A wild river journey and a wild question

What does it mean to wild (verb) pedagogies? Responding to this question is the focus of our paper. The question was raised in this specific way (see also Green and Dyment, this issue) during a shared experience rafting the Franklin River late in 2017. Our ten-day journey involved eleven women and men, most Australian but also two Canadians, one Norwegian, and one from England. Most worked in outdoor environmental education/recreation and we shared that general occupational perspective. We are two of these educators – although we had not met before this journey: one Australian and the other Norwegian. These cultural origins inform our questioning and responses.

The focus of the journey was to engage in discussion about wild (adjective) pedagogies while in a wilderness area: the Franklin River. Perspectives were shared by participants; and a notion was raised by some concerning the act of wilding pedagogies, hence our question. We gathered under the auspices of a broader project – Wild Pedagogies – that emerged in 2014, based on the content of a graduate course held at Lakehead University in Canada in 2012 (Jickling et al. 2018).

Prominent in our discussions was debate around the meaning of wild when conjoined with pedagogies. As Jickling et al. (2018) acknowledge, wild pedagogies is comprised of two terms which come together meaningfully to express the broader notion. In this coming together, pedagogy conveys teaching praxis: “the ways enacted by teachers to support learning and change” (p. 3); and pedagogies, plural, recognizes the “multiple ways” (p. 3) available for such praxis.

Wild is conventionally associated with “notions of savagery, danger, primitiveness, and emptiness” (Jickling et al. 2018, p. 3). Yet, “historically, ‘wild’ has also been associated with the notion of the will, so to be wild is to be self-willed” (p. 3; see Skeat 1888, p. 711). This etymological perspective can also be applied to wilderness, which has its origins in “a wild or waste place” (Skeat 1888, p. 711), a “desert” or deserted place. From these origins, Vest (1985) argued that “wilderness then means ‘self-willed-land’ or ‘self-willed-place’ with an emphasis on its own intrinsic volition” (p. 324), and “hence, in wil-der-ness, there is a ‘will-of-the-land’” (p. 324).

Following this etymological direction, conjoining wild and pedagogies suggests pedagogies that embrace self-will of some form, as self-willed-pedagogies. But a question must also be asked: whose will? In this paper we suggest that, in a pedagogical situation, there are always already multiple wills vying to express their agency: including the self-will of the teacher, the self-will of the students and the self-will of the land, or wider nature.

The notion of wider nature builds on Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss’s proclamation that “we are not outside the rest of nature, and therefore cannot do with it as we please without changing ourselves” (1989, p. 165). In this sense wider nature as a term is intended to highlight those wills beyond student and teacher in a pedagogical situation, acknowledging that a broader understanding of wild pedagogies must include other-than-human centredness – an idea not easily practiced. In this paper we argue that pedagogies must be progressively wilded in order to embrace wills beyond teachers and beyond students, so as to include the self-will of wider nature. But how to achieve this?

The challenge of wilding teacher-centred pedagogies

Traditionally, it has been the self-will of the teacher which has dominated the pedagogical situation, expressed through various teacher-centred pedagogies. This dominance has been questioned, enabling the self-will of the child or student to be acknowledged via the development of student-centred pedagogies. Larry Cuban (1993), for example, examined the prevalence of these two forms of pedagogy by collecting historical data across particular periods of the twentieth century in specific areas of the United States. His investigation revealed “two traditions of teaching (teacher-centred and student-centred) that have persisted for centuries” (p. 245). Notably, Cuban defined teacher-centred and student-centred instruction in terms that reflect the self-will of those involved; “teacher-centred instruction means a teacher controls what is taught, when, and under what conditions within his or her classroom,” whereas “student-centred instruction means students exercise a substantial degree of direction and responsibility for what is taught, for how it is learned, and for any movement within the classroom” (1983, p. 160).

Teaching practices have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century, when Cuban’s analysis revealed a prevalence of teacher-centred pedagogies. However, such evolution has not been linear or universal. In the 1920s and 1930s, a time when “there was an explosion of interest in the project method of teaching, joint teacher-student planning, small group work, independent study, and curriculum revision,” it was notable that “only a few of those ideas had penetrated classrooms,” even though “progressive ideology had become the conventional wisdom among educators” (1983, p. 163). So, while there was a lot of talk about pedagogies that could be described as student-centred, not many teachers actually implemented these in their own teaching.

In a second period of progressive change, described by Cuban as occurring during the 1960s and 1970s, his analysis revealed a similar picture in which “the dominant pattern was teacher-centred instruction with a small percentage of elementary teachers developing hybrid versions of open classrooms; in high school classrooms, little variation from the dominant teaching pattern” (1983, p. 164). It seems that the self-will of teachers is strong when it comes to questions of whose will should be at the centre of pedagogical practices. Cuban concluded that, “historically, teaching practices have hewed to a familiar teacher-centred pattern that persistently reasserts itself after reform impulses weaken and disappear” (1983, p. 165). Such a conclusion does not bode well for pedagogical reform efforts.

Yet schools have changed, just not via a sweeping replacement of one form of pedagogy with another, even though some groups of teachers strongly advocated for one pedagogy over another. These groups engaged in “fierce rhetorical struggles” (Cuban 2007, p. 4) over which ways of teaching were best for all or some students. The majority of teachers did not engage in such conflict, however, opting instead for compromise; “substantial numbers of teachers, concerned with maintaining order and limiting classroom noise, yet attracted to the new ideas about children and their development struck compromises between what was viewed as minimum teacher perogatives … and the new beliefs” (1984, p. 257). Cuban described a general example of what such compromise looked like.

Most experienced teachers, for example, establish student loyalty and compliance to their authority in the initial weeks of a school year. They can then count on students consistently responding to their requests. In such a setting, rearranging desks, students moving around more than they had, establishing learning centres, or dividing pupils into groups is far less threatening to a teacher's control than students determining what should be studied, when, and under what conditions. Not only are such increments of student involvement in the classroom less menacing, once the teacher's mandate is accepted by students, but these levels of participation offer the best of both worlds: control is maintained through the existing routines and traditions established by the teacher that undergird the moral order of the classroom – all within a less formal, relaxed atmosphere. (Cuban 1984, pp. 258-259)

During 2004, Cuban extended the database of his previous investigation to reveal a similar situation, with teacher-centred and student-centred instruction forming the ends of a continuum along which “most teachers hugged the middle …, blending activities, grouping patterns, and furniture to create hybrids of the two traditions” (2007, p. 11). He labelled.

this middle position “teacher-centred progressivism” because it pointed to “the hybrid classroom practices and particular student-centred features that have been incorporated into most teachers’ repertoires over the decades as they adapted their practices to regulatory policies” (p. 22).

Such compromise, from our perspective, is an example of pedagogical wilding: a change from a pedagogy dominated, fairly completely, by the self-will of the teacher at the beginning of the twentieth century, to one open to hearing the self-will of the students and accommodating this will for at least part of the time. Typified in the example provided by Cuban above, the hybrid form of teaching which developed over the course of the twentieth century, in the United States at least, acknowledged the self-will of students and allowed this will some space, but within bounds set by the teacher. This was no wholesale shift but a managed opening that is still being negotiated today.

The difficulty faced in achieving this particular pedagogical wilding illuminates the level of challenge to be confronted in decentring the teacher’s will in favour of the self-will of others (in this case students). This managed pedagogical opening has taken a century to gain general acceptance. And even so, while the rhetoric of student voice may now be considered conventional, the practical situation remains one of compromise; a guarded offering to students of teacher-centred progressivism. With this awareness, the extent of the challenge of achieving a nature-centred pedagogy is made plain.

Further wilding pedagogies to include the self-wills of wider nature

In most classrooms, it is rare for the varied and multiple self-wills of wider nature to be allowed to speak (or perhaps be listened to) pedagogically. Indeed, such self-will is simply not apparent in most classrooms. Outdoor education offers a potential contextual advantage here in that it is premised on the notion of getting out-of-doors and away from the indoor classrooms that can constrain much pedagogical initiative (Quay 2016). However, even in outdoor education there is still an awareness amongst teachers around the difficulty of embracing the self-will of wider nature, even when the teacher is willing to forego much control, because the pedagogical opening made available is readily taken up by the self-will of students.

This is visible, at times, in the tension felt within outdoor education between personal development goals of adventure education and environmental understanding/connection goals of environmental education (Quay and Seaman 2013). It might also be suggested that the varied self-will of wider nature is often encountered in outdoor education, via weather and other events, but not often acknowledged as such. Instead, these encounters are merely with things of the outside classroom, things that have affordances (Gibson 1979), but not necessarily understood as self-willed. In this sense these encounters may cause disturbances to the continuance of regular practices which then have to be managed, or not.

Wild pedagogies as nature-centred pedagogies

Under the banner of wild pedagogies, Jickling et al. (2018) propose six “touchstones” which are offered as “guiding principles … for practice” (p. 2). These guiding principles are an attempt to suggest a heuristic that might inform pedagogical planning and decision making when attempting to navigate the compromises between wills that acknowledgement of the self-will of wider nature engenders. Such compromises involve the centring, decentring and recentring of multiple wills. Yet it remains primarily the teacher’s responsibility to hold that space in a deliberate attempt to choreograph the opportunity for movement between wills, creating a flow of control and responsibility.

Building on these understandings, we suggest that the wild pedagogies touchstones may be paraphrased in the following manner: (1) maximise the potential for nature’s agency – the self-will of wider nature – to be encountered and acknowledged; (2) work to enrich the flow of control so that nature-centredness features, meaning that it is not just the wills of the teacher or the students that dominate always; (3) allow for situational emergence of encounters between wills by not shying away from complexity and by embracing spontaneity; (4) enable encounters with the self-will of nature by being where these encounters can most readily and obviously occur; (5) provide enough time, such that time is less of a barrier to how encounters with the self-will of nature can unfold and can engender new habits; and (6) engage in consideration of how these encounters and new habits may inform and transform encounters and habits in more everyday settings.

These guiding pedagogical principles indicate ways of teaching; but they suggest more than this, pointing to ways of living wherein human self-will acknowledges the self-will available within wider nature. In this sense there is no distinction implied between specific education situations and more everyday living. As Næss suggested, “you cannot draw the line sharply at all between education and action” (Næss and Jickling 2000, p. 60). But more than this, “you should not draw a sharp line between how you treat nature, how you behave, and how you act” (p. 60). Norwegians call this drawing together of education, action and nature “‘friluftsliv’” (p. 60), which literally means “‘free air life’” (1989, p. 178), hence “friluftsliv is widely recognized as a vital part of everyday life and seen as a key symbol of Norwegian culture and identity” (Pedersen Gurholt 2008, p. 55).

Also using the support of heuristic guidelines, Næss (1989) advocates five “guidelines for ethically and ecologically responsible friluftsliv” (see p. 179). These guidelines illuminate how one could and should achieve free air life, with potential pedagogical directions growing from his belief that protecting the planet as a whole and for its own sake “certainly is a specifically human task” (1989, p. 141). This human task, then, cannot be achieved without the support of education. Some of Næss’s guidelines for friluftsliv align closely with those of wild pedagogies while others add further pedagogical considerations. The implication we suggest here is that wild pedagogies and friluftsliv attempt to engage a similar nature-centredness pedagogically, and that friluftsliv contributes further connection with everyday life, connection well understood by Norwegians, as described by Pedersen Gurholt (2008). Yet there is also a critical pedagogical edge to friluftsliv, for Næss’s guidelines advocate increased adoption of free air life, for the sake of humanity and wider nature. Working pedagogically to support change in everyday life is a critical function of such wild pedagogies.

This connection back to versions of everyday living (which may not be steeped in the philosophy of friluftsliv), inspired Martin (1999) in Australia to consider the label “critical outdoor education” to specify a form of outdoor education which might “contribute distinctively to education for the planet, by focusing on cultural beliefs and practices that may be contributing to the ecological crisis” (p. 464). Here the central issue is “humanity’s relationship with the outdoors (or nature)” (p. 464). In other words, “critical outdoor education goes back to the bush, not just to recreate and have fun, but to look back with a critical perspective at the contexts left behind” (p. 465). It is the light that outdoor education experiences may shine on beliefs and practices in other parts of life that is the main concern of this critical function of outdoor education.

There is a need, however, as Payne (2002) has highlighted, to expand such critique to include the practices of outdoor education itself; for “the activities privileged in outdoor education are also a product of the culture now criticized in outdoor education and should not be immune from criticism in any discourse that lays claim to being critical” (p. 6). This insight led Payne to suggest that any outdoor education “can only be an effective form of cultural criticism if it embarks more earnestly on a ‘reflexive turn’ about its ‘own’ activities and constructions of experience, learning, education and nature” (p. 17). Such reflexivity is a key aspect of the guidelines expressed in wild pedagogies and friluftsliv. Reflexivity also speaks to the wilding of pedagogies, including those practiced through outdoor education.

Wild, critical, nature-centred pedagogies introduce an important acknowledgment of the self-will of wider nature into pedagogical discourses, especially those that may be amenable to recentring in this way, such as those appearing under the broad umbrella of outdoor education. The guidelines espoused for wild pedagogies and friluftsliv, for example, generally speak positively to outdoor educators. But this begs the critical question of whether nature-centred pedagogies can penetrate into broader pedagogical discourses, as student-centred pedagogies have done? We believe that this must be the aim. Although we acknowledge that if the historical account of the development of student-centred pedagogies is any guide, then such an advance will be a long, gradual and difficult task (see also, Blenkinsop and Morse 2017).

Many forms of outdoor learning that offer possibilities have not always deliberately addressed specific nature-centred pedagogies when these are understood to wild pedagogy beyond student-centredness to nature-centredness. Waite et al. (2016), for example, “suggest that ‘outdoor learning’ represents the deliberate learner-centred educational offer, where context, both social and environmental, play a significant role” (p. 869). Specifically mentioning learner or student-centred pedagogy, they highlight environment as context, but not necessarily in terms of pedagogical centredness, where the self-will of nature is explicitly acknowledged. This is learning out-of-doors but not yet in full acknowledgment of the agential self-will of wider nature. More wilding is required.

Another way of wilding pedagogies: Experience-centred education

Wilding pedagogies means contending with multiple self-wills in pedagogical deliberations, acknowledging a range of pedagogical centres – including possibilities for teacher-centred, student-centred and nature-centred – which, following the usual response, results in further hybridization, informed by compromise and a wholistic understanding of operating within wider nature. Centring, decentring and recentring pedagogy via compromises of this sort is a challenging undertaking.

Educational philosopher John Dewey confronted this issue more than a century ago, in the earlier days of promoting the self-will of children as a pedagogical concern. Like Cuban many decades later, Dewey recognized that there was no clear-cut expression of either teacher-centred or student-centred instruction, or what he called old education and new education respectively; “there is no longer any old education, save here and there in some belated geographic area. There is no new education in definite and supreme existence” (1902a, p. 19). Rather, “what we have is certain vital tendencies” (p. 19).

These tendencies ought to work together; each stands for a phase of reality and contributes a factor of efficiency. But because of lack of organization, because of the lack of unified insight upon which organization depends, these tendencies are diverse and tangential. Too often we have their mechanical combination and irrational compromise. More prophetic, because more vital, is the confusion which arises from their conflict. (Dewey 1902a, pp. 19-20)

For Dewey, the compromises teachers developed in trying to accommodate their own will and the self-will of children were not well choreographed movements between wills, but more often mechanical combinations premised on confusion born of conflict. Acknowledgment of the self-will of children in an educational situation resulted in the perception, for many teachers, of a conflict between their will and that of the will of students. For Dewey, this way of perceiving the problem – the case of “the child vs. the curriculum” (Dewey 1902b, p. 5) – was a major factor contributing to the way the problem was approached. A central feature of Dewey’s position was to see beyond a conflict between two sides; “it is the business of an intelligent theory of education,” he claimed, “to ascertain the causes for the conflicts that exist” (p. 5); and then, “instead of taking one side or the other,” a theory of education should “indicate a plan of operations proceeding from a level deeper and more inclusive than is represented by the practices and ideas of the contending parties” (p. 5).

Dewey’s message was to avoid seeing the problem as one of conflict, for this, fairly inevitably, leads to the solution being some form of compromise, as Cuban highlighted. And such compromise does not actually resolve the issue but instead leaves both sides in place, with the temporary answer being to find some hybridized mixture or agreeable balance point, a middle way, designed to appease and placate.

This formulation of the business of the philosophy of education does not mean that the latter should attempt to bring about a compromise between opposed schools of thought, to find a via media, nor yet to make an eclectic combination of points picked out hither and yon from all schools. It means the necessity of the introduction of a new order of conceptions leading to new modes of practice. (Dewey 1938, p. 5)

Dewey argued instead for a different way forward, one that emanated from a deeper level that was more inclusive. As desribed above, Dewey saw the issue as one of a lack of unified insight, a lack of understanding of how both wills could work together to achieve the same goal. His response was to highlight the need for “a coherent philosophy of experience” (1902a, p. 49), which could inform pedagogical planning. Dewey continued to highlight this need over most of his career, advocating again, more than thirty years later, for the same “need for a sound philosophy of experience” (1938, p. 91). It could perhaps be said that, in order to overcome the need to reconcile multiple wills, Dewey called for education to be experience-centred, where a philosophy of experience would offer comprehension of how these wills might function coherently.

Dewey’s understanding of an experience-centred education, was not student-centred, teacher-centred or nature-centred. The problem with what he knew as “child-centred” schools, those emphasizing “pupil initiative and pupil-purposing and planning,” was that they suffered “from exactly the same fallacy as the adult-imposition method of the traditional school—only in an inverted form” (1930, p. 205). He saw both “obsessed by the personal factor” (p. 205): one prioritised the will of the student, the other the will of the teacher. Instead, “what is wanted is to get away from every mode of … merely personal control” (p. 205). And this could be achieved by making experience the focus.

When the emphasis falls upon having experiences that are educationally worth while, the centre of gravity shifts from the personal factor, and is found within the developing experience in which pupils and teachers alike participate. The teacher, because of greater maturity and wider knowledge, is the natural leader in the shared activity, and is naturally accepted as such. The fundamental thing is to find the types of experience that are worth having, not merely for the moment, but because of what they lead to—the questions they raise, the problems they create, the demands for new information they suggest, the activities they invoke, the larger and expanding fields into which they continuously open. (Dewey 1930, p. 205)

Where earlier understandings of experiential learning placed emphasis on reflection, here Dewey highlights experience inclusive of such reflection. But there remains a vagueness around Dewey’s focus on experience. Still missing from the account so far presented is a coherent theory of experience which may inform what he meant by those types of experience worth having; experiences which draw together teacher and student, as well as, we argue, wider nature.

Occupations: An opportunity for experience and education

Dewey was searching for a unified insight that might support education. We agree with Kliebard (2004), who suggests that Dewey “found that unifying concept in what he called occupations” (p. 60). Occupations, for Dewey, provide a way of understanding the types of experience referred to previously. And significantly, Dewey claimed that “education through occupations … combines within itself more of the factors conducive to learning than any other method” (1916, p. 361). So what, then, are occupations?

Importantly, Dewey did not confine his understanding of occupations to adult jobs, in the sense that only adults have occupations and that they are “distributed in an exclusive way, one and only one to each person” (1916, p. 360). Here Dewey was pushing against the notion of vocational education, for “nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an eye to only one line of activity” (p. 360), he believed. Using the example occupation of artist, he argued that “no one is just an artist and nothing else,” because a person must have other occupations such as being “a member of a family,” having “friends and companions … a business career,” being “a member of some organized political unit, and so on” (p. 360). From these examples it can be discerned that occupations are always socially defined and that there are many types of occupation. So, in short, occupations are types of experiences, they constitute our lives, such that all experiences are occupational. In fact, we are always already engaged or occupied in some type of occupation, be that sleeping/sleeper, daydreaming/daydreamer, running/runner, etc. Yet labelling occupations as we tend to do with one or two words notably limits the depth with which the situational nuance of an occupation can be conveyed.

In functional terms, Dewey (1916) characterized “an occupation” as “a continuous activity having a purpose” (p. 361), as well as “an organizing principle for information and ideas; for knowledge and intellectual growth,” because it provides “an axis which runs through an immense diversity of detail” such that “it causes different experiences, facts, items of information to fall into order with one another” (p. 362). In this sense occupations are unifying of doing and knowing and experienced as holistic, as ways of being-doing-knowing.Footnote 1 As such, Dewey maintained that “wholes for purposes of education are not … physical affairs” (p. 232), as in collections of concrete things. Rather, “a whole depends upon a concern or interest; it is qualitative, the completeness of appeal made by a situation” (p. 232). Occupations, then, are whole in this way, unified by interest and purposeful activity, cohering knowledge as meaning specific to the occupational whole.

Educating through occupations illuminates the need to design educational occupations. Dewey suggested “two traits” (1916, p. 96) that may help in this regard: “how numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared?” and “how full and free is the interplay with other forms of association?” (p. 96). Næss provides an example which highlights such occupational dynamics: between conservationists and developers disputing the future of a forest. This example reveals the ontological importance of occupations: how an occupation informs perception in specific ways. Næss’s example also shows how associations between occupations can be fraught, requiring translations of meaning in order to deal with misunderstandings, and thus offering many possibilities, educationally, for forging understanding of various perspectives, or wills.

Confrontations between developers and conservers reveal difficulties in experiencing what is real. What a conservationist sees and experiences as reality, the developer typically does not see – and vice versa. A conservationist sees and experiences a forest as a unity, a gestalt, and when speaking of the heart of the forest, he or she does not speak about the geometrical centre. A developer sees quantities of trees and argues that a road through the forest covers very few square kilometres compared to the whole area of trees, so why make so much fuss? And if the conservers insist, he will propose that the road does not touch the centre of the forest. The heart is then saved, he may think. The difference between the antagonists is one rather of ontology than of ethics. They may have fundamental ethical prescriptions in common, but apply them differently because they see and experience reality so differently. They both use the single term ‘forest’, but referring to different entities. (Næss 1989, p. 66)

Education plays a crucial role as the means of developing occupations and their associations, and the educational strategies for learning through these, appropriate for those involved. This must take into consideration the richness of the interests and purposes within an occupation and the interplay or association of an occupation with other occupations. In this sense, occupations are always changing, as the people living them are learning within and through them. Such learning occurs via the conjoining of what Dewey called “esthetic experience,” which is “experience in its integrity” (1934, p. 274) and “reflective experience” (1916, p. 176), which denotes forms of cognition. Esthetic experience is the immediacy of perception, acknowledging that perceiving is always occurring, a perceiving that is shaped via occupations. Reflective experience, on the other hand, is the mediation of experience achievable through cognition. We live primarily in esthetic experience and engage secondarily in reflective experience, chiefly when the need to change esthetic experience is perceived, due to perception of some issue or concern. Reflective experience grows out of esthetic experience and aims to influence it.Footnote 2

As mentioned above, Dewey considered the types of experience worth having as occupations which would lead to the raising of questions, creation of problems, demands for new information, invoking of activities, and the opening of awareness and understanding in larger and expanding fields. So then, for teachers, “the problem and the opportunity with the young” becomes one of selecting “orderly and continuous modes of occupation, which, while they lead up to and prepare for the indispensable activities of adult life, have their own sufficient justification in their present reflex influence upon the formation of habits of thought” (1933, p. 51). If Dewey’s claim here, developed to bring together teacher-centred and student-centred pedagogies, is expanded to include nature-centredness in the one co-supportive frame, what occupations might be selected and developed? This, we suggest, is a great responsibility and a significant opportunity.

Challenges for teaching

A significant strength of outdoor education is the many occupations that it enables teachers to create. This is especially apparent when outdoor education is compared and contrasted with other educational fields, including those dominant in schooling (see Quay 2015). Yet outdoor education is only one field within education. If the aim, espoused earlier, is to penetrate broader pedagogical discourses in the bringing of nature-centred, student-centred and teacher-centred pedagogies together beyond mere compromise, and if this is to be attempted via Dewey’s experience-centred education through occupations, then a seismic shift must occur in the way education is understood and practiced. Wilding pedagogies in this sense means wilding mainstream conceptions of how education is organized. For, as Dewey argued, the basic problem is one of a lack of organization due to the lack of the unified insight upon which organization depends. Given a unified insight – a coherent theory of experience – organization must shift to reflect this.

This means uncoupling education from classrooms in order to relocate educational experiences where the occupations selected and planned may best occur. In order to be nature-centred, this means an awareness of how such locating of experiences enables encountering the self-will of nature, applying the guidelines espoused by wild pedagogies and friluftsliv. It raises questions about where the self-will of wider nature may be encountered. Can wild pedagogies only be countenanced in wilderness? Previous wild pedagogies authors (Jickling et al. 2018) and Næss argue to the contrary.

We can do it in cities. You can do it along railways, highways. Everywhere there is something that is essentially nature. You don’t see any human purpose in it. It’s there It’s there on its own—and it’s ugly or it’s beautiful—but it’s there and its complexity is unlimited. (Næss and Jickling 2000, p. 54)

It also means uncoupling education from subjects, such that occupations can be the primary organizational factors in education. No longer just outdoor education, or any other subject, Dewey’s goal for experience-centred education was “education pure and simple,” or in other words, “education with no qualifying adjectives prefixed” (1938, p. 90). This, however, does not mean that curriculum is neglected. Recall Dewey’s pronouncement that an occupation is an organizing principle for information and ideas, for knowledge and intellectual growth, meaning that an occupation provides the context within which certain subject matter is considered meaningful.

Occupations can, therefore, be aligned with specific knowledge, and the occupational curriculum of young people can address epistemic goals. But instead of occupations orientated around that of being a student – being a mathematics student, being a science student, etc. – they can enable a young person to explore being someone in an occupation more conducive to engaging their interests, while learning knowledge required in order to successfully achieve the purposes of that occupation.

The rich number and variation of these occupations (experienced in a school framework across timeframes corresponding to the way units of work are currently organized), allied with an emphasis on seeking out interactions between occupations, together offer occupational pathways that don’t start after years of schooling, but during. Education through occupations is not a mere preparation for life, which Dewey described as “a treacherous idea” (1938, p. 47); rather, they are continuous throughout life.

Uncoupling education in these two ways is a significant wilding, aimed at reorganizing around a unified conception of experience-centred education through occupations.

Importantly, this reorganizing must take into account the ontological priorities of education. As Næss (1989) has suggested via his example of developers and conservers, life is not premised on one version of reality, but many. Different occupations offer different ways of being-doing-knowing.

Acknowledging the multiple wills of teacher-student-nature means ontologically crafting appropriate occupations and their associations, as ways of being, as well as the scope for enabling various occupational pathways. This is supported by understanding that wills have purposes, and so, as ways of doing, these occupations must address shared purpose. Such purposes are the active expression of occupations. At the same time, the knowing required to undertake such action successfully must be learned. As ways of knowing, these occupations must address the sharing of meaningful understanding.

Any unit of work is a complex interplay of occupations. The planning and enactment of a unit of work requires careful crafting of occupations with awareness of multiple wills. Such enactment draws on esthetic and reflective experience, as the achievement of any occupation requires learning. The various ways in which multiple wills are expressed and acknowledged are submerged in esthetic experience, to be addressed when and where relevant in reflective experience, due to awareness of some issue or concern. This is not a compromise between wills but a determination of how to achieve occupational purposes that are shared by multiple wills.

Further work is required in order to explore these ideas. Teachers, educators, still hold the responsibility, as Dewey acknowledged. However, thinking occupationally will be a challenge for many teachers because it seems at odds with a focus on knowledge. Questions will arise as to what occupational wholes may be created and crafted which cohere purposes and meanings such that the wills of teacher, students and wider nature are recognized for the strengths they contribute occupationally. These occupations will be nuanced and local, will be different in different places and with different people. Such are the challenges of educating for teacher-student-nature centredness through occupations; the challenges of wilding pedagogies.