Wilding educational policy: Hope for the future

Abstract

This introductory paper begins by summarizing the premises of this special issue on “Wilding Educational Policy.” That is, first, current normalized educational practices in education are not adequate for these times of extraordinary social and ecological upheaval. Second, an important way forward will be to problematize modernist tendencies to control discourse and practice in education in ways that tend to “domesticate” educational possibilities. We then describe how the papers in this collection are framed around two emergent thematic arcs. One arc is directly aimed at initiating conversations with and amongst policy-makers. The other arc illustrates how authors have been expanding their understanding of the premises of this issue and how “wilding” can be interpreted in different cultural settings. These papers all add to a growing body of literature that builds on experiments and musings in “wild pedagogies.”

Wilding educational policy: Hope for the future

We live in extraordinary times. The Anthropocene is upon us and our children are growing into a world that is going to be very different from the one we currently inhabit. It is also a time of social upheaval. Global, social, and ecological justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, Me Too, School Strikes for Climate Change, and many more make it clear that normalized social practices—that is, the status quo—are inadequate to meet emerging needs. The times are demanding a change and education is one of the ways to thoughtfully engage in that process.

It is critical, when talking about changing social institutions, to consider how they have often been created through western, European, white, male, and human-centered ways of being—often referred to as Modernism. For our purposes, one of the key modernist traits that we aim to challenge is a desire to exert human control—over other humans, over social institutions, and over the more-than-human world. Sometimes the urge to control is explicit, as in colonization and commodification of the natural world, and sometimes it is buried so deeply into the assumptions beneath social practices, including education, as to be virtually invisible. Ideas of human control go to the heart of relationships, and we assert that there is a need to enact alternative relationships within a more-than-human world. In this special issue we first wish to bring attention to ways that educational policy-makers might challenge the normalized practices of exerting human-centered control, and second, to open doors to different possibilities.

Wilding education

The desire for control often plays out in our educational institutions in ways that make things measurable, routine, universal, and ultimately work to delineate ways of being. It is made manifest in many ways throughout education—often working to push educational practices into particular rationalistic ways of seeing the world. Such worldviews frequently run contrary to lived-experiences of learners, teachers, and parents. They serve to limit and “domesticate” educational opportunities. Impulses to push towards more radical reimagining of educational possibilities are tamed. There are too few possibilities for nurturing relational engagements with the natural world. The epistemological positioning required for mutual flourishing across the more-than-human world is most often absent.

Problematizing control, as manifest in educational policy, does not mean aiming for a directionless free-for-all. Rather we wish to challenge existing assumptions, to rethink possibilities, to push open the doors to educational opportunities, to expose the limits imposed upon epistemology, and to embrace the learning opportunities arising from being present to the more-than-human world. Thus, we are interested in how we might start pushing back on domestication and the desire for control in education and supporting a wilding of educational policy.

What is required in our times? We suggest, through wilder pedagogies, a reimagining of relationships that are less human-centered, hierarchical, or controlling. In other words, a reimaging of relationships within a more-than-human world that are more equitable, just, and that recognize the value of expansive, diverse communities. When thinking through and enacting change in response to the crises of social and ecological justice, equity, and basic decency, we believe that education must play an inevitable and critical role. This kind of change will require re-thinking the “rules” of schools, for many teachers, parents, caregivers, and students. Change is occurring. The question we seek to ask in this special edition is: How might educational policy help or hinder the kinds of change and the search for justice that these times demand?

One constant amongst all contributing authors to this special issue is that they are practitioners interested in wilding education. Each author has either participated in gatherings designed to experiment with “wild pedagogies,” and to generate an emerging body of literature around this idea; or, they have a cast a scholarly eye towards its literature (see for example, Crex Crex Collective, 2018; Jickling et al., 2018b). With this background in common, two overlapping thematic arcs emerge. The primary arc is shaped by direct appeals by authors—grounded in both practice and scholarship—to policy-makers. A secondary arc weaves through these papers as they seek to expand possibilities for understanding and implementing wild pedagogies. In some papers the authors offer culturally specific responses.

The first thematic arc recognizes the critical role of policy in education. The history of education is replete with policy developments that have been put into place for the express purpose of changing education. As teachers often know, the successes and longevities of these policies has varied widely. While some have actually changed practice, pedagogy, and curriculum in substantive and meaningful ways, others have had little or no impact at all, and have disappeared as quickly as the next policy trend has appeared. We believe that responding to the challenges of our time will require broad analyses that generate bold educational ideas. Some are presented in this special issue. However, bold educational ideas also require policy discussion, analysis, development, and implementation. And they require courage and determination in overcoming the difficult task of change.

The second thematic arc rests on the intentional framing of wild pedagogies as a heuristic rather than a framework or template. The critical difference is that a heuristic is presented as a catalyst for discovery. The provocateur at its core is the problematizing of control—the ways that individuals and societies are controlled in how they think and how they live their lives, and the ways that humans tend to dominate nature. We have previously offered touchstones for practice as animators of such provocations (Blenkinsop et al., 2018; Jickling et al., 2018a), but there are no universal prescriptions; it is the task of educators to develop this core idea and imagine how it might have significance within their own contexts. This thematic arc weaves in and out of policy discussions in this special issue as authors expand the wild pedagogies conversations and seek ways to interpret them within their own socio-ecological contexts.

Conversations with informed practitioners

As editors, part of our task is to select an order for the articles. Our aim has been to shape the flow for the reader in interesting ways while at the same time allowing the space for each author’s voice and each reader’s experience to mingle in dialogue and discovery. For this special issue of Policy Futures with its focus on wild pedagogies and policy we have chosen to begin with a paper by Kathleen Aikens that frames the primary arc of this issue as a series of conversations with informed practitioners.

Aikens outlines the urgency and the tensions that underlie this special issue. She acknowledges that transformation within educational systems can seem impossible—or at least impossibly slow. And she affirms within her own normative position, that mainstream schooling can be largely hostile to large-scale change and resistant to the whole-of-system transformations required to wild educational policies—and indeed, to enact wild pedagogies. We agree. Yet, given the catastrophic risks we—humans and other living beings—face, and the moral obligations that educational systems have to respond to the crisis, she proposes employing what have been called interstitial tactics.

For Aikens, working in the interstitial spaces—or the little openings for creativity and agency—within current educational settings represents opportunities that exist in spite of systemic push to the contrary. These can be opportunistic places to undermine unsustainable structures in systems that are, themselves, largely unsustainable. By naming these acts as those that operate in interstitial zones—those places of possibility amidst the seemingly impossible, unchangeable, and implacable—Aikens offers hope to the change seekers. By naming those things that are supportive of and necessary to these acts of resistance, Aikens makes them possible. She suggests that not only should one find the cracks, gaps, and spaces that might be fertile with possibility for change, but one should also seek out other actors with a similarly clear sense of purpose. Building a rich group of allies, then, makes this work visible, plausible, and sustainable.

This framing also reminds us that all of the authors in this volume are teachers and educators. Each has had experience working in interstitial spaces within their own educational realms. They have all implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, refused to accept that aspects of the world they know and love could be adequately represented within mainstream education as it is currently enacted. The papers in this volume can thus be seen as a collection of appeals written to the educational policy community. These appeals from a small band of rebel teachers (e.g. Blenkinsop and Morse, 2017) are a down payment on what this collective feels is worth hearing. And, even more importantly, in presenting this collection of papers we are attempting to recruit and develop “co-conspirators” that can inhabit, and perhaps enlarge, these spaces while building connections between policy and wild pedagogies. Many of the papers go further, as well, to make requests of policy-makers that might strengthen and generate possibilities for wilding practice.

Going forward, the following three papers, from theoretical and philosophical standpoints, seek policy that might support a different kind of educator and a change that leads to a different end-point from that of the current educational project—that is, an ever-more “clever” anthropocentrism. This different end-point would be more aligned with eco-social citizens who see themselves as part of the web of relations, and thus live in accordance with a more diverse and inclusive equity. Such calls for policy change emerge from an ethical stance concerned with relationships within a more-than-human world.

Through consecutive papers, John Quay and Ruth Irwin work to expand the concepts of wild and wilderness introduced in the wild pedagogies work to date. Quay asserts that a primarily humanist orientation of educational policy is no longer acceptable in responding to the crises of our times. He challenges practitioners and policy-makers to widen the scope of education and embrace the complexities of a more-than-human world. Using inquiries into wildness, Quay introduces posthuman awareness, and what he calls enlightened anthropomorphism, to the task of nurturing empathy and supporting understanding of wild pedagogies. Such anthropomorphism, Quay suggests, can enable a moral consideration to be extended to all living beings and offer ways to shift educational policy and practices while at the same time supporting an expansive notion of wild pedagogies. In the following paper by Irwin, we encounter a desire to learn from and equitably involve a diversity of cultures. In this case, she introduces Maori ways of being in the world to challenge education to move beyond a particular, modernist, neo-liberal set of theoretical norms. Irwin draws from her own working context the Maori concept “Whakapapa” to bring the wild further into view. This, she argues, offers a cultural perspective that can challenge dualisms between humanity and ecology and generate a substantive shift in worldview—placing humans fully within the wild—enabling the possibility of deeper ethical decision-making to inform educational policy and practice.

The final paper in this grouping by Chris Beeman makes an intriguing twist in policy discussions. He examines the possibilities and limits of risk and how policy embedded in a specific way of understanding the world might, with its focus on immediate short-term physical risks, get in the way of myriad possibilities that are necessary for change. In fact, the argument suggests that current risk assessment may put at risk other social and emotional learnings that are going to be useful and maybe even necessary skills to have in the changing world.

The next grouping of three papers provides readers with visions of how practices can be aligned with emergent ideas about wilding education. They are also catalysts for discovering ways to expand the work of wild pedagogies through examples of culturally specific responses. Yuko Oguri and Takako Takano in Japan, Mphemelang Ketlhoilwe and Kgosietsile Velempini in Botswana, and Lewis Winks and Paul Warwick in England, provide insights into some of the unique challenges they face. In each paper, there is an explicit policy request for flexibility in responding to the needs of diverse communities, and for recognizing their unique abilities and extant epistemologies. Their recommendations challenge the ways centralized control is enacted in their working contexts. In some cases control is too expansive to adequately recognize the nuances of the particular place, and in other cases the premises of centralized policy control run contrary to the diversity these authors seek to sustain and support.

Oguri and Takano frame Japanese educational policy within tensions between centralized and local power structures that deeply influence both policy and practice. They assert that any successful re-wilding of education in Japan depends on a release of some control from centralized governments and policy-makers. The value of doing so is then explored through two case studies—one situated in a traditional mountainous farming community of Japan and another set in a group of remote islands. Oguri and Takano show how human–nature relations can be reimagined by carefully attending to the everyday lives of inhabitants within these localized communities. Ketlhoilwe and Velempini then provide two examples of place-based educational practices for teacher candidates in Botswana. In doing so they highlight ways in which a wilding of educational practices might extend traditional learner-centered approaches to be more inclusive of broader community opportunities. They also demonstrate how careful reading of existing educational policy documents from their region can reveal interstitial spaces as leverage points for change for practitioners, but also as ground from which to argue for explicit policy interventions to support a transformative wilding of pedagogy.

Lewis Winks and Paul Warwick write from their experiences in initial teacher training and continuing professional development, in England. They argue for distinctive policy shifts to support relational and place-responsive forms of practice. Winks and Warwick build this argument, in part, through an examination of educators’ experiences of a carefully planned, though not controlled, Wild Pedagogies colloquium held in England during 2019. They conclude their paper with four suggestions for infusing continuing professional development with place-responsive and wild pedagogical approaches.

The final paper in this special issue, by Daniel Ford and Sean Blenkinsop, is presented as a series of personal letters. It posits a set of premises from which policy-makers might operate if they seek to respond to the ecological and social challenges of our times. The letters invite policy-makers to create environments that are more welcoming of change, rather than relying on individual educators and administrators to try to successfully work in small interstitial spaces, or seemingly clandestine rebellious groups, that they often find themselves within.

Conclusion

To return to the original question—how might educational policy help or hinder the kinds of change and the search for justice that these times demand?—the reader is free to explore this special issue for its diversity of specific and nuanced responses. However, we would also like to name several interwoven threads that stand out for us.

First, given how many of the authors are not simply researchers but also dedicated educators, their appeals in this special issue are also direct requests to policy-makers. Practitioners are in a dynamic situation; they are on the front lines of the social and ecological challenges. They are witnessing the effects and hearing the demands for diversity, change, and reconciliation. They are experiencing the difficulties of doing the work needed to thoughtfully create equitable spaces. They are feeling the struggles of students and responding to the psychic manifestations of deep fears about environmental degradation and an uncertain future. Their requests to policy-makers recognize that the policy issues they raise matter, that the challenges they face are real, and that substantive changes are needed. What policy-makers do has an effect, and thoughtful policy can support practitioners in providing fertile spaces for response.

Second, there is a thread that runs through every paper, each in its own way, that is asking for a loosening of centralized, standardized, homogenizing, and control-based policies. These are policies that tend to minimize local strengths, diversities, and needs. These papers are asking in various ways that this distant and detached structure be eased and more local flexibility be allowed. Building on this thread is a request that policy-makers trust the educators and decision-makers at local levels and give them more autonomy, space and time, resources, and training opportunities needed to respond to the diversities and realities of the communities within which they work.

Third, is a request to expand the notion of community beyond the human. This means finding ways to broaden the range of voices involved at all levels of the policy-making and educative process. This expressly means including voices of the more-than-human world. Throughout this special issue, authors have argued that the current human drive to control, contain, and exploit the natural world contributes to the planetary stresses of our times. A critical step at this time will be to become better listeners—yes, of science and metaphor—but importantly also to literally listen to the world around us (e.g. Blenkinsop and Piersol, 2013).

And finally there is a thread in these papers that asks policy-makers to do the right thing. The existential challenges we all face reflect a need to change the culture of education. Schools need to exemplify thoughtful, doable, responses to the social and ecological crises of our time. They need to offer hope and to name the challenges faced. Policy-makers need to demonstrate that they can develop policy that supports educators who are striving to help learners create more sustainable, equitable, even mutually flourishing ways to inhabit an increasingly threadbare planet.

Our goal is for you to find inspiration in these offerings—and provocations. Perhaps you will also find some basis for hope in the work laid out in this special issue.