Preface
From my vantage point, in a chair rather precariously balanced at the top of a ladder, my eyes survey the landscape. There is water, so much water, more than I have ever seen here before. The pools at the bottom of the hill are expanding, and I see birds, and trees, and sunlight.
My eyes scan. No beavers. I cannot see the beavers.
I know they are here, for they were brought here about a year ago. I have been on this land several times since they arrived, and I know that other people have seen them. Not me. They elude me.
These ecosystem engineers might be invisible to me, but the impact of their presence is undeniable. After an absence of about 1000 years, beavers were brought here from Scotland and released into their new home. The first to return to Dartmoor. They have already dammed the stream to slow the spread of water, and thus created a series of pools, a newly created wetland. A wildlife haven for insects, dragonflies, butterflies, amphibians, birds and mammals.
This place is part of a larger piece of land, privately owned, on the edge of Dartmoor. The whole project is striving for ecological restoration and thriving wildlife, and the approach includes introducing keystone and functional species, such as the beaver, or mimicking the effects that these creatures would have had upon the landscape through using traditional skills and land management practices.
In other words, rewilding.
The outcomes are astonishing. The land here has been transformed, with more dramatic changes becoming visible every year.
As I sit patiently, my mind is whirring. I am thinking about education, learning, teaching, and facilitation. I am often preoccupied with these thoughts, but especially now as I am here on this land with a group of adults, leading a year-long programme about environmental leadership and education.
Our conventional ways of educating are outdated. They are, literally, old school.
Education needs transforming as dramatically as this land. The need for change is becoming desperate, in my experience, and the extent of the problem is deepening. We need new ways of ‘doing education’, new ideas about creating healthy habitats for learning, new relationships with children and young people. We must do things differently, radically, even controversially, for the sake of people and planet. We need education to thrive.
In other words, we need to rewild education.
Would it work to use rewilding as a metaphor, to take a concept from one arena and move it to another? Would the lens of rewilding help us to understand the nature of the problem within the education system, would it give us a way of seeing changes could be made? Ecosystem engineers. Tropic cascades. Keystone species. Healthy habitats. Ecospaces. Biodiversity. Could this be an interesting way, a potentially useful way, to explore how and why we could radically transform education?
My thoughts are interrupted. I hear the distinctive sound of a slap. I lift my binoculars, my eyes focus, and finally, I see it.
A beaver.
Finally.
Background to this book
This book is a creative collaboration between an eclectic mixture of people. Teachers. Academics. Unschooling parents. Home educators. Activists. Campaigners. Nature-based folk. Young people.
We share a conviction that the education system is deeply flawed. Even those authors who have dedicated their professional lives to working within mainstream education agree with this position. Their chapters – presented in Section 1 – explore, openly and honestly, their experiences of being teachers within this system. The insights they offer are real and raw.
The chapters in Section 2 are more theoretical, taking us on a journey to explore some underpinning philosophies that inform the processes and practices of rewilding education. It is important to consider these perspectives, for it is only through this – and through seeing the contrast with the mainstream – that it is possible to understand what is really being offered within the radical alternative spaces.
In Section 3, grassroots educators in alternative or counter-cultural methods of learning share their stories and insights. The conventional system is embedded in Paradigm A – the old system – and we need to move towards Paradigm B – the new system. But what does Paradigm B look like in practice? What might we see with education or learning that has been rewilded? There are more and more examples of innovative and radical alternatives, but despite the efforts of activists working within these spaces, they remain relatively invisible to the mainstream world. Section 3 aims to bring some of these into the light.
The starting point: what is the problem with education as it is now?
The mainstream education system in the UK and beyond is deeply flawed. It was designed as a one-size-fits-all factory system which prioritises the needs of society and economy over those of individuals. It upholds the class system and perpetuates inequality and social injustice. It was built on patriarchal and racist assumptions and privileges particular knowledge. It locates power exclusively in adults and is highly controlling of children and young people. It is coercive and dehumanises students and teachers alike. It separates children and young people from their innate sense of self and distorts innate connections with the living world. These are not controversial points. They are well established facts. Schools are in a desperate state and the cracks have started to be chasms.
It is time for radical change.
Our education system needs to be transformed and not simply reformed. It needs a radical overhaul. We cannot merely tinker with this system or collude with the damage that it does to children, young people, and teachers. We need extensive changes to the way that we, as a society, think about and ‘do’ education.
The only way to transform education is to go back to the beginning and think again about what we want the system to be doing. A system which is based on the wrong premise cannot be made to work unless we are willing to rethink the original premise. Our education system was designed as a factory system. This is deeply problematic. The system does not work. It does not work for all. It is not fit for purpose. Even the children who come through the system and appear to have been ‘successful’ are not unscathed. Those who struggle, in any way, are wounded. Teachers are also suffering. The fact that they leave in droves is testament to this.
Changes to the education system are often about money and about efficiency, about improving ‘the factory’. Productivity. Efficiency. Control. They are about creating ‘better’ outcomes for society. Better grades, more skills, better citizens. One-size-fits-all. Nationalised curriculum. Same teaching. Fixed rules. Same uniform. Standardised testing. Comparison. Competition. No room for individuality. No room for compromise. No room for children who don’t fit the mould. No room for parents who want something different for their children. No room.
We must think again.
Rewilding is a way of supporting the land and sea to return to a better sense of balance, of giving space for the land to recover, of standing back and letting nature heal itself. Rewilding is a way of relinquishing human control, of repositioning humans so that we are a part of – and not apart from – nature. Rewilding is a way to help nature to thrive.
What has happened to the land, the species and the soil acts as a mirror for us. The land and the sea needs rewilding. What has happened to children, to young people and to adults is similarly devasting.
Education needs rewilding.
The metaphor of rewilding
In recent decades, ecologists and environmentalists have pointed to catastrophic changes in climate, to species decline, to a lack of biodiversity, to pollution of rivers and seas. Traditional conservation strategies were having an impact, but more critical environmentalists felt that it was too little, too late. Many people were started to marinade in the dawning realisation that the problems might be irreversible, that human intervention could not be significant enough to radically change the landscape.
The rewilding agenda changed that. These optimistic, maverick, risk-taking pioneers held a more ambitious view. By thinking the unthinkable, such as bringing back megafauna, standing back and trusting nature, studying trophic cascades and keystone species, they catalysed tangible transformations of landscapes in relatively short periods of time.
Rewilding is defined by Rewilding Britain, a leading UK-based charity as:
… the large-scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself. Rewilding seeks to reinstate natural processes and, where appropriate, missing species – allowing them to shape the landscape and the habitats within. It’s focused firmly on the future although we can learn from the past.
Rewilding is a pioneering way of helping the living world to thrive, but in this book, we are not focussing on rewilding land and sea nor in exploring how people could learn about rewilding.
We are exploring how to rewild education itself.
We are using rewilding as a metaphor to investigate whether the processes involved in rewilding land and sea could have the same dramatic impact if introduced to education.
At the risk of over-simplifying an increasingly complex concept, we perceive there as being two main approaches to rewilding.
The first – often seen as being more active or interventionist – involves reintroducing keystone species or recreating the behaviour of them. As seen in the famous example of Yellowstone National Park with the reintroduction of wolves, or in my Dartmoor example of bringing back beavers, the impact of these actions are far-reaching and can contribute towards far healthier and more sustainable ecosystems. This approach entails an active engagement with keystone species, trophic cascades, and bringing back predators. It recognises the important of some species as ecosystem engineers. Where key species cannot be reintroduced because they are extinct or because their presence is controversial, land management techniques such as coppicing, clearing ground, rootling, or dispersing seeds are used to recreate the impact that these species might have had. The aim of all these approaches is to catalyse changes in the ecosystem that, in turn, create momentum for changes elsewhere. Ponds are created. Browsers such as deer move more frequently. Light can reach through the thinned forests which help seeds to germinate. Depleted or damaged ecosystems can be seen to literally come alive again, to become self-sustaining and self-managing, and to start to return to a more natural baseline.
When used as an approach to transforming education, what does this active and interventionist approach mean? For us, it involves having clarity about what a healthy and self-sustaining ecosystem would be like, and in turn, actively working to create the conditions for this to flourish. This might sound simple on paper, but in practice it is challenging. In education, there is no such thing as a ‘natural baseline’. Rewilders in nature hold a perception of a time, usually before the industrial revolution, when the land and the sea was ‘healthier’ and ‘wilder’. They want to return to that baseline. As educators, this is more challenging. There has been no clear time within the history of education that we herald as ‘wild’ or ‘healthy’. We do not romanticise the past, whether this be the recent past or the distant past, and thus, there is no clear ‘baseline’. We are breaking new ground here. Our first challenge, therefore, is to establish a shared sense of what a healthy and self-sustaining educational ecosystem would be like, and our second is to agree the steps that we can actively take to create this.
The second approach to rewilding – sometimes seen as more passive – brings an element of trust in nature, a belief that if nature is left alone, it will thrive on its own. Let the humans step back and leave well alone. Remove human intervention, for it is usually characterised as destructive, and let nature sort itself out. The idea of ecological succession is important here, stories of landscapes naturally changing over time. Lichens, mosses, grasses, shrubs and woodland. Insects, birds, small mammals, larger mammals and so on. Wait, trust, be patient. See the example of Chernobyl after it was abandoned by humans: life literally came back, even to this desolate and polluted place. With this approach, what will emerge – it is argued – will be a self-managing, self-sustaining, vibrant, healthy ecosystem.
This second approach to rewilding is not uncontroversial (as with the first approach – just put ‘reintroducing wolves’ into google to see the extent of the concern). There are numerous stories of landscapes which have been taken over by bracken, Himalayan balsam or rhododendron. Dark forests with no light coming through. Pockets of woodland that cannot thrive because they are cut off from the rest of nature, with no easy corridors or access points for returning species, or even no species in existence which are ready to return.
Within an educational context, what does this more passive, more trusting approach mean? If we imagine that the teachers, adults or other authority figures are the equivalent of the humans within the nature-based setting, then it is easy to see that this is about power, about relationship, about role. Educators who want to create healthy and vibrant educational ecosystems will need to rethink the dominant ways of relating that are embedded within conventional education. Stand back. Trust. Believe that others (in this case, children and young people) can thrive if they are trusted. This approach is about the culture that we create in our educational systems. There is a word of warning that comes with the stories of invasive species, of the dominance of the bracken or the balsam. Do we, in fact, need a more balanced approach, one in which adults are involved, where adults can play their part and bring some of their expertise in helping to manage the ecosystem? Can adults (humans), in fact, be important players within the creation of healthy ecosystems, even if they also create a culture where children and young people (nature) are trusted to thrive? As educators, therefore, a central challenge is to work out the intricacy of the relationships within educational systems, to find ways to manage the complex issues of power, and to hold any power that we have in the most delicate and sensitive ways.
In rewilding land and sea, the two approaches described here are not mutually exclusive. They are not binary. Most rewilders employ both approaches in their attempts to restore healthy ecosystems for nature. The rewilding agenda, regardless of the approach that is used, is about returning to a more natural state, a heathier and more sustainable way of being. It is about restoring balance and trusting that nature can find its own solutions. It takes an ecosystemic view of life, where there is no point in looking at one field, one garden, one plant, one week, one day. It is about seeing a much bigger picture. And so, with education. One test, one subject, one lesson, one teacher, one school. Education cannot be reduced to these singular units. It needs to be seen as a much bigger whole.
The nature of ‘nature’
Rewilding has sometimes been seen as a ‘return to the past’, to a romanticised bygone age before humans messed everything up. When talking about children and young people, a similar bygone age can sometimes be imagined, a time when children could go out into nature all day, playing in woods and swimming in ponds before returning home to eat and sleep. A time before technology kept them tethered to their consoles and screens, a time before dangerous people and busy roads meant that it became unsafe to wander outdoors without an adult.
A time of the innocence of childhood.
The problem with evoking the spirit of the 1950s / 1960s / 1970s, or whichever decade heralded this time of innocence, is that so much of our cultural understanding about nature and about children was wrong. It is not helpful to return there.
Transforming education by rewilding it is not about returning to a previous era which does not accurately reflect the natural world or children and young people. We live in a multicultural world, where the construction of families has totally changed, and where the interests and preoccupations of children and young people have evolved.
Our understanding of the natural world has also changed. It is increasingly recognised that many of the basic assumptions made by early scientists who studied the natural world were inaccurate. Many scientific theories which have perpetuated, to this day, because of these assumptions are wrong.
I am talking here about the ‘nature’ of nature.
Darwin’s work on sexual selection and the good gene hypothesis, for example, have been hugely influential on our understanding of the natural world. Survival of the fittest. Male domination. Sex being for reproduction. Males battling other males for females. Females choosing the biggest or most attractive males. Humans being subject to the same instincts and ‘natural laws’. These ‘facts’ imbue many popular scientific tomes, films, documentaries, and children’s book. The problem is, despite their prevalence and the way that these ‘facts’ have substantially shaped our understanding of the natural world, many of them are simply inaccurate.
Our strongly embedded cultural and ecological lens has distracted scientists from seeing what is really happening. They have continually misattributed their observations to reinforce the dominant cultural understanding, giving undue emphasis to particular types of observed behaviour and ignored others. They have distorted our perceptions of the natural world and as a result, have also distorted that way that we perceive what is ‘natural’ amongst humans.
Queer ecology has started to challenge this.
Catriona Sandilands, a leading academic and writer about queer ecology, defines is as:
… a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory.
Gay penguins. Male pregnant seahorses. Sex-fluid parrotfish. Female-led societies of hyenas. Yews that change sex. Intersex toads. The list of mammals, amphibians, fish, birds, insects, trees, fungi and plants that do not conform to conventional scientific wisdom is extensive and becoming increasingly well-known (see Little Gay Natural History book).
Queer ecology, however, is not just about sharing stories of species that are same-sex, gender-non-conforming, or trans. It goes much further than this. It challenges heteronormative assumptions of the natural world, and by doing so, it disturbs and disrupts binary and fixed thinking about both the human and non-human world. It strives to hold a much broader lens through which to view and understand the natural world, opening up our thinking and expanding awareness.
What this means for us, as educators, is that in striving to rewild education, we need to hold an understanding about children and young people that is equally open and expansive. Diversity and difference must be acknowledged, welcomed and accepted. We need to appreciate that our educational spaces are enhanced and strengthen by this diversity, and that genuine inclusiveness – radical and progressive inclusiveness – are key. Gender. Sexuality. Neurodiversity. Ways of thinking. Ways of being. Dis/abilities. ‘Race’. Culture. Faith. Interests. Aspirations. We need to pay attention to inclusiveness and to social justice.
Vandana Shiva, an Indian scientist, activist, ecofeminist and author, says that “uniformity is not nature’s way; diversity is nature’s way.” This seems so clear. If we look to the natural world as a mirror, it is vital that we see diversity reflected in the way that we offer education. It must be part of the tapestry of our educational ecosystems. This changes the way we even talk about things, we way we write policies, the way we operate in practice. Curriculum. Pedagogy, Structures. Processes. Decision-making. Governance. Ethics. Values.
In the natural world, one of the key measures of ecosystem health is biodiversity – define here. As educators, we need to find ways to encourage diversity to thrive. As a central measure of ecosystem health, this needs to be one of the key principles that guide the way that we think about and do education.
Where are we going: what does a rewilded education look like?
The effectiveness of rewilding land and sea is measured through looking at the ecosystems that develop. How biodiverse are they? How healthy? What is abundant and what is missing? Is it a self-sustaining ecosystem? Although there are contrasting ways of addressing these questions, there are some commonplace measures that have been used across different landscapes, including habitat restoration, biodiversity, water quality, population vulnerability, and presence of specific organisms, flora and fauna.
And so, with education.
The factory model of education some standardised methods to assess the effectiveness of the system. Grades. Attendance. Number of exclusions. High stakes testing. Number of children per class. Literacy and numeracy levels. Things that are measurable, and comparable across settings. Measures that are important to some and meaningless to others.
If education was to be rewilded, then the ways of measuring the progress of this – the effectiveness of education – also need rewilding. We need to find ways of measuring the health of the ecosystem, the biodiversity, the culture, the processes. We need an entirely new set of measures. We need to know what is in abundance and what is missing. This entails using a whole new lens.
We want to see self-directed and autonomous children and adults who have a sense of themselves and a care for others, a collaboration and co-operative dynamic between children and adults which is not underpinned by coercion and control, a varied set of curriculum opportunities which does not prioritise some subjects over others, a culture which supports a deep connection with the living world, a flexibility of approach which means that diversity is welcomed and everyone can feel a deep sense of inclusion and belonging, a transformed structure and new processes which enable grassroots involvement in decision-making, a culture which values authenticity and encourages open conversation and honest expression of the self. And more, and more.
We want to transform education, but we do not want to replace our current one-size-fits-all model with another one-size-fits-all model. There is no single blueprint and there are no simple recipes to follow.
Rewilding education is not the same as being outdoors all the time. This is not the best measure to use. We can be wild whilst being indoors. We can be tame and constrained whilst we are outdoors. Conflating ‘the wild’ with ‘being outdoors’ is not helpful in our context. Thoreau leant on a definition of wild from Richard Trench’s ‘On the Study of Words’ (1853): ‘Wild’ is the participle past of ‘to will’; a ‘wild’ horse is a ‘willed’ or self-willed horse, one that has been never tamed or taught to submit its will to the will of another ... (Trench 1853 in Thoreau 2007, pg. 179). Within this book, we align ourselves with this, positioning our definition of ‘wild’ as ‘self-will’.
When we rewild education, we move beyond discussions about location, and onto matters to do with attitudes and values and intentions. We need to create spaces where the self-will of everyone can flourish. Children. Young people. Adults. Teachers. Nature. Being self-willed does not mean that we are entirely autonomous. Connecting to self does not equate with being selfish. Ironically perhaps, connecting to self often aligns with a greater interest in connecting with others. As in nature, where no animal, plant or insect acts alone, human beings are also intimately connected. Connected to each other. Connected to nature. We all operate as part of an interconnected ecosystem.
The process of rewilding education can take place in mainstream schools, in alternative learning settings, in homes, in parks, in nature reserves, in forests, in colleges, in universities and online. This means that they will all look different in practice, and thus be difficult to directly compare. These contexts present their unique sets of challenges, but even within rigid frameworks and structures, there is room for manoeuvre.
We recognise that some people might find it hard to picture a rewilded education. It is so different to the education system and educational experiences that many of us are familiar with, and as a result, it can sound like a fantasy or a dream.
This is no fantasy.
There are already places which exhibit the qualities of a rewilded education, with many more which are moved towards this. In the main, they are outside of conventional education systems. They operate on the edges and in the margins, often invisible to much of the population. By giving a glimpse into some of these – as we attempt to do in this book – we hope to give real and concrete examples of what can happen. Not what might happen, but what is happening.
Don’t forget your compass
Although there is no single blueprint, it is crucial that our efforts to rewild education are underpinned by a shared set of principles. Developing new, radical, transformational practices requires a strong rationale and a robust pedagogy. We have created a new navigational tool – a compass – to help us to illustrate what would characterise a ‘rewilded education.’ This compass is as important bit of kit for navigating towards healthier, fairer, and wilder educational practice.
This compass contains four central concepts: wild, free, grounded, and consensual. If education is to be rewilded, it must move as far as it can on all four of these measures. Just one is not enough. They operate as a delicate counterbalance to one another. Too free and it may no longer be consensual. Too wild and it may trample of social justice.
It is our thesis that educational settings – even though operating as part of the mainstream – can be rewilded if they pay attention to these four measures. We have evidence for this, and practical examples to illustrate the case.
Using the compass is a dynamic experience rather than a static one. It is a way of navigating conversations, of self-evaluating our own practice, of assessing the effectiveness of organisations. It is simple to understand yet complex in what it is trying to convey.
We hope that it helps you to navigate through this book.
This is an optimistic book. We know that the climate is in crisis. Our education system is teetering on the edge of a precipice. We also know that radical thinkers and brave pioneers have started to demonstrate that change is possible. The beavers are back. Some species have been removed from the endangered list. The natural world, in some places, is thriving. We want to see the same depth of change in our education system.
Bring on the educational rewilders.
This is an exciting time. Change is possible. Change is happening.
The time is now.
________
For info, this chapter was written as part of a collaborative book project. We compiled nineteen chapters on the theme of rewilding education, but eventually decided to not pursue publication of these as a collected piece.