Exploring wild pedagogies in higher education for relational being and becoming in the world

Young adults today grow up amidst multiple socio-ecological crises – uncertain, or so to say, ‘liquid times’. Many struggle with anxiety as a response to the future that is awaiting them. Mainstream Western education fails to be responsive to these times of crises and youth’s entrapment in a failing system. My research explores an alternative pedagogy for young adults that departs from care for and relation with the world around us. Working from a post-humanist, feminist perspective, the concept of relationality and ethics of care, I come to define this ‘wild pedagogy’ as a relational, transgressive, transformative, pluralizing, responsive and emancipatory pedagogy in a multispecies learning setting and rooted in an ethic of care. My research focuses on how such wild pedagogics can inform academic education, how the more-than-human world can act as a teacher with agency in the outdoor classroom and whether and how experiences with wild pedagogy trigger inner transformations in young adults towards more sustainable co-existence on the one planet we are all part of. To explore these questions, I use a variety of qualitative research methods, grounded in a relational and care-full approach. Besides education design research, I will apply participant observation, reflective questionnaires, document analysis and walking interviews with both students and teachers of three wild pedagogy courses at Wageningen University. My research aims to contribute to the development and understanding of more just and sustainable education that is responsive to the liquid times we live in and the future we are heading towards.