Bob Jickling

Lakehead University Thunder Bay Campus

This chapter aims, first, to provide a brief introduction to ideas that are central to the heuristic called wild pedagogies [Jickling et al (eds.) (2018) Wild pedagogies: touchstones for re-negotiating education and the environment in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan]. We frame some of the background influences, challenges, that shaped its emer...

Polar bears are drowning. Children rage. And the educational system fails to lead to the qualitative changes this planet needs. The paper begins with the claim that children and adults encounter their worlds in different ways. Children, we suggest, relate to their environments with all their senses, emotions, and skills. These relationships positio...

The stories of our age are being written in mass species extinctions, catastrophic events and the acceleration of climate change. We cannot continue as we are. Any effective response requires a rethinking of ideas, but also of actions and ways of being that are less anthropocentric, less hierarchical and more equitable. Education, we suggest, has a...

This well-constructed, and highly original, sourcebook integrates educational materials for teaching environmental ethics with theoretical reflections. The book is set to contribute immensely to its aim of taking ethics out of philosophy departments and putting it into the streets, into villages, and on the Earth—to make ethics an everyday activity...

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce emerging outdoor environmental educators to wild pedagogies. We begin by framing the challenges and conceptual ideas from which wild pedagogies arises, including ideas about the wild, wildness, and wilderness; questions about education and the nature of control; and concerns for emerging environmental rea...

Preamble: Singers gathering on stage This is a paper for three voices. An attempt at a philosophic experience in the symphonic form. The first voice carries the tune and holds the shape of the paper as it focuses on Baudrillard and proposes that public education in Canada today is in fact a simulacra. The second voice has more room to roam, tracing...

This introductory paper begins by summarizing the premises of this special issue on “Wilding Educational Policy.” That is, first, current normalized educational practices in education are not adequate for these times of extraordinary social and ecological upheaval. Second, an important way forward will be to problematize modernist tendencies to con...

This work, comprised of pinhole photographs paired with written text, represents a series of ontological experiments with participants on a rafting expedition, on the Franklin River, lutruwita (Tasmania). Through photographic experiences in this landscape these experiments interrogated ideas about ways to represent places and ideas. We began with i...

Wild pedagogies are about rethinking our relationships within the world and represent a desire to let go of an overabundant sense of control, to invite the places we visit to become an integral part of our educational work and to respond to provocations in spontaneous, and at times unforeseen, ways. In this paper we provide a contextual background...

Wild pedagogies rest on two premises. First, human relationships with Earth are not sustainable, and second, education is a necessary partner in any transformational project of the scale required to address the first premise. It will not be enough to simply reform existing educational institutions, it is suggested that they must be re-wilded. This...

This chapter presents educators with a conundrum: how to change educational systems so that they can in turn promote learning relevant to and commensurate with the multiple crises we face, without being co-opted by dominant cultural norms. Instead of seeking to integrate environmental and sustainability education into existing educational instituti...

The touchstones presented in this chapter are intended to help sustain the work of wild pedagogues. They stand as reminders of what educators are trying to do. And they challenge us to continue the work. These touchstones are offered to all educators who are ready to expand their horizons, and are curious about the potential of wild pedagogies. The...

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 reexamine relationships with places, landscapes, nature, more-than-human beings, and the wild. This requires rethi...

This chapter focuses on three key points. First, the world has changed, with destructive consequences for many, will continue to change, and will not return to situation "normal." That is, it will not return to global temperatures or species abundance and fluctuations that fall within the kinds of background levels experienced by generations of hum...

In many ways the ideas in this book build towards the touchstones in the previous chapter. In the meantime some educators have already been drawn to wild pedagogies and found the touchstones helpful. Samples of their stories are presented in this chapter, for a couple of reasons. First, these are examples of individuals who are openly renegotiating...

This book explores why the concept of wild pedagogy is an essential aspect of education in these times; a re-negotiated education that acknowledges the necessity of listening to voices in a more than human world, and (re)learning how to dwell in a place. As the geological epoch inexorably shifts to the Anthropocene, the authors argue that learning...

This chapter focuses on three key points. First, the world has changed, with destructive consequences for many, will continue to change, and will not return to situation “normal.” That is, it will not return to global temperatures or species abundance and fluctuations that fall within the kinds of background levels experienced by generations of hum...

This chapter presents educators with a conundrum: how to change educational systems so that they can in turn promote learning relevant to and commensurate with the multiple crises we face, without being co-opted by dominant cultural norms. Instead of seeking to integrate environmental and sustainability education into existing educational instituti...

This article is a small piece of a much larger and still evolving project. Herein we focus on six touchstones for wild pedagogies. The article begins with a short orientation to the larger ideas behind the project and then focuses on exploring six current touchstones with a view towards early childhood environmental educators. The six explored here...

‘This book leads an attack on the domestication of learning, the creeping formality, the structures and control, the standardizing, the separation of each of us from ourselves and our physical reality. This is a portrait of the physicality of children and the need to embrace this in education; the need to see education as humans in the world; the n...

This book provides a critique of more than two decades of sustained effort to infuse educational systems with education for sustainable development, sustainability education, and, for longer still, environmental education. Additionally, taking to heart the idea that deconstruction is a prelude to reconstruction, this critique leads to discussion ab...

In this Afterword, the editors reflect on some of the main themes emerging from the collected chapters. They note that the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report, Education for People and Planet, was launched just as the first draft of this book was completed. This report is welcomed as it couples the status of education with planetary prospects. Yet, it...

First, broad issues in education are discussed and similarities with issues in environmental and sustainability education are noted. Second, some key initiatives, arising after the conclusion of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, are noted and discussed. These include the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda and its implications for educat...

'…raises necessary radical answers to questions emerging from the Community of Life: How can we correct the suicidal path of the neoliberal cultural ethos?' -Alfonso Fernández-Herrería and Francisco Miguel Martínez-Rodríguez, University of Granada, Spain. '… pushes us to consider the future of education.' - Judy Braus, North American Association...

This response problematizes Stefan Bengtsson's (2016) defense of education for sustainable development. He argues that sustainable development and education for sustainable development are not globalizing and hegemonic discourses, as some have claimed, and uses case-study analysis of Vietnamese policy documents to support his claims. He observes co...

This paper shares our experiences using pinhole photography with adolescents as both a pedagogical tool to support and deepen adolescent experiences in wild nature, and as a visual methodological tool to elucidate their experiences. Reflecting on a journey that explored the nature-based experiences of two adolescents on a family canoe trip in North...

I am enormously grateful to the readers of this journal for their kind attention to this work over the past 30 years. Conceptual analysis, the subject of my article, is primarily about clarifying meanings of those key concepts that are central to our collective work. Given the number of nebulous concepts in environmental education, and in education...

This paper is comprised of written text and photographs of wild experiences that relive a series of ontological experiments. The text represents reflections on these experiences. The photographs, artistic expressions of the same experiences, have been made with a homemade pinhole camera—without a lens and viewfinder—thus demanding special sensual p...

Processes of normalizing assumptions and values have been the subjects of theoretical framing and critique for several decades now. Critique has often been tied to issues of environmental sustainability and social justice. Now, in an era of global warming, there is a rising concern that the results of normalizing of present values could be catastro...

In this dialogue between two friends and colleagues with different takes on education for sustainability, Canadian environmental education scholar Bob Jickling argues that education for any cause is not true education, which should strive to prepare minds to create new ideas, not follow a doctrine. Since we don’t have solutions to sustainability, w...

This article traces the development of the World Environmental Congress movement and its establishment as an important international forum. Reflecting on the 5th Congress, it notes the particular contribution of the Congress theme, ‘Our Common Home’. Finally, it considers environmental education’s place alongside other parallel transformative educa...

This paper engages questions about ends in environmental education research. In doing so, I argue that such questions are essentially normative, and that normative questions are underrepresented in this field. After cautioning about perils of prescribing research agendas, I gently suggest that in environmental education key normative questions exis...

0 0000002007 BobJickling bob.jickling@lak eheadu.ca This study contends that environmental education is being significantly altered by globaliz- ing forces, witnessing the effort to convert environmental education into education for sustainable development. This internationally propagated conversion can be challenged from many vantage points. This...

In Canada education for sustainable development is not flourishing. This may seem curious as The Decade of Education For Sustainable Development is now well underway. But this isn't a bad news story. There are interesting dynamics at play and many great initiatives are emerging. This assessment is a story too. There are many ways of interpreting ev...

This paper takes a research orientation towards ethics and, in so doing, frames ethics as processes of inquiry and stories to be told. First, it explores ways that ethics might be ‘reimagined’, situated in everyday contexts and interpreted in ways that allow its stories to do work and invite readers and listeners to consider ethics. Second, it crea...

This article takes the view that in a globalizing context the concept of 'sustainable development' should not be assumed uncritically. Further, tensions arise when education is constructed as an instrument for the implementation of this concept, as manifest in the term 'education for sustainable development'. With critical concern about sustainable...

ppaquet@sasktel.net). Jickling, a long-time Yukon resident, taught environmental ethics and environmental education at Yukon College for many years. He now divides his time between his home in Whitehorse, Yukon and Thunder Bay, Ontario where he recently accepted a faculty position at Lakehead University. His research interests include philosophy of...

Environmental education and environmental advocacy have a contentious relationship. In this article, the author argues that there will always be uncertainty about educationally appropriate responses to controversial issues. Although uncertainty is inherent in this task, the choices are not dichotomous. The author also argues that education suggests...

It is higher education’s responsibility to continuously challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio-scientific disputes. The ill-defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and rea...

It is higher education's responsibility continuously to challenge and critique value and knowledge claims that have prescriptive tendencies. Part of this responsibility lies in engaging students in socio-scientific disputes. The ill-defined nature of sustainability manifests itself in such disputes when conflicting values, norms, interests, and rea...

The field of education, and derivatively environmental education, is filled with inherently difficult concepts, yet we have not, I believe, given sufficient attention to understanding these ideas that ground our work. For example, the term 'education for sustainability,' has gained rapid acceptance yet little critical attention has been given to th...

Sustainability has become a focal topic and important goal for many people concerned about environmental issues. It is, therefore, important for educators, and others, to talk about sustainability with their students and colleagues—about its meaning, curricular application, and practice. However, I do not think this is sufficient. In this paper I w...

This paper examines limitations of using the term "sustainability" as an organizing concept, or aim, of education. I do acknowledge that in particular contexts sustainability is an important term; many ecological processes are not sustained. However, I also identify three problems associated with a sustainability focussed agenda. First, I recognise...

This paper acknowledges that, in many contexts, the term ‘education for the environment’ has generated powerful images which have resonated with educators seeking empowerment for themselves and their students. We also acknowledge that it has enabled inquiry into socio‐political dimensions of environmental issues. However, we propose that this term...

In light of recent criticisms of environmental education, it is timely and important to renew discussion about how environmental education is defined. This, I argue, means giving more attention to the educational dimension of environmental education. It also entails more that just critiquing definitions of this field, but more fundamentally, critiq...

Many agencies have given attention to ethical dimensions of wildlife management issues. Important questions remain about the nature of ethics, and how they can be interpreted. This paper explores two different conceptions of ‘ethics’ and suggests a framework for exploring ethical dimensions of environmental issues. This framework is applied in the...

Popularization of the term "sustainable development" and speculation about its role in education poses problems for educators. Although such programs as "Learning for a Sustainable Future" in Canada have quickly embraced this concept and made it the object of their educative efforts, it is far from clear that these initiatives are appropriate. In e...

Examines two concerns the author has about teaching sustainable development. The first concern arises from a lack of attention to educational philosophy and the research methods employed by philosophers. The second concern relates to the proposed relationship between education and sustainable development. (LZ)

Discusses the technique of conceptual analysis to communicate the meanings of difficult concepts in environmental education. Illustrates the technique for the concepts sustainable development education and education for sustainable development. Presents research needs that arise from the discussions. (MDH)

When considering a topic as broad as research in environmental education it seems worthwhile, at the outset, to make some basic distinctions. First, establishing research priorities is not simply an empirical question. While it is undoubtedly useful to try to establish perceived needs and interests, and to consider them when establishing research p...

Some misconceptions about the roles of action and problem solving in environmental education are examined. It is argued that the use of the term problem solving exaggerates the abilities of environmental educators and students. The implications of establishing problem solving as a goal of environmental education are discussed. (KR)

Daniel Tanner and Laurel Tanner, in their widely read textbook Curriculum Development: Theory into Practice (1980), make the claim that by the middle of this century the field of curriculum had emerged as a distinct area of study. They also suggest that a consensually based paradigm for systematic curriculum development has arisen from the work of...

This presentation is comprised of written text and photographs of wild experiences that relive a series of ontological experiments. The text represents reflections on these experiences. The photographs, artistic expressions of the same experiences, have been made with a homemade pinhole camera—without a lens and viewfinder—thus demanding special se...

This paper contextualizes the 5 th World Environmental Education Congress, dis-cusses the theoretical underpinnings of the Congress theme, "Earth our Common Home," and relates this theorizing to the research project that was woven through the Congress. The rationale for this research project was to invite Congress partic-ipants to have a say in co-...

La postura de esta ponencia es que en el contexto globalizador que vivimos el concepto de desarrollo sustentable no debe asumirse sin una actitud crítica. Es más, han surgido algunas tensiones que derivan de que está pensando la educación como instrumento para implementar este concepto, como lo manifiesta la noción educación para el desarrollo sust...