a relationship-centered, possibility-expanding pedagogy

Rewilding is an instinctive, ancient approach to education. Part real-life adventure, part initiation ritual, and part existential immersion, Rewilding’s 10-step pedagogical process empowers students and teachers alike to claim their full individuality.

Upending the outmoded power structure of the traditional classroom, the Rewilding classroom is structured around a project – a “big” project. Not the teacher’s relative expertise.

The Rewilding classroom is a place of extreme student autonomy, authority and responsibility, students choose their own objectives and goals, design their own programs, and learn in their own ways.

The role of the teacher is transformed.

The teacher becomes a mentor, coach, and guide. They nudge, cajole, encourage, and make deep investments in building loving trusting relationships among and with their students. More importantly, as they collaborate with their students, they become a student of their students.

The major principles of Rewilding include:

• Agency: Rewilding reminds both teacher and their students that the world as they know it is not fixed. It is malleable. They are subjects in the world - fonts of change.

• Solidarity: Sustainable social change takes solidarity. Solidarity amongst the students, solidarity amongst the students and their teacher, and solidarity among the students, teachers and communities they work with outside of their classroom.

• Integrity:The change that students and their teacher wish to see in themselves and the world around them does not come easy. Making change is work. Incremental work that takes patience, persistence and endurance. It takes a work ethic.

The essential elements of Rewilding include:

• Community: The project is too big to be done alone. It can only be accomplished if the teacher and their students successfully build a trusting loving community.

• Culture: The teacher and their students must articulate a set of promises that influence their actions and shape the dialogue they have within themselves, with each other, and with the communities with which they work.

• Action:The teacher and their students must leave the classroom, enter into the world, implement their project, and allow reality to judge the worthiness of their work.

Together, the teacher and their students take on their fears, reconsider their histories, rewrite their narratives, and challenge their blinkering internal commentaries. They delve into their interiorities, reignite their agency, recognize the system of expectations in which they are submerged and take responsibility for their freedom.

Courage, commitment, and critical consciousness - where recognizing their agency in deciding the direction and purpose of their lives – are the outcomes of Rewilding.