Ecological encounters: the art of rewilding higher education

Most of us have experienced meaningful encounters with birds, animals, trees, or wild places at some point in our lives. So why is it still so difficult to talk about them - and can creative practice help to break the silence?

Since the beginning of the year, I've had the privilege of being able to combine all my favourite subjects - ecology, geography, environmental anthropology, ethnobiology, and the arts - in a module for third-year undergraduates at LIS: The London Interdisciplinary School . The goal was to empower young people to cultivate a relationship with a local habitat and the species that live there, and express that relationship through a creative medium of their choice.

Over the ten-week term, we used a range of different research methods to explore different habitats in East London. On the quantitative side, the 16 students were actively involved in measuring different air, water, and soil parameters; using quadrats to determine plant species diversity; counting and identifying birds, and using GIS data to estimate the perimeter and area of their chosen habitat.

Qualitative methods included direct observation, research on political ecology and cultural history, participatory mapping, and 'walking interviews' with community gardeners. We also enjoyed an eco-art session at Phytology, Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, which involved making a variety of functional and attractive fences, hedges and sculptures to discourage visiting Forest School pupils from trampling the newly emerging wild plants.

At the heart of the module was an approach described by Peter Reason (the founder of the Co-operative Inquiry research tradition) and his colleagues as 'kincentric'. Inspired by Indigenous traditions and the work of Indigenous authors like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Tyson Yunkaporta, as well as Freya Mathews' philosophy of living cosmos panpsychism, the kincentric approach calls on us to engage with our other-than-human relatives as sentient beings rather than inanimate objects. As Sandra Wooltorton, Anne Poelina and Hozaus Claire ask, in their 2023 essay Kincentric Geography and Re-Indigenisation:

'...what would it take for us to be able to see persons of all species as our relations, including rivers, trees, mountains, and forests, who share with us and our liveliness? What would it take to recognise these living beings as our kin? From any standpoint, we are deeply and irretrievably enmeshed. To be kincentric is our history, our ancestry, and it is still needed to guide the ways we live.'

This attitude - which can be extended to rivers, rocks, and the earth itself, as well as more obviously 'living' creatures like birds or animals - involves respect, gentleness, curiosity, love, and, above all, deep listening.

When we're able to shake off our western conditioning and meet the more-than-human world in this way, we start to engage in a genuine dialogue. The Austrian philosopher Martin Buber (1923) referred to this as an 'Ich-Du' (I-You) rather than an 'Ich-Es' (I-It) relationship, where 'du' is the informal version of 'you' that's more often used to address close friends and family.

Yet the unspoken taboo against this type of intimate engagement continues to haunt westerners, even in educational contexts where it's openly encouraged. More than once, I witnessed young people starting to open up about their friendships with trees, or what they'd learned from listening to a bird - only to clam up or make jokes about it as soon as their friends appeared.

The final assessment for the module was designed to enable learners to process their ecological encounters in several different ways. There were three components: (a) an original creative product for exhibition, in a physical or digital medium of the student's own choice; (b) a 1000-word accompanying text for inclusion in the exhibition catalogue; and (c) a meta-learning map. The latter is a visual representation of students' learning on the module in relation to a framework of concepts and/or competencies, such as the Inner Development Goals, Attributes of a Systems Thinker, or RSA Regenerative Design Principles.

I hoped that this combination of deliverables might help the students to navigate their own inner conflicts, as well as the culturally-imposed silencing, around meaningful engagement with habitats and species - and I haven't been disappointed. The exhibition, which opens at our London campus from 22-26 April, brings together a rich diversity of creative products: photographs, postcards, pencil drawings, installations, models, poems, a song, a zine of collected folk tales, and a series of posters illustrating the transformation of a neglected park into a wildlife area.

The catalogue entries and the meta-learning maps bear witness to a myriad stories that would otherwise have gone untold. I'm looking forward to sharing some of them here when marking and moderation have been completed.

In the meantime, we still have tickets available for our private view event on Monday 22 April from 17:00 - 19:00, at our East London campus - please complete this form to book your free place.