly apparent (Louv, 2006).

In looking for an explanation for why only a narrow conception of risk and liability is so frequently used, it seems likely that it is simply easier to determine who is responsible in short-term incidents that have immediate, and potentially traumatic, results. However, a consideration of liability based on ease of determination of fault is surely a case of convenience trumping ethics. Despite the difficulty in doing so, care and concern for the welfare of students and teachers, and a minimization of all kinds of injury, especially those that may be more difficult to discern initially, may emerge later in life or may persist throughout life, ought to be at the forefront of policy and practice. The precise time at which injury becomes apparent ought to be immaterial if the well-being of students and teachers is at the heart of the matter.

Thus, with recent studies showing the benefits of learning in wilder places to physical, cognitive, emotional and creative learning, the dangers of not doing so are also becoming apparent. In Canada and most countries of the modern, global West, student-aged citizens are required by law to attend school in some form; the state thus has an obligation to ensure that this forced activity does the most good. At least in theory, then, public school boards are responsible for not only the destructive direct effects of cutting a relationship with the natural world, but the absence of what could have occurred and has not – that is, the absence of those educational experiences that would be most beneficial for students. Note that I am not claiming that this would be an easy or even possible legal argument to make: my position rests on public schooling’s ethical duty. If this idea holds, then it opens the possibility for a much wider interpretation of risk, risk management and liability.

These ideas may challenge hidden presuppositions around the idea of control in educative practice as a whole. Tightly controlled learning is often justified in terms of minimizing risks. But what if risk, more broadly considered – say the risk of a future citizen not learning, by making mistakes, how to self-regulate or how to be a responsible citizen of a more-than-human world – were at issue? It would seem this risk is weighty indeed, even if its temporal edges are a little vague. What if a few cuts and bruises also led to better judgement and to a strengthened ability to take responsibility for one’s actions? This could have ramifications in such apparently dissimilar areas as, say, a capacity to spot lies on social media, thus contributing to an enhancement of democratic process, evidence to the contrary of which dominates news as I write? ⁴ And what if something like a Wild Pedagogies approach to learning, in which teacher role and student role are less hierarchized, and the world emerges as co-teacher, actually diminishes an unconscious deference to state control of learning? Might an ability to better discern one’s own biases contribute to a capacity for self-knowledge so rare in current educative practices?

Even the concept of educational risk itself has been almost entirely hijacked by concerns over immediate liability. What about the other kinds of risk that are inherent to learning? Pushing limits, daring to go beyond what is “in bounds,” daring to be perceived as stupid, the creative expression of a really original idea: the list is endless because risk is an inherent part of learning. And if risk actually is inherent to learning, then a focus only on liability-oriented risk skews the discussion. It is a bit like dancing by following a pattern of footsteps laid out on the floor: the pattern is followed but the dance is lost. In this case, the pattern of liability skews the dance of learning.

To recapitulate, then, for the purpose of this paper, I am suggesting that narrow risk is the way risk tends to be considered today. A narrow risk orientation asks only the simple question, does a particular activity result in injury, usually physical injury, in the short term? It then looks for ways to prevent predictable injuries, no matter what the learning cost. Injury prevention is the focus, not learning. On the other hand, wide risk is risk to the overall well-being of students and teachers, from the moment of confinement – sorry, did I say that? – rather then, from the beginning of education, onward. It includes physical, mental and emotional well-being, considering all of the effects of educative practice, including both acts of commission and omission. This would include, but not be limited to, physical conditions or diseases associated with inactivity, the habits around which are often formed young. This especially applies to low-income students, who are less likely to have access to additional activities outside of school that could compensate for the relative torpor of the classroom. A wide risk orientation then would include an evaluation of the challenges to mental and emotional well-being that may, in part, be rooted in inactivity.

What is perhaps most noteworthy about this argumentative tack is not that it will be agreed to by administrators, especially in North America. I don’t expect such a dramatic swing, nor that it would now be legally feasible to make this argument. (For an alternative scenario, in New Zealand, see Boeseveld, 2014.) However, it’s not being agreed to, by those making administrative decisions, speaks volumes. If the deleterious effects of not permitting learning in wilder places is acknowledged and an educative change is not enacted, then a reasonable conclusion is that administrators value more highly a simplicity of risk-consideration than they do educative fecundity. If administrators choose to avoid narrow risk at any cost to students, then they must more highly value a learning environment defined by what it does not contain (i.e. narrow risk). They must value this more than what an educational environment could contain (i.e. genuine growth and a reduction of wide risk, by intentionally taking on some narrow risk, that is more likely to enhance the long-term well-being of students).

Two schools

This section is a tale of two schools. Allow me to describe the first. Imagine a school in which every possible short-term risk of physical accident is accounted for and addressed. Floors are made of soft material to reduce injury. Every day the material is disposed of – it cannot be washed because it would still contain some contamination – and is replaced with another. Students are required to sit on the floor so that they cannot fall from chairs or desks. Pencils that can poke are replaced with tablets that have no sharp edges. Air is filtered. Not only known contaminants and allergens are removed, but unwanted “distracting” smells are removed. Only mass-produced, pre-packaged and plastic-wrapped food that is deemed minimally likely to cause allergic reactions is permitted on school property. Potentially dangerous physical play outdoors is strictly limited or altogether prohibited (as it is in many schools already). Everything associated with the school is sterilized. Trauma risk is reduced so that the space becomes a lightly modulating soft-edged place, decorated in pastel shades. Because what happens electronically is perceived as having less physical risk (of physical trauma), learning happens in more and more virtual (abstract) ways. To reduce risk, virtual “realities” replace actual ones. Any physical injury, however minor, is monitored, processed and noted as a failure to protect students. Teachers are, in part, assessed by their ability to protect students from even minor physical trauma. ⁵

Imagine also that in emotional spheres, similar, though less visible, checks are put in place to limit the emotional equivalents of small cuts and bruises: painful topics are not addressed because the high numbers of widely varying students in each class indicate that the safest path is to provoke the least emotional response, at least in the context of the school. Just as difficult topics are avoided, students’ investigations of their own emotional responses are limited. In this context, what counts as learning is not an ability to encounter one’s own feelings, to be aware of them and then to use these intuitions as the inquiry basis for the building of knowledge, but an ability to master facts and figures. A student’s own feeling about learning is, in general, actively avoided. School is expected to be both enacted and perceived as a kind of simple transmission of knowledge, proceeding at a pace that is determined in advance to be likely to be acceptable to a majority of students, in the same way that lesson and unit plans are determined in advance. This model of learning conceives of education as something that is done to students, ideally with their cooperation, but, if necessary, without it.

Imagine also that these two categories of emotional and physical risk influence each other. It is possible that the limitedness of the physical context in which the body develops and learns in this brave new classroom – this lightly modulated, soft-edged place – also emotionally cushions the growing child. Yet, their emotional being is created through context (Sandifer et al., 2014). They must not only push against their environment, but be influenced by and mimic its variedness. Much more variety is available in the nearby terrain, air, water, plant and animal life of an outdoor setting. There is also a parallel between the ways in which narrow risk are avoided, and the still-fashionable attempt to mechanistically note every possible “learning outcome” to finer and finer degrees of precision. Both come from the same place of needing to control. On the one hand, they are expressed in preventing even minor narrow risks being encountered by students, on the other, they are expressed by limiting learning to only precise outcomes. Learning that is not predicted is likely ignored and possibly punished. This is a mechanistic view of both risk and learning that is only understandable if one posits a need to limit and control, rather than a wish to expand and explore.

While the details of such a model have perhaps been exaggerated here, the approach to risk is doubtless familiar: find out anything that might cause trauma and reduce it to as close to zero as possible, without considering any peripheral costs to doing so, or what is lost. The final phrase, what is lost, is perhaps most important. In the same way school policy tends to be created within a framework that presupposes not only the possibility of control but the duty to proceed by exercising control over whatever factors are desired to be controlled, risk is perceived as being separable from other aspects of learning – such as a richer learning environment – and is reduced at all costs. But what is learned in a “riskier” environment might be an entirely different entity (Blenkinsop and Beeman, 2012) .

This segmented view of risk privileges what can be thought of as sterilized learning ⁶ – the elixir of learning that is left after narrow risk is extracted. Let us place to the side for the time being the kinds of learners that this tends to favour – likely abstract learners who prefer to sit still – leaving aside any other kinds of learners who might be harmed. By these means, what qualifies as curriculum is automatically and unconsciously edited in attempts to manage risk. This view of risk limits what can be “safely” taught in school. If, instead, we focus on the learning child, our view may alter. Entirely at the mercy of those who make policy with only avoidance of risk in mind, the long-term effect of such constraints in learning may be that they become less whole as a person.

This example may seem far-fetched. But there are real-life instances that exceed even this imagined one. In a recent issue of Paddling Magazine, Scott MacGregor (2020) tells the story of his eighth-grade son’s attempt to bring a half-day paddling workshop to a local school’s outdoor day. Having solved the major difficulties of transportation and having worked out how to identify his classmates’ level of swimming skills through using information collected from an earlier event, he approached his Principal. He was stopped short by, amongst other things, circular-reasoning conditions that required students to demonstrate paddling skills (in water) before they could be permitted to paddle. In fact, he faced 132 conditions that needed to be met in order for this event to occur. The point is not simply that the conditions made it impossible for the event to occur, despite the best efforts of the student. It is also that any “encounter” with the natural world, especially when occurring in an educational context, is viewed as a potential disaster. As Henderson and Howard (2020) point out, joy goes missing from the equation, and what is left is simply risk. Or, to describe this with the language I am using in this article, the only risk visible to school administrators is narrow risk; wider risks of not learning outside are not considered. And the deep joy, rooted in acceptance and connection that might accompany such learning, the joy that, after all, must at some level underpin any meaningful learning, is not even worth a mention.

My guess is that, in this and many other cases, the principal took the stance they did because they were themselves schooled to fear the natural world. How different this is than the sense of Jujum dakim, the Anishinaabe phrase meaning “mother earth” but etymologically connected to breast milk: literally, the home place that nourishes (Alex Mathias, 2019, personal communication). ⁷ Such a world view is present in some educational practices still enacted by certain First Nations schools (for some examples, see Fontaine, 2016).

What is beneath policies to control narrow risk is not just an assumption of the right to control precise outcomes divorced from context through the creation of standardized policy. Even more basic than this is that the world (and its risk) can only be known meaningfully through abstract means. Knowledge that is reduced to simple, countable “facts about” is the reductio ad absurdum of this position. That there could be something agential and difficult to grasp, something magical and poetic, something capable of speaking directly to the very being of the learner, is lost.

And as Henderson and Howard (2020) note, the worse it gets, the worse it gets. The expertise of those responsible for safety, and students’ own learning about reasonable risks and mistakes atrophies as judgement is narrowed to whether detailed standardized policy is followed. That policy is constructed with a narrow conception of risk and utterly removed from context is considered irrelevant. In a curious way, practitioners’ capacity for actual risk consideration and negotiation diminishes as they learn to just follow the rules.

Now imagine a second school. In this school, there are almost no particular rules limiting narrow risk. The risks of every activity undertaken are instead considered by the students themselves. A consideration of narrow risk is part of all learning. In fulfilment of the duty to students for the best learning possible, learning happens in the most rich and varied ways. This generally means outside of a building and in wilder spaces. Field trips happen frequently. While in wilder places, as well as in human-created spaces, narrow risk is part of what, how and why students learn. Students with special needs are provided with particular guidance.

All kinds of animals, from the tiny to the great, may pose narrow risks. The diseases present in unsterilized spaces may also be considered risks. But all of these tend to be balanced by context – for example, the effect of sunlight on organisms that may cause illness. A school that is safe following this model is so because students learn – as an integral part of their education – to spot and consider narrow risk. In this school, risk is not seen as being an evil to be rooted out and removed by administrators. It is seen as a natural accompaniment to – or perhaps better, an inherent aspect of – any learning and, indeed, to any action. This might well include getting to school in the first place. When viewed in this light, risks of outdoor learning pale. As Henderson and Howard (2020) note, considering rates of highway fatalities, it might be more beneficial for students to wear helmets on the car ride to school than while in a canoe. And engaging in most contact sports such as those now regularly played in schools would be out of the question.

While teachers may guide the process of addressing risk initially, and while safety is practiced and considered, narrow risk is seen as the responsibility of each student, teacher and administrator to consider as part of the learning process, rather than to avoid at all cost. As autonomy and responsibility increase with other abilities and with age, narrow risk calculation becomes part of each student’s learning, and is part of an overall curriculum. Opportunities for different levels of comfort in a given learning experience are provided for all students.

When risk and liability are considered in the narrow way they tend to be now, far greater risks, yet ones whose cause is more difficult to attribute and which may play out over much longer periods of time, may increase. An ethical principle that is at stake here. No principal worth the title would teach their students that a bad act ought to be permitted because it is hard to trace. Think of stealing from a locker, for example. And yet, in keeping with new knowledge about the benefits of learning in wilder contexts, a similar ethical wrong is committed by principals, themselves, although it is all but invisible. The good from learning in outdoor settings that does not occur is a predictable and in some cases measurable loss. Therefore, teachers and administrators may be held responsible for not permitting much better learning to occur. A “theft” has occurred – this time, one perpetrated by school administrators upon their students.

I hear those red-suspendered legal colleagues already guffawing, and I want them to know that I expected precisely this of them. I realize that the arguments I am making would not (yet) stand up in court. That is not, of course, the point. The point is that introducing the concept of wide risk is the first step to these ideas (eventually) undergirding an established moral principle, which is at the heart of legal argument. If it is known that it is of benefit for students to learn outdoors or in wilder settings, then it is by inference injurious to student interest to not learn in wilder places. The next part of this paper provides evidence for this claim.

Benefits of learning in wilder places

This section highlights some detailed evidence for why learning in wilder places carries with it so many benefits. It follows that if students are not permitted to learn in wilder places, then they are not likely to experience these benefits. It will be up to the courts of various countries to determine whether administrators have correctly weighted the narrow risks, which are easily linked causally to particular circumstances, against the broader risks that have to do with not providing optimal learning contexts. In the context of this paper, I am suggesting this must, in many cases, include the natural world.

Early in this paper, I provided a list of some studies documenting the benefits of learning in wilder places. There is not enough space here to explore all of these, although I invite the reader to investigate them at their leisure. ⁸ What I propose to do instead here is to present some positions that are at the more exploratory edge of things, from a range of perspectives. (This section summarizes a more thorough, earlier exploration of the benefits of learning in outdoor settings noted in Beeman and Walton, 2016).

For example, can students learn or think more creatively in natural surroundings? “Creativity in the wild: Improving creative reasoning through immersion in natural settings,” reports on research by psychologists Dr Ruth Atchley and Dr Paul Atchley from the University of Kansas, and psychologist Dr David Strayer from the University of Utah (Atchley et al., 2012). After wilderness hiking trips of only about five days, the researchers noted a 50% improvement in higher-level cognitive function in test participants. The researchers reasoned that one possible mechanism for the observed cognitive improvement could be that immersion in wilder settings may boost “soft fascination,” which allows the overused higher-thinking frontal lobe area of the brain to recover. Thus, recovery from the usual “directed attention,” mode of thought might have contributed to improving creativity in problem solving(Atchley et al., 2012).

One interpretation of this study is that wilderness journeys (one end of a wilder learning environments spectrum) in particular excel at fine-tuning the brain because the brain is best tuned while it is immersed in the context in which its design evolved over many millennia. Immersion in wilderness environments – especially when elements of challenge, risk and uncertainty are introduced – may lead to a greater range of attentiveness. Let us set aside for the time being other possible factors contributing to positive cognitive outcomes such as increased levels of exercise and oxygenation, a reduction in local environmental levels of pollutants, and digital device distractions. Learning in wilder places may also favour the expression of a kind of attention that is vigilant in present-moment awareness to a wider surrounding environment for potential danger or opportunity. This moment-by-moment, felt, sensory attentiveness to the wider world might be part of what is responsible for retuning the brain to improve function. ⁹

And what about the kind of thinking that may occur differently in wilder places? Psychologist Robert Greenway has explored a deeper relationship between people and the natural world through the concept he termed “the wilderness effect” (Greenway, 1993). As part of his long-term research at Sonoma State University, he and his team of researchers developed a wilderness expedition program over 22 years of study. It immersed 1380 students and others in two- or three-week-long wilderness journeys. ¹⁰  Greenway gained insight into different modes of being in wilderness by exploring changes in mental states of participants as they crossed through what Greenway describes as a “psychological boundary” into wilderness. This is different from crossing physical boundar between human environments and wilder places. As this psychological boundary was crossed, what was described as cognitive individualism gave way to something else: a more participatory whole-being experience involving a sense of expansion and reconnection (Beeman and Walton, 2016). These included not just a sense of connection with other people but with the world itself. In a time of climate catastrophe, the idea that people could feel not merely a sense of responsibility for, but a being part of, and hence, feel their shared fate with that of other species and the earth, is perhaps one of the most needed qualities in students today.

Indeed, how brain and mind are understood may shape teaching practice. The standard computational model considers brain and mind as more-or-less the same. In this perspective, the brain is often imagined as a kind of living computer, with mind taking the place of programs that running within it. Several researchers contest this view. For instance, philosophers Andy Clark and David J Chalmers, in “The Extended Mind,” propose an alternative model they call “active externalism.” In this view, mind and the surrounding environment act together, with an “… active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes” (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). ” If it is accepted that thought and being may be situated in a more complex arrangement than the isolated model of (human) being that has pervaded the modern, global West, then surroundings become all the more important. There is a case, therefore, to be made that the more varied and diverse (without being overwhelming) the environment with which brain and mind are engaged, the more potentially abundant the context for thought. Indeed, through Clark and Chalmers’ thinking, the model of mind and world that underpins educative practice is itself contested. This puts everything into question when it comes to “best practices.” What are the best educational practices if these, and the mind of learners, cannot be separated from the world about which they are learning?

This paper is part of a Wild Pedagogies special issue. It is, therefore, apropos to ask how a wild pedagogies approach to policy and practice might support and enhance such a renewed concept of risk. Wild Pedagogies espouses six touchstones, which include the unknown and spontaneity, agency of the natural world with nature as co-teacher and embracing of complexity (Jickling et al., 2018). None of these factors are of major interest in standard educational approaches. Yet, work in Wild Pedagogies suggests that the natural world ought to at least be considered, and is probably best involved, in educative practices. If this is the context against which risk and liability are to be considered, a case can be made that the broad risk of not having anything to do with the natural world outweighs the narrow risk of injury if learning occurs therein, even if only because of the intellectual fertility of a natural context.

Indeed, I am calling this paper Wilding liability because one principle of interactions in wilder settings is that an interactive back and forth, a getting used to the space, a testing of limits, is what all animals/plants/beings do and how all species learn. It is a continual process of testing limits, of cooperating with other species, of seeing what works and what is likely not to. Thus, current policies based on standardized rules, generated by central administrative bodies such as ministries of Education, yet which are imposed on an infinite number of unknowable circumstances, may be considered an un-ecological way to navigate risk. This is peripherally about wilding an approach to law as well. If now only narrow risks have legal implications, then what is considered in shaping educational policy is oriented toward these concerns.

A parallel may be seen in popular literature around exposure to pathogens. Recall the earlier phrase I suggested: sterilized learning. A central idea in Let Them Eat Dirt (Finlay and Arrieta, 2016) is that removing exposure to pathogens through children being in pristine, clean environments may, in some cases, harm the development of their natural responses to these pathogens. Immune systems that are not exposed to bacteria function less well. On the other hand, exposure to multiple bacteria (in ways that do not overwhelm a healthy response) contributes to overall health. The parallel in learning is that exposure to the widest possible variation (including localized risks) in learning environment, through learning in the natural world, ¹¹ is best for cognitive and emotional development. Here, we are “exposed” to widely varying, sense-received ambassadors of other life forms. We are not “pristine”: we are a part of the world that contains us and contribute to its variety, in our part.

Practical considerations

Let me begin this section with the observation that, whatever the path of balancing narrow and wide risk is chosen, it is not going to be easy. Not because the balancing of narrow and wide risks would be that complex, but a cultural understanding of what risk is would have to change first. That is, of course, difficult to predict, because the timing of cultural shift is unpredictable. If risk is a concern though, a precautionary approach would suggest that attention ought to be turned toward balancing narrow and wide risk through recognizing the multiple benefits of learning in outdoor settings in the long run.

Perhaps there is a kind of equation that can be made that could permit balancing these two kinds of risk. For example, a similarity in value could be seen between say, high narrow risk and low wide risk. This would sometimes justify not learning in wilder places. For example, the likelihood of serious falls in certain conditions (say ice-covered trails) might mean that although it would be better for students in the long run to be learning in wilder places, on balance, on this day, say with inexperienced students and inadequate ice equipment, the narrow high risk of falling would outweigh the wide risk of not learning outdoors.

With this case, a hidden value of spending more time outdoors is exposed: if lots of time is spent learning in wilder settings, then it is a small loss to miss one day. But if little time is spend learning in wilder settings, then even missing one day could be a significant learning loss. There could be a hidden pressure to adopt narrow high risk if little learning occurs outdoors: even if the rocks on the trail are ice-covered, if this might be the only outing a class has that year, so students are more likely to go out anyway and get hurt. This is another argument for making learning in wilder places a much more common event.

Clearly, given the opportunity, almost any outdoor learning ought to be justified if we consider the well-being of students over the long term. But, of course, the idea of an equation itself falls within the realm of the mechanistic. This kind of equation needs to be balanced with a feel for things, for the details of the environment, for a long familiarity with the place and a knowledge of its stories, for the season, for the mood, for the day, for the particular people involved. And this, in turn, is because the world is not a zero-sum game. Our being in it and acting in it changes the nature of the learning that occurs therein. And, of course, all of the above are not just knowledges and skills and values to be held by teachers, but also form part of the how and why and what students learn.

This latter approach is one that is more in keeping with Wild Pedagogies: the world is something with which we interact and negotiate moment by moment, it is something that contains us, that composes us and that shapes us, as we do it. It is not just something that serves as the receptacle for our wishes – or for that matter, the landing places of our lesson plans – even if these be laudable, educative ones. Jujum dakim (noted above) may be the sustaining milk of mother earth, but part of its sustaining quality rests in its ability to educate us about ourselves. That includes learning how to listen to not just human, will-directed thought, but to what the place is telling us in this moment. In this sense, even if the narrow risk on a given day precludes our doing what we had intended, the very act of listening deepens a relationship with the world. As such, it behoves us to listen, for listening itself reduces the wide risk of living in isolation from the natural.