Sean Blenkinsop

Simon Fraser University · Faculty of Education & the Semester in Dialogue

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...

Being outdoors can provide experiential possibilities not readily available indoors. In this paper we draw on phenomenological research undertaken with participants on 10-day outdoor Franklin River journeys in Tasmania, Australia, to illustrate such possibilities. By exploring multiple aspects and variations of participant lived experience outdoors...

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...

In this paper, Cassandra’s role in the ancient Greek myth of the fall of Troy, as one given the gift of prophesy but cursed to be disbelieved, is explored with a view to understanding the apparently powerless position of climate justice and environmental activism to change public policy. To make this case, we re-interpret the myth of Cassandra to i...

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 paper takes the academically unorthodox form of personal correspondence. This method, of letters between two educators writing to one another across the distance of two continents and different experiences, seeks to create an inclusive, confessional tone, one that invites the reader to get closer to the lived experience of those struggling wit...

At a certain time during the filming of Daki Menan I began to question my own readiness to make metaphor of the experience of others. I began, instead, to regard the literal words of the Temi-Augama Anishinaabe elders with whom I was working as accurate representations of what they thought, especially the way they thought about how the world worked...

We begin this paper by considering a practice that is not normally thought of as ‘environmental education’. That is, the land acknowledgement. In recent years, it has become standard for schools and other public institutions in British Columbia (BC) to acknowledge that they are situated on Indigenous land, especially when hosting events and present...

In this paper, we attempt to do a kind of theorizing that we think is compatible with new materialisms. To do this we explore the idea of what it might be to separate ontos- from -logos, and give suggestions to readers for ways of experiencing this idea. We posit that it is not only possible to make diffractive readings and re-readings of texts, bu...

The central focus of this article is to share several experiential activities we have designed in our teaching careers that we use to help education students, primarily undergraduates and teacher candidates, access philosophical ideas and enter philosophical discussions. The examples shared below come from our attempts to help students reach key co...

Through the personal this article seeks to extend the lived experience felt by the authors that all-inclusive nature, the more-than-human world, is agential and possesses the potential to be considered as guide and co-teacher. As a combination of vignettes and reflections it is auto-ethnographic (Holman-Jones 2013) in tone and method. Yet this pers...

This paper begins with a very short overview of the environmental and educational challenges that exist today. It proceeds through three pedagogical strands – the relational, the critical, and the existential – that have been woven through the practices of many outdoor and environmental educators for the last 60 years. After each strand is describe...

This paper, based upon our experiences starting a school, is part dialogue and part theory. The three authors have all played important roles in the design, creation, and ongoing support of an innovative public elementary school. The first part of the paper describes the impetus behind the creation of this “buildingless,” environmentally focused sc...

This chapter examines some of the challenges of unlearning anthropocentrism – i.e., the deep-seated cultural, psychological, and enacted prejudices of human specialness – in nature-based early childhood education programs. We begin with a critical exploration of recent trends in environmental philosophy and the conservation sciences that seek to mo...

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...

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...

Over the last decade there has been a discernable global upsurge of nature kindergartens, forest schools, bush schools and nature-based primary schools; all with varying degrees of intent focused on (re)connecting children and young people in/with/as nature. Yet, not all of these educational endeavours are the same. The understanding of the role th...

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...

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...

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 re-negotiatin...

This article uses an unconventional format to explore the role of parent and nature and the development of a young child's ecological identity. It follows journal entries from a mother observing her young son, Julian, as he explores, interacts with, and learns from the Stawamus River on the west coast of British Columbia. By creating questions, dis...

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 chapter focuses on a single fleshy interaction taken from research at a ‘nature-based’ public elementary school. By carefully examining the bodily actions and reactions of each of the actors the authors outline shades of patriarchy while also noting the violence done to the often forgotten bodies of other-than-human members of the natural worl...

‘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 article shares three vignettes, drawn from the life experience of its authors and five years of research at two schools, to illustrate the “choice” many males are forced to make between normalized “masculine” indifference and a stigmatized caring relationship with the natural world. We suggest this dissociation results, for some, in a kind of...

This essay is written in two sections. The first, following a short introduction, is made up of three scenarios drawn from the life and work of Martin Buber. As well as demonstrating his obvious interest in human relationships with the other-than-human, each scenario describes an encounter between either Buber himself or a stand-in character and a...

This paper begins by exploring the anti-colonial work of Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi in his classic book The Colonizer and the Colonized and determining whether the characteristics of colonization that he names can be successfully applied to the current relationship between modern humans and the “natural world”. After considering what we found to...

The chapter starts with suicide and ends in rebellious possibility. We begin by highlighting Albert Camus’s consideration of suicide, and in particular his assertion that in the act of choosing not to exercise our ever-present radical freedom to commit suicide there exists both a negation, saying no to suicide, and an exaltation, of saying yes to l...

This paper begins with a recognition that questions of climate change, environmental degradation, and our relations to the natural world are increasingly significant and requiring of a response not only as philosophers of education but also as citizens of the planet. As such the paper explores five of the key journals in philosophy of education in...

This article uses an unconventional format to problematize a common dichotomy found in the theory and practice of experiential education. The article comprises the contributions of five authors and begins with one author’s description of a potential real-life scenario that provokes the question of whether an art history lecture might be understood...

This article draws from the experience of outdoor and experiential educators working in the context of a radical, long-term formal public education research project. One of the accidental findings from the research is that experienced outdoor educators may have particular pedagogical skills, likely honed by the contexts in which they work, that can...

The institutionalization of neoliberal reforms that began to take hold in the 1970s were by and large ‘common-sense governance’ by the 1990s. While the growing predominance of neoliberal discourse and marginalization of alternatives in environmental education is disconcerting on the level of policy, this paper explores an equally troubling phenomen...

This paper begins with an assumption that the natural world is literally able to speak. What follows is research around a new place-based, ecological and imaginative public school in Maple Ridge, BC. The school has no building to speak of as there is an attempt being made, as part of the day-to-day pedagogical practice, to listen to the more-than-h...

This article explores an important section of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous early work, Being and Nothingness. In that section Sartre proposes that part of the human condition is to actively engage in a particular kind of self-deception he calls bad faith. Bad faith is recognized by the obvious inconsistency between the purported self-knowledge of an i...

This article focuses primarily on our research group’s year of preparation before the opening of a new K-7 publicly funded ecological ‘school’ for students aged 5–12. The article begins with a discussion of the reasons for seeking ways to change the values of a culture which fails to confront the consequences of its destructive practices, and for l...

In this paper, we will argue, predominantly using examples tested in the crucible of our own teaching, that there is a place for experiential education in the teaching of advanced theoretical ideas. As experiential educators trained as philosophers of education and working in faculties of education, we regularly encounter students with little or no...

This paper is concerned with if, and how, measures of discipline and control are involved in outdoor and experiential education. Using the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, author of Discipline and Punish (1975), we shall explore how educational practice may be used to control people and to render them into “docile bodies.” We follow...

Deciphering complex signals of constructed educational systems requires symbolic interpretation; deciphering complex signals that are inherently ignorant of their ecological roots requires a modification of a semiotic approach, which we call ecosemiotics. This paper examines one of many average classrooms through this veil of perception. As part of...

One of the tasks of Jean‐Paul Sartre's later work was to consider how an individual could live freely within a free community. This paper examines how Sartre describes the process of group formation and the implications of this discussion for education. The paper begins with his metaphor of a bus queue in order to describe a series. Then, by means...

By considering the work and words of some Anishinaabe Elders, Heidegger, and Spinoza we argue that these point at another state of being, a different ontological position, from the one most broadly expressed in modern western culture and in its schools. We call this state attentive receptivity. While leaving the door open for still other states of...

By considering the work and words of some Anishinaabe Elders, Heidegger, and Spinoza we argue that these point at another state of being, a different ontological position, from the one most broadly expressed in modern western culture and in its schools. We call this state attentive receptivity. While leaving the door open for still other states of...

This article explicates the theoretical framework of an ethic of care and outlines recommendations for applying the framework to practice in adventure education, offering possibilities for re-imagining organizations as centrally concerned with compassion and care. Focusing on the work of Gilligan and Noddings, we suggest an understanding of an ethi...

This paper proposes that contained within Martin Buber's works one can find useful support for, and insights into, an educational philosophy that stretches across, and incorporates, both the human and non-human worlds. Through a re-examination of his seminal essay Education, and with reference to specific incidents in his autobiography (e.g. the ho...

In considering ecology, comparatively little attention has been turned to the mode of thinking that may lead to uncovering new ideas or to the ecological nature of the philosophical underpinnings requisite for such a project. Our work examines what would constitute an ecological mode for teaching and learning through one particular lens, that of th...

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2004. UMI # 3134469 Vita Bibliography: leaves 297-310.