Western contemporary educational systems tend to re-produce, and thus maintain, the existent non-sustainable social structures, failing to live up to the present critical times. Their aim is confined to preparation for financial “success,” whereas they disregard the imminence of environmental crises and global social shifts and are rooted in the human sense of superiority over nature, that is, anthropocentrism. The present article acknowledges the need for reconsideration of humans’ place and role in the ecosystem and focuses on the importance of a more ecocentric pedagogy. A holistic in-service teacher training was designed and implemented in Greece, inspired by the wild pedagogies touchstones, mainly the notion of nature as co-teacher. Twelve participants met for the course of a year to immerse themselves in nature-centred, affective, relational, “wild” experiences. Changes were recorded using pre/post-semi-structured interviews to inquire into participants’ perceptions of self versus Self (i.e. acknowledging oneself as part of a larger whole) and perceptions of (environmental) education. It appears that deep, relational nature experiences (a) can shift the perception of individualised self towards Self, (b) can shift the perception of teacher identity towards that of a change agent and (c) can set ethics and values education as a priority among trainee-teacher participants.

This paper begins with crises; environmental, social and democratic. And then it posits that in the midst of these crises there might be an opportunity. One that involves not so much “saving” democracy and sustaining current ways of life but shifting attentions towards potentially creating (re-creating) something different. Something we are calling eco-democracy. There have long been voices, calling for a more environmentally thoughtful form of democracy. After tracing a short discussion of this history including some of the critiques we turn to an exploration of eco-democracy in environmental education. Our argument is that some forms of environmental education are already thinking in more eco-democratic ways without necessarily naming the project as such. In order to do this, we focus on five ‘seedlings’ of eco-democracy that already exist in environmental education. These seedlings allow us to do two things. First, draw connections to Wild Pedagogies and second draw out four key considerations for environmental educators if they are interested in having more eco-democratic practices: voice, consent, self-determination and kindness. The paper ends with a short speculative exploration of what might happen pedagogically if environmental education were to assume an eco-democratic orientation through honouring voice, consent, self-determination, and kindness.

Fostering a relationship with the more-than-human world is understood to be crucial in wilding pedagogies. Yet for many, such a relationship is often developed in early life and is limited in complexity and nuance. In this paper, we propose to investigate what a mature relationship with the natural might look like. We do so in three parts. The first part introduces four moments of surprise or pause: “hunh?!” moments. These lead to four associated observations that suggest contemporary limitations on human relationship with place, and in one case, enhancement of it. They are: an idealisation of childhood relationship with the natural world, which is now kept in a separate category, rendering it inaccessible to the adult; an un-knowing of relationality with the natural world through cultural practices that deny or denigrate such a state; the myth of human autonomy, which comes with multiple cultural repercussions; and finally, what we are here calling natural imagination, which pulls in the opposite direction to the first three. An environmentally rooted Haudenosaunee model regards imagination as not simply the purview and possession of humans, but a shared space between people and the natural world. In response to these, in Parts 2 and 3, we propose that a relational ontology — one that enacts relationship between humans and the more-than-human — cannot be reached simply by progressing further in intent, sensitivity or theorising from the current assumed model of the psychological development. The abyss between current ontologies and an alternative must be hurdled, if it is to be crossed at all. This may be done by challenging presuppositions that underpin current ontologies and psychologies and moving from theorising to enacting an alternative model. Such a model, in part informed by the fungal research of Merlin Sheldrake, may lead to another way of being human, an enmeshing with the more-than-human, which we call amalgam-being.

Framed by biological and environmental education, this paper addresses eight questions posed in Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene. These questions ponder more-than-human methodologies, positionality of the natural world, embedded anthropocentricism and research implications for the natural world. Wild pedagogues aim to reclaim and reimagine an educational system toward intentional praxis less reliant on quantifiable learning outcomes, with a move toward active, ‘‘self-willed pedagogy’’ with an agential nature as co-teacher. This bold enterprise challenges dominant Western-colonial paradigms rooted in power and control over nature and learners. My responses explore Tim Ingold’s notion of a ‘‘modest, humble, and attentive’’ science, ecocentric place-based research, questions dissection and animal experimentation, and offers Goethean science and Indigenous philosophy as alternatives to rational-reductionist Newtonian science. Lab-based science is contrasted with natural history, and creative, contemplative practice are suggested as tools of the wild researcher. How can we transform science education through the lenses of deep ecology and philosophical posthumanism? This paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue of ecological and environmental education during the Anthropocene, especially in regard to the life sciences and the often-unquestioned use of nonhuman animals in science teaching and research.

Wild pedagogies invites educators to engage with more-than-humans as co-teachers and co-researchers. In collaborating with city grass, this paper blends rhizomatic thinking, literary ecocriticism, and the rewilding of pedagogy within severely constrained circumstances. Citing cognitive, emotional, and physical benefits of engaging with free and flourishing nature, this research asks: How can the severe constraints of particular sociopolitical circumstances and disciplines, such as postsecondary literature courses, be creatively encountered to support engagement with flourishing more-than-human kin? It also asks: What would grass do? This paper walks readers through many barriers faced by city college humanities courses and suggests practical, creative work-arounds that, while focused on college literature classes, can be adapted to educators in diverse disciplines and contexts. Because we need playful thinking to think creatively — even on the brink of catastrophes — this paper is written as a choose-your-own adventure game. Educators will be invited to consider the institutional, geographic, academic, political, personal, and social barriers impacting their pedagogical choices. Ecologically concerned educators need pragmatic, creative, and compassionate support to envision how wild pedagogies pathways can be applied to their course loads. Here, these explorations are designed to be experiential and experimental, open-ended, and ultimately mutually liberating.

Within environmental education research, there is an ongoing interest in trying to understand what factors might lead to pro-environmental action and pro-environmental behaviours. This study explores the relationship between environmental attitudes and self-perceived action competence for sustainability by combining a questionnaire measuring self-perceived action competence for sustainability (SPACS-Q) with a questionnaire measuring environmental attitudes, the 2 factor Model of Environmental Values (2-MEV-Q), among 236 primary school student teachers in France. Our results show that the SPACS-Q adapted to the French context is largely valid within this sample and that the factor Preservation in the 2-MEV model is a predictor for SPACS. This connection is strongest for the factor Willingness to act. Likewise, we conclude that age impacts the SPACS factor Confidence in one’s own influence, whereas other variables such as training in sustainable development issues do not impact any of the SPACS factors. The study provides some insights into how self-perceived action competence and pro-environmental attitudes might be promoted through education.

This article explores the extent students’ environmental values are informed through a socioecological learning framework when a deep-time universe hi/story is integrated with environmental education and local cultural origins in the primary school curriculum. The research concept grew from teacher observations that students addressed sustainability from a fragmented action approach, rather than incorporating a lifelong learning and wider worldview of past, present and possible future environmental changes. The research was conducted with 8–9-year-old students during a 17-week transdisciplinary pedagogical intervention, adapted for primary-aged students, from an educational evidence-based, online Big History Project, empowering young learners to engage in transformative thinking and to add their voices as co-researchers. Additional data was collected from the same co-researcher and student cohort two years later. The research findings over the two years remain significant, where students continued to discuss the environment and sustainability in the context of a child-framed deep learning pedagogy framework of the changing 13.8-billion-year universe story. If this original research is to remain significant, further research and programming need to be undertaken with students and educators, to ensure that the value of deep-time hi/story is embedded at all levels of the education continuum, including primary-aged students.

An urban forest school, London, UK: Stegosaurus (self-chosen pseudonym) is crouching and looking down intently at something on the ground. I notice he is rubbing two pieces of chalk in his hands. Chalk gently sprinkles over blades of grass, covering each leaf in a white dust.

A wall-less school, Bali: Paintbrush hails me. I pick her up, stroking her smooth, moist bristles likening them to fur. Between my fingers, I roll her brittle wooden handle backwards and forwards, imagining that this could be a twig, bone or spine.

What if we were to attend to the peculiarities of these material encounters?

How might Chalk and Paintbrush enact wild pedagogies?

Chalk and paintbrushes are everyday objects in educational settings and traditional, dominant pedagogies focus on how humans use these objects to support learning. Drawing on two material-multispecies moments from our posthumanist, feminist, materialist inquiries, we think-with rather than about Chalk and Paintbrush as intra-acting, co-creators of knowledge. These provide ways for becoming-wild that resist the anthropocentric, developmental and civilising processes so deeply imbued in educational approaches. Instead, becoming-wild offers hopeful and generative wild pedagogies that acknowledge the power of the everyday, ignored and divergent that strengthen and expand all our response-abilities.

In this paper, we focus on a particular example of human–wildlife conflict involving Dungalaba (Dungalaba, Saltwater Crocodile, C. porosus — this paper will interchange between the various names of the species. It is preferred to us various names as we would like to acknowledge the various ways in which people come to understand and recognise the species) (Saltwater Crocodile) in the Northern Territory, Australia. We seek to both better understand and improve relationships with such potentially dangerous animals, positioning this as an educational endeavour. Drawing upon interviews with a small number of relevant stakeholders, we utilise storytelling as a method for informing contemporary relationships with Dungalaba. The method of storytelling has been used effectively by Indigenous Australians for thousands of years to pass teachings of our older people for the benefit of future generations. During interviews, research participants told stories of their lived experiences, which informed the creation of narratives that depict current relationships of conflict and past relationships of harmony. We discuss these narratives and how they may educate for respectful interactions and mutually beneficial coexistence between humans and Dungalaba. This paper contributes to the growing body of work that embraces Indigenous ways of knowing for improved environmental relations. Furthermore, this paper offers specific possibilities for the use storytelling as a tool within crocodile safety education programs within the Northern Territory.

In this communication, the Australian authors – two Indigenous women and one woman with Anglo-Celtic ancestry – take us into Western Australian Indigenous language and worldviews, to help us reach toward a regenerative worldview. Indigenous words such as rinyi, pirlirr, and liyan are explored to point us in a direction unfamiliar to many English speakers, to Land and Country as living and responsive. The authors notice that it is very difficult to describe these terms in English, because English language does not seem sufficiently capacious to describe the depth of relational being-with Country that Indigenous languages portray. This may be changing, as various Indigenous and place-based groups publish their messages to the world. Within a methodology that is poetic and ontological, a storying method is used to illustrate elements of an Indigenous regenerative worldview that highlights the lyrics of life, for hope. It is for change agents who want to be transformative of the ways they participate with Country; and enable children to learn.

Imagine being in a university that functions in a place-based culturally regenerative way. In this concept paper, the authors bring together theory, practice, and experience, in the service of transforming universities towards place-based cultural regeneration. At present, Australian universities operate using an economic philosophy of neoliberal corporatism characterised by hierarchical management strategies, competitive tendencies, patriarchal values, and discourse characterised by bifurcation or binary thinking. These features illustrate a worldview that is entangled with the meta crises of our times such as climate change, species loss, hatred/intolerance, and unfathomable violence. The authors consider ways of moving towards a place-based, Indigenous-informed, practical, relational way of learning, being and knowing differently. The paper tentatively assembles a local, place-based culturally regenerative worldview based on living, vibrant, responsive places that embrace people who collaborate with Country – in the Indigenous sense of deep relationality. Within this worldview, the authors propose collaborative ways of governing, teaching, learning, and leading that is necessary for place-based cultural regeneration. In conclusion, the authors outline a pathway towards universities as places of regenerative cultures, which prioritise the nurturing of learning to live and work beyond the current societal paralysis on the road to collapse.

This paper shares a heuristic to support thinking about meaningful transformative education within the context of the contemporary environmental and social crisis. We describe the context of this work and explore the epistemological foundations for this model, which has been evolving and guiding our research and teaching and which underpins the six qualities of meaningful transformative education. The qualities are being open to alternative visions of the future and alternative approaches to education, accepting and embracing complexity, incorporating multiple types of knowledge, reorienting towards justice, developing ecological worldviews and supporting students to bring about systemic change. We also present a series of illustrative vignettes, informed by real-world practices of schools in England, which bring these qualities to life. The vignettes and subsequent discussion highlight possibilities and challenges for enacting a meaningful transformative education in schools.