This paper is the result of international conversation and collaboration regarding outside learning, teacher preparation, and innovative curricular design in out of school learning environments. This paper explores ways in which two curriculum scholars are “rewilding” curriculum through two distinct projects that critique existing curricular and school based patterns, and present viable alternatives to the restrictive environments often experienced by students in traditional classrooms. Rewilding, an idea in land conservation that restores an area to its natural and uncultivated state, is viewed here as a curricular concept – focusing on the innate learning that happens within experience, with minimal “management” from educators.

Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It's about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes (Rewilding Europe, 2022). This serves as both a substantive concept addressed in the Boundary Waters Teacher Institute, as well as a metaphor examined through a curricular lens. What might it look like to “rewild” our curricular practices? How is curricular practice in school damaged? How has teacher curricular practice been degraded in American schools? How might we draw upon curricular orientations that nurture the innate curiosity of the learner (problem based, integrated, embodied) in schools?

The first project is a Cyprus based forest school, research and resource center that gives the opportunity to children to experience a nature-based curriculum, in a serene environment, amongst trees, hills, and ponds. The soil, stones, branches, leaves, wood, and the sky are part of their classroom and their learning material. Observation, exploration, inquiry, building, crafting, trying out possibilities, risk-taking, playing, are part of their experiential learning journey. The forest school also gives the opportunity to teachers to explore ways to create a rich, natural learning environment for the children to unleash their potential through natural installations and set up of the environment in a multitude of ways.

The second project is a teacher professional development program in the United States that takes place in the Boundary Waters Canoe and Wilderness Area (BWCA) in northern Minnesota. The program presents a developing theoretical conceptualization of curriculum that may provide insight towards 1) reclaiming the innate spirit of wonder and learning found through experience and 2) embracing an approach that serves ecological mindedness by seeking an interdependence of knowledges.

The weeklong wilderness program takes place in the Boundary Waters Canoe and Wilderness Area (BWCA) in northern Minnesota, an area that includes over one million acres of undeveloped and ‘wild’ land. This serves as a meaningful backdrop in which to ponder the meaning of ecological and justice oriented curriculum, as well as the limits of protection absent a meaningful land ethic to guide human action and human systems. Most importantly, the experience affords practicing teachers to meaningfully reflect on what it means to integrate relevant knowledges through an experience.

We are using narrative methods to narrate our experiences in building the curriculum and then implementing it in ways that are responsive to our specific audiences. Interviews with participants, as well as reflections and artifacts from activities conducted in both sites provide subjects for analysis.

Enhanced by student and participant reflections and reactions to both the Forest School and the Boundary Waters Teacher Institute, this paper presents a theoretical argument for nurturing an ecologically minded curricular approach that centers the innate and “wild” learning of students in outdoor learning environments. It is commonly accepted that we are in the midst of a climate catastrophe, brought on by human destructive behaviors and dominant institutions and ideologies that function in opposition to conservation aligned ethics and epistemologies that see humans as integrated with environments and ecosystems. Educational systems and concepts (curriculum, schooling, institutions, etc.) have been ill-prepared to support the epistemological orientations necessary to challenging systemic degradation of ecological systems. But rewilding curriculum should not be limited to the subject area of ecological sustainability. The authors have found rewilding to be both substantive and metaphorical in its ability to describe the meaningful experiences had by participants in both programs on opposite sides of the globe. Of particular importance is the international nature of this work. This paper explores various international contexts and both synergies and differences regarding curricular experimentation and the reception of learning outdoors.

Hopkins, L.T. (1954). The emerging self in school and home. NY: Harper. Schubert, W. (1981). Knowledge about the out of school curriculum. Educational Forum, 45(2), 185-198. Sitka-Sage, M.D., Kopnina, H., et. al. (2017). Rewilding education in troubling times; or, getting back to the wrong post-nature. Visions for sustainability, 8:00-00. Westall & Walmsley (2017). Forest school adventure: Outdoor skills and play for children. UK: GMC Publication. Cree & Robb (2021). The essential guide to forest school and nature pedagogy. NY: Routledge. Rewilding Europe (2024, January 31). What is rewilding. https://rewildingeurope.com/what-is-rewilding/