This article sets out to explore alternative approaches to education, wilderapproaches that seek to embrace the innate self-will of young people as a positive starting point for enlarging personal freedoms in education. These alternatives are presented as a rebuttal against educational practices that portray young people's native autonomy as an undesirable trait requiring discipline and subjugation. The article considers the opportunity for learning to be led by the senses, a provocation for deeper environmental relationships that underline the value of opportunities to develop kinship and equality with the more-than-human world. The appearance and development of wilder teaching practices in recent educational research literature underlines the increasing significance of rethinking pedagogy for a twenty-first-century world and this article seeks to draw attention to this growing philosophy of wild pedagogy. Paulo Freire's concept of education as a process of domestication is presented alongside the idea of wild pedagogy, with an introduction to the methodology of this wilder teaching practice and a plea for embracing the self-will of those involved both as learners and teachers. The article concludes with an invitation to turn aside from worn-out educational paths and go wild. |
