This presentation will begin in a place, at a school, with story. Rather than focusing on a singular “meta” question it proposes to offer the questions that are immediately meta for us as a research team that is working with several ecologizing schools in BC, Canada. Two stories will be offered. The first, focuses on the ‘development’ of a student called Raven whom we have worked with/observed/hung out with for almost 15 years as she traversed childhood immersed in a public school that has no building and sees the natural world as an active co-teacher. Here, we watch as Raven is psychically and developmentally pushed out of an orientation of deep connection with the natural world and into a “more adult”, “healthier” way of being isolated and detached. And we wonder about the limits of developmental psychological and what a relational developmentalism might look like? The second story focuses on the “village” created in an outdoor space through ongoing children’s play. Here, as the story progresses the teachers and researchers come up against the edges our own cultural imagination and begin to ask the necessary and difficult question related to expanding our imaginations and, perhaps more importantly, to what end?

Blenkinsop, S., & Kuchta, E. C. (2024). Ecologizing education: Nature-centered teaching for cultural change. Cornell University Press.