8 Touchstones

These touchstones can become points of departure and places to return to. They stand as reminders of what we, as wild pedagogues, are trying to do. And they challenge us to continue the work. These touchstones are offered to all educators who are ready to expand their horizons, and are curious about the potential of wild pedagogies. They are meant to be read, responded to, and revised as part of an evolving, situated, and lived practice.
We welcome your critiques, research, practice-based elaboration as we further the discussion in the creation and formation of these touchstones. They will evolve.

Nature as Co-Teacher
We believe that education is richer, for all involved, if the natural world and the many denizens that co-constitute places, are actively engaged with, listened to, and taken seriously as part of the educative process.
This touchstone reminds educators to acknowledge, and then act, on the idea that those teachers capable of working with, caring for, and challenging student learning include more-than-human beings. This is more than just learning from the natural world; it includes learning with and through it as well.
Through this process, the learning experience is de-centered the taken-for-granted human voice and re-centres more-than-human voices. All of the beings – the water, plant life, geography – participate in the process of our coming to know the world and ourselves in it.
We must be willing to recognize and make space for these co-teachers to engage students meaningfully. This means when these moments arise, we need to provide time and space for the lessons to run their course.

Complexity, the Unknown, and Spontaneity
Wild Pedagogues believe in re-negotiating educational practices to open up possibilities for embracing complexity and spontaneity. We believe that education is richer for all involved, if there is room left for surprise.
If no single teacher or learner can know all about anything, then there always remains the possibility for the unexpected connection to be made, the unplanned event to occur, and the simple explanation to become more complex.
Wild Pedagogies challenges ideas of control in education by embracing complexity, inviting risk, and allowing for emergence. This involves overcoming mainstream education’s reliance on defined outcomes, known standards, and measured results.

Locating the Wild
We believe that the wild can be found everywhere, but that this recognition and the work of finding the wild is not necessarily easy. The wild can be occluded, made hard to see, by cultural tools, by the colonial orientation of those doing the encountering, and, in urban spaces, by concrete itself.
Encountering the wild provides educators with complexity, opportunity, and challenges. Given that the growing majority of us live in super-urban, urban, and suburban places where the wild may not be easily and immediately apparent this touchstone presents both fertile ground and difficult work.
In bringing students to encounter the wild there are no educational guarantees: there is no simple solution to the problem of how to facilitate students’ encounters with the wild, the self-willed, and self-arising others that surround us.

Time and Practice
We believe that building relationships with the natural world will, like any relationship, take time. We also believe that discipline and practice are essential to this practice.
Developing a well understood concept of Wild Pedagogies requires the process of habit change is understood as one of deep examination of self and culture.
Environmental relationships and deep experiences spent outside produces intuition which plays a more important role than reason, which is a product of more recent cultural history. Finding a place for intuition, sustained by organic time, is needed to allow for more expansive wild encounters.

Socio-Cultural Change
We believe that the way many humans currently exist on the planet needs changing, that this change is required at the cultural level, and that education has an important role to play in this project of cultural change. We believe that education is always a political act.
Current norms of the dominant Western culture, many of which infuse mainstream education, are environmentally problematic. And because the future may no longer be predictable, we must disrupt current trends and prepare learners for an unclear and virtually unknown future. This requires a conscious shifting of values and educational priorities that is fundamentally political in its purpose and practice.
Wild pedagogies are explicitly and deliberately about enabling mutually desirable socio-cultural change. We hope for human relationships with the natural world that are much more equitable and interactive, that pursues flourishing for all beings for the express purpose of stopping the massive destruction being wrought and to mitigate accompanying problems such as climate change.

Building Alliances and the Human Community
Wild pedagogues seek alliances and build community with others not only in the environmental world but across all people and groups concerned with justice. In the context of wild pedagogy, democracy of this type helps us remember that there are communities, made up of humans and more-than-humans, affected by all decisions, and that all involved ought to have a say, in whatever language, voice, and form is their own.
As much as community is everywhere, it can often be forgotten or neglected in a culture that is predominantly individualistic. Hence the suggestion of this touchstone for educators to foster a community in which the complex composition of local communities includes all members, including the more-than-human.
When we have hard and uncomfortable work to do, communities can be positive spaces to simultaneously encourage and challenge us. Multiple perspectives allow each of us to see beyond our own limitations.

Learning That Is Loving, Caring and Compassionate
We believe that humans can develop rich relationships with the more-than-human world. And, relationships of reciprocal care contribute to overcoming the alienation between many humans and the natural world (Jickling & Blenkinsop, 2020, p. 126).
David Orr (2017) calls for educational change, because “without exaggeration it will come down to whether students come through their formal schooling as more clever vandals of the Earth and of each other” on one hand, “or as loving, caring, compassionate, and competent healers, restorers, builders, and midwives to a decent, durable, and beautiful future” (pp. ix–x) on the other. What will it take to nurture caring, compassionate, and competent restorers of the earth?
There is no simple answer to this question, but caring and compassionate learning must include relationships with more-than-human others. Such a perspective places one in the world in a particular way—not so much as an individual; rather, as a member of a broader interconnected community. Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Næss (1988) advocates such an inclusive ecological approach to being-in-the-world. For him, this approach is rooted in deeply intimate relationships that shift one’s understanding of self from an egotistical “self” to the more expansive “Self” as an expression of identification, interrelationship, and compassion within a more-than-human world. Critically, Næss, was inspired by experiences with another creature that evoked empathy. He often returns to this experience of watching a writhing flea die in a bath of acidic chemicals. In recognizing empathy for the suffering of the flea, he began to see, encounter, and be in the world differently.
This was not a happy experience; it is profound but not pretty; it is transformative for Næss, and decidedly not abstract. Key learning elements can be characterized as primarily held, felt, and disruptive (Jickling, 2017). Importantly, this kind of learning cannot be planned or controlled. It suddenly just announces itself. So, what then?
This question raises intriguing possibilities. If Næss is correct, then it is important to provide opportunities for rich lived experiences that are untethered from predetermined expectations. Perhaps it is sufficient, at times, to concentrate offering rich activities in stimulating settings that can allow for a wide and productive range of outcomes. At their best, such activities can cultivate discovery and new kinds of experience and learning that can be manifest in a multitude of ways (see Eisner, 1985, p 120-123).
Such opportunities can enable relational positioning and affective identification in the world—evoking respect, wonder, care, and even awe and fear. Such understandings, located beyond an individual human world, can open possibilities to inspire learning that is loving, caring, and compassionate. What does teaching practice begin to look like if we take these insights seriously?
With this discussion as background, educators might want to consider questions such as:
– What did I do today that required learners to be sensually present in their learning? To encounter the other, to feel, care, respect, and to notice the more-than-human world?
– Evaluation of some important learning can be elusive. How can I create a positive space to honour the existence of diverse learning, without being beholden to the tyranny of measurable outcomes?
– Have I considered how to hold space for learners as they encounter the range of emotions that appear in response to care?

Expanding the Imagination
We believe that future teachers can no longer be trained for a system that leaves students ill-prepared to respond to current crises and imaginatively unable to create new responses. (Jickling & Blenkinsop, 2020; Blenkinsop et al., 2019).
Current ecological precarity requires educators to think and be differently and to do this they will have to imagine differently. This requires ecological forms of imagination that reach beyond our own skulls to engage external materials, processes, entities, and places (Morse, 2022). We acknowledge that many educators, especially that choose to work with learners in settings beyond the bounds of classroom walls, are already extraordinarily imaginative. However, we must still be aware that the imagination is not as broad and flexible as generally assumed.
As educators, this involves recognizing that the imagination is culturally limited. Part of the wild pedagogical work will be to expand the imaginative capacities of teachers and learners. The languages we speak and the foundational stories we are told shape who we are in the world. And they limit what we can think and imagine. For example, one of the most persistent challenges that we have experienced is that many teachers have a hard time imagining that meaningful learning can occur either outside or beyond that which can be measured. Yet this learning may be pivotal to meaningful change. Consider the example of Næss and the dying flea. His learning and understanding were suddenly present, like a bolt of lightning, in a moment of wonder and awe. This was a knowing “freed from the agenda of possession and control” (Robert Bringhurst, in Zwicky, 2023, p. 11). It wasn’t acquired through scaffolding or a series of planned activities. And it wasn’t assessable in any obvious way.
Put another way, do we have the imaginative capacity to loosen control and surrender to experiences in the world? Can we imagine meaning making that is emergent, expressive, more-than-human, and potentially different for each learner? And what might we mean by surrender?
In these times, with such an uncertain future, the required scope of this implied surrender to the unstructured, the outdoors, and the hard to assess isn’t fully knowable. We aren’t suggesting abandoning numeracy, literacy, and all other educational “staples.” And we don’t yet know if the solution will be to abandon the physical structures of schools—such as at the Maple Ridge Environmental School (Blenkinsop & Kuchta, 2024)—or some more modest arrangement that allows the boundaries between inside and outside to be far more porous. What does seem clear, though, is that we must provide space—perhaps surrender to—physical and emotional experiences that fall well beyond forms of knowing and imagining prioritized by social norms and mainstream educational systems.
It is risky business to stray so far from expected norms. Yet in Zwicky’s words, “where the danger lies, there too lies meaningful life” (2019, p. 95). Can we be diligent in fulfilling our educational responsibilities if we do not embrace learning that increases our capacity for knowing and meaning making with and in the world? Taking on this challenge will test our collective imaginations.
While imaginative capacity will always be limited, we can expand our reach. This requires open and generous orientation; willingness to change; active gathering of ideas about how to be-in-the-world, both within one’s cultural reality and beyond; expansion of available tools; careful consideration of the stories, metaphors, and languages used; and thoughtful engagement in an ever-widening range of experiences. The last consideration recognizes that imagination relies on the “stuff” of living to work with. It is the ideas, concepts, experiences, encounters, that nourish the imagination. It is then up to educators to offer students wilder possibilities for expanding and perhaps re-orienting their imaginative range.
The challenge of expanding imagination is difficult; however, there are some things to consider. We can name this limitation for educators and invite this challenge. This might in turn act to de-centre the teacher as expert and open the space for risk-taking and pedagogical exploration. If we are imaginatively limited by our histories and cultures, then none of us has the whole answer. This naming might leave space for the wild and the spontaneous to nourish possibilities. It might also challenge the sometimes defensive “it just won’t work” kind of thinking that can hold us back. Our sense is that the challenge to expand imagination might be essential for responding to this changing world.
With this discussion as background, educators might want to consider questions such as:
– What did I do with my practice today that pushed outside the students’ previous experiences and my own imagination?
– What new “stuff,” experiences, and stories, did I add to the mix? Did I make a considered attempt to provide space for the unusual to happen?
– What cognitive, physical, cultural, and natural tools am I working with right now? And what new ones might I try introducing? Where might I look to find additional ideas?

NB: Text for touchstones 1-6 is taken directly from the Wild Pedagogies website: https://wildpedagogies.com/