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.

This article explores and discusses the change processes and pedagogical dilemmas ignited by introducing wild pedagogies to pedagogical employees in Danish early childhood institutions. By analysing experiments aimed at developing new play and learning environments, carried out as part of a large design-based research project, we discuss how existing “roots” of early childhood education in Denmark provide a fertile soil for the introduction of wild pedagogies. We identify two “shoots of change” with a potential for pushing the status quo in relations between children, adults, and more-than-human nature. Centreing on altering the place of nature in early childhood education and carving out time for more open approaches, these shoots are in close dialogue with wild pedagogies. By experimenting with these shoots of change, pedagogical dilemmas became more visible, important, and present to the participants. Attending to and exploring such dilemmas are crucial aspects of keeping socio-cultural change processes in motion.

History is littered with unfulfilled promises that emerging technologies – from radios to televisions, and from computers to mobile phones – would completely transform teaching and learning. Now the same promises are being made of generative artificial intelligence (AI). This presentation argues that we should not be focusing on educational revolution, but instead on educational evolution. Education is a complex social, cultural, and political endeavour, serving multiple purposes and multiple stakeholders, and technology is just one of many elements in this large ecosystem.

Focusing on the context of language teaching and learning, this presentation discusses what has changed technologically, and suggests what could and should change educationally. It shows that ChatGPT and a range of other generative AI tools can contribute to language and literacy development in a number of ways, but that we need to be wary of their pedagogical, social, and environmental risks. Educators must develop the AI literacy necessary to take a more nuanced view of generative AI, and we must help our students to do the same.

This paper is based on a keynote presentation delivered at the English Australia Conference in Perth, Australia, on 12 September 2024, with some elaborations for the written version alongside minor updates to reflect more recent developments and publications.

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.

Recent scholarship has explored the concept of “wilding pedagogies” to more deeply engage the more-than-human world in environmental and outdoor adventure education. Thus far, the scholarship around wild pedagogies has been primarily epistemic and pedagogical, focusing on epistemological principles that can guide pedagogy. There has been less focus on ontological considerations for wild pedagogies. This paper offers a theoretical exploration into such ontological considerations that can further inform the practice of wilding pedagogies in outdoor adventure education. The emergence of (new) materialism coupled with an increasing awareness of Indigenous philosophy has problematised many of the ontological assumptions embedded within Eurocentric philosophical ideals. Challenging dualisms and the traditional boundaries of substance, these philosophies consider relations as ontologically primary. From this ontological posture, we can engage with the phenomenon that exists in the space between humans and nature, thinking with nature rather than about nature and recognizing the agency of the more-than-human world.

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.

Despite the central role of language teacher educators (LTEs) in contributing to the development of language teachers in higher education and non-higher education contexts, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical work on their professional lives. One such area that remains largely unexplored concerns the psychology of LTEs. This paper argues for the need to embrace a research program that systematically investigates aspects of LTE psychology in the face of the unique demands, challenges, and pressures this professional group needs to navigate in their complex situated reality. We first position LTEs as key agents in the educational enterprise and go on to problematize the current state of scholarship on this under-researched population in universities, schools, and other practical settings. We then present an empirically grounded discussion to justify why a more explicit focus on LTE psychology is essential, followed by a brief review of what is already known in this respect. In what follows, we outline several key directions future empirical work might take to generate a more in-depth and holistic account of LTE psychology. Overall, this paper portrays LTE psychology as a promising but under-explored area which merits particular attention in its own right.