This article contributes to Wild Pedagogies by foregrounding love as an emergent, affective practice that takes shape through embodied, affective encounters with the more-than-human (Whatmore, 2006) and material world. Engaging post-qualitative sensibilities, it approaches walking and writing not as fixed methods, but as entangled, responsive practices that invite ethical attunement to the unfolding rhythms of the living world. While Wild Pedagogies emphasise relationality, they have yet to fully account for affect as a pedagogical force. Addressing this gap, the article traces how love moves through diverse encounters, shaping perception, responsibility, and responsiveness. Love is conceptualised through three interwoven affective pathways: shimmering rupture (moments that unsettle habitual perception), relational resonance (the affective flow that binds beings in co-becoming), and cyclical attunement (the rhythmic deepening of ethical engagement). These pathways reframe love as a material practice of staying-with (Haraway, 2016)—a commitment to returning, noticing, and responding to the world’s ongoing entanglements.

This article explores what we identify as two forms of intuition. The first is a form called teacher-intuition, which is described as expertise-based, rational, and individualised. The second form, relational-intuition, is inspired by Intuitive Interspecies Communication and presented as an embodied, reflexive, and connected way of being with/in the more-than-human world. Guided by hermeneutic methodology, anecdotes and research vignettes aid in understanding the ontological and epistemological differences of these two intuitions. We consider how teacher-intuition might unduly limit the possibilities available for ecologically minded pedagogies, especially in comparison to relational-intuition, which opens more ontologically diverse ways to be teacher — thereby expanding one’s options for interacting with students and creating space for ecological connection. Wild Pedagogies (Jickling et al., 2018) is drawn upon to help situate relational-intuition. We conclude with questions that educators may consider with regards to the form and range of their own intuitions, with a view to perhaps bringing forward more relational forms.

In the edginess of our predicament, violences of the -isms (capitalism, colonialism, imperialism) impact life: ecological degradation and inequalities are some matters of concern and care, regionally and planetary. Such crisis accentuates the call for relational education, a worlding process emerging within and being immanent to practice, probing power-relations, decentring the human and highlighting the enmeshment of peoples and environment. Wilding pedagogies is one way of responding to such call. This contribution, a postqualitative assemblage, attends to the formation of wild as a philosophical concept emerging in-practice working the relationality of theory, artmaking and storying. It defamiliarizes domesticated visions of education by mapping the movement of practices of peoples and conditions of life in (and beyond) Southeast Mediterranean. In so doing, it problematises new materialist, Deleuzoguattarian and indigenous philosophies and cosmologies and suggests such frictions crucial for environmental education. I re-visit and re-enliven — in Karen Barad’s discussion — projects with children, communities, and the more-than-human world in Southeast Mediterranean through artistic (urban sketching) and teaching-pedagogical practice probing wildings as dynamic, unfolding process refuting isolation and fixity. Wildings emerges as differentiating process reworking ethical relations, intensifying and nuancing wild pedagogies and re-imagining environmental education.

This paper reports on a doctoral study that explored young children’s (ages 5 to 7 years) relationships with sticks during their school-based outdoor learning experiences. Sticks (parts of trees) became uniquely contextual agents due to the profound agentic effect the stick-based experiences, which were enacted through Wild Pedagogies, had on the children’s understandings of Place. Sticks were used in physical and symbolic ways throughout the children’s self-guided learning experiences. The children used long sticks to build large structures, houses, and other creations, and selected smaller sticks to represent microphones, brooms, or currency. The use of the Mosaic approach in this study aligns with Wild Pedagogies’ openness to new and different ways of being in and understanding the world, particularly as this approach privileges children, natural objects, and Place as agentic co-teachers and co-learners. The children demonstrated their agency as they made cognitive, physical, corporeal, agentic, affective, and aesthetic connections with Place, which they expressed through their Wild Pedagogical experiences. The study underscores the value of tactile, immersive, and bioregional experiences in helping children connect with nature, build knowledge, develop and share collective agency, and cultivate an ethic of care for the environment in Wild Pedagogical ways.

This submission argues in favour of re-examining the pedagogical role of the microscopic matter of dust as a creative, lively, rebellious participant in an early childhood centre in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on posthuman theories of matter and the social construction of creative agency, this essay shows how the most abject of agents in an early learning educational context have nonhuman agency, and that dust interacts collegially with young children and microscopes, creating (new) playful situations between bodies, atmospheres and spaces. Some educational and western narratives that associate purity, order, and validity with cleanliness propose that dust is akin to dirt. Therefore, dust is seen as maligned. This essay advances an argument that removes the association with dirt and repositions dust. Dust is regarded here as an ordinary teacher, researcher, fellow explorer with children, and a strong agentic collaborator in learning environments. Dust is proposed in our essay to activate children’s connections and relationships to creative ecological microworlds and all forms of planetary lives. Dust also helps rethink some early childhood education practices around the organic bodies that are included and excluded, and the prioritisation of human bodies in discussions about environments and ecologies.

Putting our concepts of dustly microbodies to work, we speculatively explore how the exclusions and expulsions of such microbodies in the early childhood education space can be considered a form of colonising practice, and that re-theorising, re-materialising and decolonising dust allows us to explore concepts of decentralising the human, challenge boundaries of individuality and binaries such as the nature-culture divide and disrupt current educational approaches and frameworks. Additionally, dust invites us to attune to the wildness of microworlds and reimagine more experimental and relational ways of approaching environmental education. Moving away from the dominant stories usually told from psychological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives in early childhood education and applying Harris’s concept of “creative ecologies” (2021) instead.

Wild pedagogies (WP) are emerging as critical, relational alternative to current, often unsustainable learning practices. WP aim to offer a way of learning in, with, through and for nature, embracing a post-humanist, relational perspective. So far, WP have mainly been explored theoretically. Increasingly, educators both within and outside of formal education, are inspired and apply WP in their education. Throughout the world, examples of learning that fit into WPs’ living definition, are emerging. However, concrete inspiration for how to bring WP theory into practice, is still largely lacking. In this paper, we explore three emerging approaches at Wageningen University (The Netherlands), that are inspired by wild pedagogies. Empirically, we combine formative evaluations of course designs with participant observation in a collective case study setting over three years. The empirical research is embedded in an explorative literature review that led us to four explorative areas of WP, namely (1) Wild and caring learning spaces (2) Learning from self-will and wonder (3) Relational learning with the world and (4) Disruptive learning for the world. Eventually we present concrete inspiration on those four areas for implementing WP in formal higher education.

Calls for innovating environmental and sustainability education—including higher education—have been voiced for many years. New approaches are gaining traction, including the Wild Pedagogies framework and notions of rewilding education. A common denominator of these approaches is an emphasis on learning outdoors, and through a relational epistemological lens. Contributing to these developing approaches, this paper investigates the budding concept and practice of outdoor relational education at a university level, specifically Wageningen University (WU) in the Netherlands. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with protagonists and other stakeholders involved in or affiliated with outdoor relational education at WU, we identify associations, key elements and perceived benefits. Our research provides insight into what outdoor relational education and associated concepts are perceived to be in this context, how they are engaged and what the key experienced opportunities and barriers are to implement outdoor relational education further at WU. Complementary to theorisations of wild pedagogies and related approaches, our results offer empirical illustrations of wild pedagogies “in action” in an institutional academic setting that is not necessarily conducive to such developments.

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.

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.

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.