Abstract
This paper takes the academically unorthodox form of personal correspondence. This method, of letters between two educators writing to one another across the distance of two continents and different experiences, seeks to create an inclusive, confessional tone, one that invites the reader to get closer to the lived experience of those struggling within the educational and environmental crises. Critically, this correspondence also seeks to open discussion about the difficult demands of state secondary and tertiary education. The authors explore issues regarding their denuded experiences of working in formal education settings while bearing witness to environmental degradation and ecological collapse. In light of their exploration, the authors argue for an ‘agrios’, a wilder, more expansive polis, coupled with more ecologically-inclusive governance, to address the current potentially catastrophic political leadership that has seemingly turned away from ecological responsibility. This paper culminates in direct letters that focus on a series of practical proposals for action and on four premises for developing agriocy – the policy that supports the agrios/agriocity.
Dear Reader,
The letters we invite you to read here began in response to a Wild Pedagogies gathering in Norway during the summer of 2019, and were written over the course of the following year. The genesis of this correspondence was personal and borne out of one author, Daniel’s, sense of frustration and helplessness – frustration at not being able to attend the gathering in person, and helplessness at the increasing rigidity of working within an institutionalized education setting. The following exchange is between Daniel, a teacher, and Sean, a participant at the gathering. Mutual frustrations soon arose and the letters grew into an inquiry into the urgent need for changes in current pedagogic policy. These exchanges are informed by our entry into the growing ideas associated with ‘wild pedagogies’ (Jickling et al., 2018a, 2018b). Assuming the reader of these letters has some familiarity with these ideas, we focus on unpacking essential concerns pressing down on us as educators as we turn our attention to the authoring of educational policy. We hope that readers will act in a similar way. That is, we hope to embolden educators to take policy into their own hands, and to walk again within the notion of ‘wild fields of good governance’.
Offered with sincerity and respect,
Daniel and Sean.
Letter 1: The challenge to teach wild
Dear Sean,
I write to you with apologies. I won’t be joining you in Finse, Norway for Wild Pedagogies: A Walking Colloquium. I can’t. Please let me explain for my apology has several sides that relate directly to the concerns of the gathering.
I am sorry, personally, that I won’t be there with you, to listen to the stories, to turn over the ideas that will be shared, to step out into the high, clear air and receive the inspiration, and guidance from mountains and sky.
I am sorry, that the very boundaries you will seek to question and push against, the boundaries of control and relation, are the same boundaries that prevent me from joining you. This apology grieves me most.
For you know that I am working as an active-duty teacher in the UK and my contracted work with young people has already begun. As you walk alongside lakes and stones, considering educational change, I will be behind a desk, working to support students as they negotiate a system that I have serious concerns about. A controlling system, conceived at a distance, that I feel severs young people’s connection from the natural world, from their local stories and places, from each other, and possibly, even from themselves. A system that sets boundaries on me as well and makes it very difficult to do the kind of work that I think we all – students, parents, caregivers, teachers and colloquium goers – long to undertake.
My apology extends to all those whom I may meet and work alongside in the coming weeks and months who are caught inside institutional education. I offer my apology here in the knowledge that I cannot, yet, truly live inside the values that ‘wild pedagogies’ (Jickling et al., 2018a, 2018b) call forth. And this, for me, is the most pressing issue now and of course a guiding aim of the colloquium:
How might Wild Pedagogies work in my teaching settings?
How can it be adapted to my educational settings?
I struggle to find answers to these questions. I am convinced that part of the solution needs to come at the level of policy. There is only so much wildness I can make space for behind my closed and controlled classroom door.
With all this in mind I write to you also with a request for help. Perhaps, in solidarity, you might find the space to write to me? To offer your responses, and possible insights offered by your time together, responses informed by the wild place and wild beings that abide there.
These letters will work then with these urgent puzzles, not only from a distant peak, but from inside the problem itself – from where I am standing beside young people, adults and families, and from where you are standing among mountains, seabirds and glaciers.
In the meantime I will pursue as Thoreau suggests, ‘some path, however narrow and crooked, in which [I] can walk with love and reverence’ (Thoreau, 2007).
Daniel
Letter 2: Emotional encounters
Hey Daniel,
Thanks for your letter. I can hear the sadness, and maybe a sense of futility, in your words. Your letter made the work here real for me, especially as we gathered to talk about the possibilities of wild pedagogies as practice. It pushed me to think not only at the level of practice but also to try and bring larger policy issues to the fore. If things are going to change, for you and at the deeper cultural level, wild pedagogies is going to have to take the systemic issues in educational policy seriously.
First, though let the land that is Finse say hello. This is a short section from my journal composed the day after the gathering ended. Hoping it gives a little sense of place and maybe some of the things we wrestled with.
… Above me, hunkering down in a miasma of mist and wind is the Hardangerjøkulen glacier … I am touched by the glacier’s grandeur and seeming timelessness, its slow patience, incredible power, and deep wisdom …
Three days ago, our encounter with this living ice being was very different, tempered by proximity, for we had walked to its closest face, and by the knowledge of the locals in our group. For the latter, the encounter was challenging emotionally, tears flowed for the dramatic changes that have occurred in this valley once filled with ice and snow. Even in the last few years these tongues of ice have retreated quite noticeably. Pictures on the hut walls below show that tons of ice and water have been shed. No longer does this glacier gleam blue and silver against the sky of grey. Now it is a cowed and dirty victim of the violence of changing climate and rising global temperatures. Damage done, in part as a result of my, our, privilege as modern humans and in part because we appear to be unable to imagine ourselves into something new. This imposing being that sparkles and exudes grandeur that makes my heart sing and makes me laugh out loud, that I feel kinship with, and without whom I would be lesser than I am … is in fact dying and I am a party to that killing. What does one do with this knowledge?
So, there it is, a couple of the thematic threads, for me, of this gathering you missed. It appears that we are both wrestling with how to exist as humans, as teachers and as beings in the world. Still we are culpable – damaging and limiting those we care for – you in the classroom and me through my presence in Norway. And in both cases these limits can be traced back to the systems, the policies and the cultures in which we are immersed.
I wonder where we might go from here?
Sean
Letter 3: Wilding politics and policy
Dear Sean,
Thank you for bringing me closer to your time in Norway. Your letter felt charged with feeling and with challenges. I may not have been able to join you but your words have brought me closer to what I am sensing in my day to day. Something feels wrong not only in our relationship to the more-than-human world, but also with the choices we are making as we stumble onward into a calamitous future, one that appears increasingly denuded and degraded.
You asked, ‘what does one do with this knowledge?’ My immediate response to the challenges within your letter is that these kinds of reactions are a critical step toward genuine relating. It is a sign of a mature interdependence, one that has the potential to bear witness to our own action, and inaction, with humility. This should embolden us to act.
Taking this seriously is urgent. It is becoming increasingly clear that those governing us are continuing with toxic policies and principles that reshape the future of all life (a recent example: ‘UK government breaks promise to maintain ban on bee-harming pesticide’ (Busby, 2021)). The cultural historian Thomas Berry articulated this clearly in The Great Work (1999). We need to create and enact a renewed ‘polis’, a way of governing, of creating frameworks that create space for diversity, and wilder ways to learn, to engage and to become.
But I am worried. Current policy in the UK, both in the structures of institutionalized education and in the life of the wider society, seems wholly deficient. Institutionalized education continues to focus on accreditation and abstract bodies of knowledge despite some recent movement. During the opening months of 2018 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) launched A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment. On first reading this document appears to echo some of our concerns, and yet too easily it pulls us back into the status quo.
The 25 Year Plan instructs the reader that nature ‘can reduce stress, fatigue, anxiety and depression. It can help boost immune systems, encourage physical activity and may reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as asthma. It can combat loneliness and bind communities together’ (Defra, 2018: 71). All evidenced in practice and yet there is an obvious utilitarian thread here. It is also apparent that neither young people, nor the natural world, were consulted. Voices are missing. We need new policy and a new polis – indeed, a new politics from which to grow and meet the multiple challenges we face. Etymologically, policy rises directly out of ‘polis’, the city, and ‘polites’ (MacCulloch, 2010), and the citizen is assumed to be human and, historically, male and land-owning, what you call the ‘usual decision-makers’. It is beyond contestation that a new polis should include more than these usual decision-makers.
I believe we now need to move on from the polis – recollecting that the word ‘police’ has its origins here as well – and towards an ‘agrios’, a wild politics with wild policies. The reason I put forward the term agrios is because of its etymological association with the non-domesticated and the beautiful connection to wildness and open fields that I hope might then turn policy-makers towards including the more-than-human world in decision-making. I also like the potential that the word might be related to the son of Gaia, Agrius. To think of policy operating for and on behalf of wild fields, of policy that considers all the children of earth, sounds right. We should be careful to note that this is a metaphor and not some romantic image of humans romping through fields and flowers.
The pedagogical trick might involve finding ways to genuinely involve a diversity of voices in these visions. I don’t have a complete answer for this but one place to start might be with something like Seed and Macy’s ‘Council of All Beings’ (Seed et al., 1988). This might allow us to build the skills to hear a wider range of voices before they are lost forever.
A second worry I have is with building allies. In my day-to-day as an indentured teacher I feel quite alone. I recently reached out to the staff where I work to invite them to consider participating in the Student Climate Education Day (Teach the Future, 2019). Here is a copy of the message I sent:
Dear colleagues,
It is my pleasure to bring your attention to a request from the UK Student Climate Network inviting us to show our solidarity with young people tomorrow by participating in the Climate Crisis Education Day this coming Tuesday the 24th September 2019.
As we as a College enter our ‘educational quality review’ cycle this topic seems more urgent than ever, for surely there can be no quality of education if there is no air quality, no quality of biodiversity, and no equality for all living systems?
Yours sincerely, State Teacher
Can you guess how many responses I received?
Not a single one.
Yet I still sense that there is a yearning where I work for a more equitable education.
So here I am writing to you, hoping these letters might act as a way to communicate solidarity with other ‘active-service’ educators and to promote the possibility that there are steps we can take, alone and together in the face of an unfeeling educational system that no longer appears to care about anything but targets, outcomes, retention and the bottom line. And so, my question is: what can we do now?
What wild policies can we author and activate ourselves?
Daniel
Letter 4: Thinking and acting beyond the human polis
Hey Daniel,
I like this questioning response to the Green Futures document in the UK. There does seem to be a consistent ‘bending back to the status quo’ (Jickling et al., 2018a) and a limited imaginative range (Blenkinsop and Jickling, 2020) at work in so many of these policy documents. I also support the move to seek allies, recognize the loneliness, and I really appreciate your inclusion of more-than-humans in the discussion. And, I like the rich possibility of thinking about politics in the light of all living things, not simply in light of the polis, the city.
If we want to make the wild move in and beyond people, the city and centralized control, when it comes to creating policy, then maybe the ‘agrios’ is just what we are talking about. So, if policy involves notions of good governance, plans of action, ways of management for humans and the city, then maybe ‘agriocy’ involves plans of action for good, shared governance of the wild field as enacted by, ‘agriocites’? Now, what might policy-making look like if there were more-than-human voices present at every meeting? What would it look like if policy inferred freedom that supported a mutually beneficial flourishing (Blenkinsop and Morse, 2017) for all beings?
I remember when I was involved in creating the values statement for the Maple Ridge Environmental School 1 we sought to (a) have most of our meetings outdoors (harder to ignore the natural world), and (b) actively bring place into our discussions. For example, we would create space in the circle, turn our discussions outwards if necessary, and take turns being representatives of earth, air and water and so on. Intriguing and worth further exploration.
Your line of inquiry also plays into a worry that these kinds of non-agriocy, ‘green’ documents, maintain a utilitarian, anthropocentric and species elitist orientation towards the natural world. I can see them leading to questions of ‘how much’? If time in the natural world is useful for health and well-being, then how much time are we talking about? What does it take to get maximum ‘bang for the buck’ as it were, from nature? Is it 15 minutes/day, 15 days/month, or 15 years of deep immersion and relationship building? The answers will have implications for what is permitted in the realm of curriculum design. I worry that the ‘hit’, some short but seemingly significant encounter with nature, will come to be understood as the sum total of the potential ‘return’ from the outdoor experience. If so, then significant time spent building relationships and learning from, in and with the natural world will disappear as an option. All this kind of thinking will just keep policy operating within the established cultural range, and the loss of voices you worry about from the natural world will be complete.
Maybe our first big wild ‘agriocy’ recommendation is to actively find ways, even seemingly meagre ones, to have more-than-human beings involved at all levels of policy design and development. A classroom teacher who is using the wild pedagogies touchstone of nature as co-teacher (Jickling et al., 2018b) could build the natural world into every class meeting and could encourage care of the more-than-human neighbourhood as part of class expectations, and even evaluations. A school administrator could include members of the natural world in every meeting. This involvement could be modelled on the ‘Council of all Beings’, research about the benefits of being outside, or it could come in the form of conscious land acknowledgements, in parallel with those of Indigenous People (Blenkinsop and Fettes, 2020).
What if more-than-humans were named, acknowledged and heard from during meetings? What if school decisions considered the mutually beneficial flourishing of all beings – for all those others who live on, in and around every school, school-yard or school community? Would this also permit us to, indeed, acknowledge the colonization of nature (Blenkinsop et al., 2017)?
Ok so I am getting carried away, … but am I?
Sean
Letter 5: A question of responsibility
Dear Sean,
I want to respond directly to some areas of challenge in your last letter, although I do not feel that I have any satisfactory answers, yet.
Your development of our notion here of an ‘agrios’ and an ‘agriocity’, a community that goes beyond just the human with its wild embrace and valuing of the non-domesticated, has the potential to enable a more ecologically and socially just politics while also necessarily expanding policy beyond its current limits.
If current policy feels limiting and limited then your questions regarding the utility of nature are a reminder of our agri-culture’s current limited view of the wild field itself. You draw attention to the utilitarian ‘how much’ – how much time is enough, how much nature is needed?
Surely this way of thinking and acting has to be tackled? As noted, I too see an increasing amount of this utilitarian, model-based thinking. In Nature Fix, the journalist Florence Williams (2017) distils a range of contemporary research regarding the impact and effect of nature on a variety of groups and individuals. These range from the positive impact that a view of nature has on patients recovering from surgery (Ulrich et al., 1991), through the therapeutic experiences of war veterans embarking on white-water river rafting, to the impacts on re-wilding Asian city structures. All good examples of nature as gift giving for humans, yet potentially just another account of nature as a resource. Might we develop an agriocy that involved the more-than-human in school meetings and decision-making while addressing this critical need for the relationship to be reciprocal? Is there a way forward for this work on a personal level?
Hidden in the work of naturalist Barry Lopez are several pragmatic educational suggestions for direct re-engagement with the living world. In ‘Crossing Open Ground’, Lopez proposes that each university and college in the country establish the position of university naturalist, a position to be held by a student in his or her senior year and passed on at the end of the year to another student.
In this way the university naturalist would be responsible for establishing and maintaining a natural history of the campus, would confer with architects and grounds keepers, escort guests, and otherwise look out after the nonhuman (sic) elements of the campus, their relationships to human beings, and the preservation of this knowledge (Lopez, 1989: 205).
For Lopez the enactment of this role would see the university naturalist seeking ‘to protect the relationships-in-time that define a culture’s growth and ideals’ (Lopez, 1989). Despite being proposed by Lopez in the last century I feel an excitement regarding the application and availability of this as a wild educational policy.
Of course, any move in this direction will require a renewal of the adult experience of nature. Adults might themselves need to work on healing their separateness before acting with reciprocity with the wild world in mind. At this point I believe that all our relationships require re-tooling if we are to deal with the issues of separation, the severing and disconnections that feel endemic. Yet children surely remain vital to these problems?
What happens when the liberty to take even just a walk in the wild is being eroded by the enforced attendance of schools, the pressure of homework and study of abstracted subjects, the reality of COVID, human-induced weather challenges and the systematic eradication of the wild? The truth is, we are enclosing our children. We are stifling their ability to be free, to be at their best as children and it is having significant impacts (Sears, quoted in Carrington, 2016: 1).
These reports of fragmentation relate to the key idea that binds my recent thinking together. School, as an expression of a modern, hierarchical neo-liberal culture may be part of the problem. Hard to admit given my 15 years working in the system but it feels like it needs to be named.
Yesterday my son and I were talking about learning. About how limited learning by rote is. Might we learn best when we have the freedom to feel our way, sensing that, at times, something about the steps we have taken may feel wrong. Then, when it feels wrong, having the courage, and the support, to look again at where we have travelled from, to reconsider what we thought we knew, retracing and reinventing where necessary.
So much feels wrong right now. What can be done about it?
Daniel
Letter 6: Developing ‘agriocy’
Hey Daniel,
I am wondering if I might push this discussion. I have had a series of experiences and conversations in my teaching that suggest there are a lot of ‘things feeling wrong’ in the world today. This has happened a few times lately, so I will offer a composite story.
Yesterday I went for a walk with a friend whose daughter is having some anxiety challenges. At 12 years old, she is feeling the stress of climate change. She feels incapacitated in the face of imagining her own future and responding to the enormity of harm already incurred. My friends have been taking her to a psychologist, hoping to finding ways to support her.
Oddly, the therapist has positioned this eco-anxiety in the same category as irrational fears/phobias, such as anxiety over the earth being destroyed by a meteor. In effect, the ‘prescription’ is denial. The treatment for phobias is to have the patient come to recognize that the fear is irrational and then work from there. Yet in the case of climate change the child has overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The therapeutic response is to deny the truth and, I think, to shut down her sensory and emotional relationality, and to self-isolate. I suspect this feels wrong to the family involved, and maybe even the therapist.
This denial and the move to the autonomous self is problematic. We ask the child, and likely ourselves, to deny what we know, but we are also asking her to deny her humanity as situated in the web of a living, and now dying, planet. When we acquiesce to this kind of diagnosis, we are denying our innate relationality and, for teachers, removing key building blocks of eco/environmental education.
There are policy issues that need to be explored in all of this. My worry is that as teachers, educators and policy-makers get serious about these environmental issues, they may make parallel ‘denial’ mistakes. Four things come to mind as starting points, or necessary premises, for developing new systems to support the agrios/agriocity. There will be more, but this is a start:
Developing agriocy starts by recognizing that the climate emergency is real and that there needs to be substantial change to how many of us ‘be’ human on the planet. This then triggers both financial and institutional support to help train teachers to develop the skills to support relationship building among peers and other humans and importantly, with more-than-humans – the birds, trees and ants with whom we cohabit our places. It must also start by responding to the anxiety felt by students. Developing agriocy starts by recognizing that the world is changing, has already changed – environmentally, ecologically, socially and economically. Movements such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and MeToo reflect injustices baked into our institutions, the policies they endorse, and the ‘police’ that enforce them. Students are no longer graduating in the world of the 1950s; and schools need to name this and respond accordingly. This then triggers a need for teachers to have the critical skills and the tools of activists. Students need support to discover the problematic assumptions that exist in their cultures and within themselves. They will need to learn, or invent, ways to respond to the destruction and pain they are witnessing – and to their own guilt, sadness and culpability. They will need to learn how to ‘feel that something is wrong’. Developing agriocy starts by recognizing that the assumed citizen being produced by the hegemonic public education systems of the North and West is no longer the goal. This agriocity would posit a relationally engaged, socially and ecologically responsible, flourishing, eco-citizen – or something like that. And it would support the development of a teacher’s capacity to enable this change. This is radical! It begins with the assumption that environmental problems are cultural in nature; the change being sought is cultural. And for us wild pedagogues, agriocy would have to support our work in creating space to build learning communities where human students are able to question and change who they are in the world. This will also mean having to re-think – as communities, schools and cultures – what it means to be human in the world. Whew! Big ask! Developing agriocy requires the flexibility that may allow educators to actually do the work suggested in 1, 2 and 3 above. It requires the time and space for this work to happen at individual and local levels. This again means supporting teachers in developing the criticality and humility required to question their own practices on an ongoing basis, and to question the very containers/institutions in which they work. This will include: the skills to build ally communities; the self-reflexivity to detect a retreat when falling back into uncritical cultural norms; the criticality needed to name anti-environmental and unjust teaching practices, languages, ways of being, and so on; the room for practising ‘good governance’ (the aim of policy) that is changing as understanding shifts; and the willingness to step up, and lean in, to the work.
Ok, so I have said it out loud. No going back now.
What do you think?
Sean
Letter 7: Don’t forget the teacher
Dear Sean,
These are intriguing premises we are building. I can see that policy would have to shift if these were taken up seriously. I appreciate this sense that ‘policy’, as control-focused and human-centred, is limiting and I am enjoying responding with a move toward ‘agriocity’. This is not meant as a clever repurposing of words, but as an indignant citizen that seeks to cultivate true equitable good governance with and in wild fields.
Responding directly to the above four premises in your letter I appreciate the move: to confront and re-direct the contorted nature of teacher training; to challenge the increasing enforcement of teacher neutrality and the confinement of critical perspectives that may incubate activism; to change the direction of the fundamental aims of culturally transmitted education, and to challenge what it means to be human, alongside the space and humility to question all of the above along with our own actions and commitments.
Now, I know we are thinking policy here but I can’t forget about teachers, for I am one. So, briefly let’s think about what we might offer teachers out of our discussions.
Have you read Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner? Although it was published in 1969 it stills contains robust challenges for educators. I discovered the book when I was a trainee teacher seeking solace and an alternative perspective to the rote methods being introduced in my instruction. The book features an image of an apple with a lit fuse on its cover alongside the claim that the authors offer a ‘no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods – with dramatic and practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today’s world’ (Postman and Weingartner, 1969). I look at the cover now and see the apple and the fuse in a new light.
In their penultimate chapter, ‘So What Do We Do Now?’ Postman and Weingartner put forward 11 suggestions for action. They were responding to enormous change, societal and technological, yet they did not foreground the ecological changes that we are witnessing now. So, something we might add.
I still love their first challenge:
You are a teacher in an ordinary school, and the ideas in this book make sense to you … what can you do about it, say tomorrow?
In response to the challenges proposed by Postman and Weingartner, and your four premises for policy-makers, I want to offer a quick series of proposed teacher ‘acts’. Offered in the spirit of ‘Teaching as Subversive Activity’ and rooted in our own experience, in the recently proposed ‘Touchstones’ crafted by those involved with Wild Pedagogies (Jickling et al., 2018b), and from the demands of the daily witnessing of ecological catastrophe. I hope that these are supportive of a move in policy towards the heart of our notion of the agrios and that they echo the concerns of teachers already moving towards these wilder ways of acting and educating.
Seven provocative acts for teachers in a time of ecological crisis
Act 1:
Act 2:
Act 3:
Act 4:
Act 5:
Act 6:
Act 7:
These I hope might begin to respond to the dilemma facing all educators, myself most keenly, wondering how to link their conduct with their values, wondering how to heed the feeling that something is wrong, while placing another stepping stone into the ‘chasm between knowledge of environmental problems and what researchers call “pro-environmental behaviour”’ (Oakes, 2018: 109).
It is a statement that supports the development of an ‘agrios’, our own wild, inclusive, just and ferocious educational community in the face of outmoded systemic education confined to abstract concepts and subjects severed from life itself.
To be in service.
Daniel
Letter 8: Extending the conversation
Dear Reader,
Rather than keep the conversation between the two of us, we have chosen to turn it towards you in keeping with the overall motif.
Thank you for reading this far by the way.
Might the above lead you to generate your own tangible education/school policy agrios?
Can we tempt you to add to the actions above?
We know that something feels amiss in putting forward proposals like these. They have a tendency to feel fixed, to become a model, or overlook all those other beautiful suggestions and actions put forward by those that care and give voice to similar concerns. We’re not for a moment suggesting that the actions above are the definitive answer either, rather that we personally need to draw the line and make a stand when we return to work tomorrow.
So how about it?
Where will you draw the line?
Perhaps you might write to us and let us know how you are getting on, in order that we might all feel less alone in this …
Sincerely, good luck.
With wild wishes
Daniel and Sean
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/orpublication of this article.
