Why Wild Pedagogies?

Given the sense of ecological urgency that increasingly defines our times, this chapter seeks to look beyond current norms and worldviews that are environmentally problematic. With this thinking in mind, wild pedagogies, first, aims to re-examine relationships with places, landscapes, nature, more-than-human beings, and the wild. This requires rethinking the concepts wilderness, wildness, and freedom. Second, this chapter contends that educators need to trouble the dominant versions of education that are enacted in powerful ways and that bend outcomes towards a human-centred and unecological status quo. With this in mind, wild pedagogies seeks to challenge recent trends towards increased control over pedagogy and education, and how this control is constraining and domesticating educators, teachers, and the curriculum. Finally, given that the dominant current human relationship with Earth cannot be sustained, we posit that any critique suggested must be paired with a vision - and corresponding educational tools - that allows for the possibility of enacting a new relationship.