Re-Rewilding Environmental Education

Booth, Robert (2026) Re-Rewilding Environmental Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education. ISSN 0309-8249 (Accepted for Publication)

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Abstract

It is commonplace today to hear about the value of ‘rewilding’ formal education, whether understood in terms of directed use of outdoor spaces, adopting nature-orientated curriculum content, or some mixture of the two. Much such discourse, however, invokes the pursuit of a sense of ‘wildness’ that is either problematically conceptually imprecise or tracks something’s pure ontological non-humanness. Both are approaches to wildness which philosophers have roundly criticized for licensing an anthropocentric domination agenda antithetical to the moral aims of most well-intentioned environmental education. In this paper, I explore the prospective merits of cultivating an onto-epistemic and affective openness to ‘wildness’ in Henry David Thoreau’s alternative sense–qua the multifaceted unpredictability of heterogeneous everyday things–as an improved means of teaching about and, ultimately, inculcating environmentally positive mindsets and behaviours amongst learners.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	This is the author accepted manuscript version of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Philosophy of Education. The final, published version will be available from: https://academic.oup.com/jope
Keywords:	environmental education
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
SWORD Depositor:	RISE Symplectic
Depositing User:	RISE Symplectic
Date Deposited:	30 Sep 2026 10:50
Last Modified:	30 Sep 2026 10:50
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4983

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