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.

This article explores and reconsiders the view of children's encounters with place as central to a place-based pedagogy that seeks to dismantle rather than support constructions of a nature-culture binary. I unpack the current fervour for reinserting the child in nature and nature-based education as a significant phenomenon in environmental and outdoor education. I will draw on recent literature on place-based research and theorise using new materialist and posthumanist approaches that seek to disrupt anthropocentric views and support new ways of considering our encounters with the more-than-human world. Then, using these new approaches, I will theorise a recent place-based research project with children in the city of La Paz, Bolivia, to illustrate how it is possible to challenge current assumptions that are firmly entrenched in the child in nature movement. I will conclude by considering what intra-species relations, place encounters and child-body-animal-place relations can teach us about questioning anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Finally, I consider how can we overcome these limitations of a narrow and nostalgic view of ‘child and nature’ and reimagine a more diverse approach to education for a sustainable future.