ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a problem, but not the usual discourse on the challenges of climate change, environmental degradation and the failure of most educational systems to respond. Those things are known. The problem we begin with is how education as a system cannot seem to respond, and even appears to frustrate, serious change of any kind. And then we will provide a brief synopsis of a potential response, something we are calling wild pedagogies. Importantly, this response attempts to develop usable aids for action called touchstones. The six touchstones created so far are designed to be concepts and questions that challenge and support educators seeking substantive change.
While the work to date represents a start, we still worry about the tendency for useful ideas to underperform – to slide away from their intended destination. What causes us to slide off course?
With this question in mind we first explore a series of frequently named policy-related limitations to implementing innovations. Specifically, these reference challenges to the development of an alternative public school, the Maple Ridge Environmental School Project. We then offer a new touchstone that focuses on the imagination and how its limitations can impede innovation. Here we posit rebel teachers (Blenkinsop & Morse, 2017) – in active partnerships with communities around them, including the more-than-human – expanding the range of tools available for students and themselves to imagine alternative paths forward.
Thus, the aim of this chapter will be to develop an imaginative touchstone, but first we will sketch, in broad strokes, some of the context from which wild pedagogies arises.
