The land we roam
The episteme we rove
Interconnected.
Rewilding is a response, both environmentally and epistemologically, to the observation that “overly managed systems, whether ecological or educational, can become depleted, homogenous and fragile (Gillies & Compton, 2025).” A call for a Rewilding of Higher Education recognises the role a “command and control (Prof. Cathy Elliott’s Inaugural Lecture: ‘Rewilding The University’, 2025)” academic culture, rooted in a “technocratic model of education (Woods et al., 2010)” underpinned by Tyler’s work (1949, cited in Woods et al., 2010) can and does play in creating intellectual homogeneity, reducing plurality and thereby adversely affecting the intellectual diversity within higher education.
To explore rewilding both as an ecological concept as well as a metaphorical inspiration for higher education, members of Centre for Arts and Well-Being participated in a visit to Knepp. We used the award winning rewilded landscape of Knepp as our classroom and undertook a “walking seminar (The Walking Seminar, n.d.)” to explore the metaphor of rewilding and how it could be applied to various facets of education. We problematise limiting ‘learning’ to cognitive experiences limited to highly industrialised ‘classrooms’, dissociated from nature, and explored the possibilities offered by reducing the command-control approach to learning. We explored how our understanding of ‘pristine gardens’ and weeds is intertwined with our understanding of higher education and it’s exclusionary baggage.
A field of horses at Knepp
The land we roam
The episteme we rove
Interconnected
Have you ever thought how
a weed feels?
Excluded
Unwanted
Marginalised
Despised
A weed
It’s not wanted here
Coming over here
Taking over our pristine garden
Not the right shaped bits
A weed
How must it feel
Isn’t its paranoia justified
The gardener is after it
Not on my watch
Not on my patch
And yet.
And yet
On your watch
On your patch
The weed spreads life
I am the Dandelion
Unwanted in gardens
But vital for survival
On your patch
On your watch
Keeping insects alive
The ecosystem going
You’ve got this whole thing wrong
What if a river was actually alive?
The petrol powered lawn mower comes
grazes my spine- yet again
My blob doesn’t fit the squares
Not quite pristine enough
Reduced once again
Every slash of the blade, reductive positivism
Cuts through my plural-selves
Maybe with the next rain
I will rise again
Rewild, reconstruct the forest of ideas
But if not
Cause of Death: Too Many Surveys
Put that on my tombstone.
Fig.1 If a Dandelion could speak: Epistemology of a weed
The success of a rewilded space such as Knepp despite various challenges, our experience of walking within it, and the immediate return to a classroom to debrief made us think about how absurd our ‘normal’ learning environment is: artificial lighting, great big walls, sterile spaces (and this is no criticism of University of Brighton’s work spaces- which, within the context of a higher education building design, are fantastic for what they are). Rather, our normalised learning environments within higher education sector as a whole are separated from ‘nature’ and real world to such an extent that it is no surprise that when we practice higher education, we don’t really think about the ecological connections. Whatever subject we are studying or teaching or learning about, medicine and healthcare, architecture or language, nature is intricately woven throughout be it as a provider of material, or a supplier of metaphor, be it to writers (daffodils) or philosophers (if a tree falls in a forest…).
This made me think that as educators, we are often concerned with the samey-ness of ideas but often we neglect how our samey- learning spaces, samey- pedagogical tools and samey- assessment aims and methods mean that the creation of a samey learning experience should be the expectation, not a surprise. We know it is not adequate to just bring in diverse looking people into the higher education space, particularly if we are going to make them “assimilate”. Rather than bring diversity in and then homogenise it through a blender of positivism, we must continue to reflect and self- critique, moulding ourselves in a way that allows the diversity to flourish and in the process, convert the Uni-versity into a ‘Pluriversity’(Boidin et al., 2012).
Higher education is often understood to be tripartite: Teaching, Research and Management. Applying the lens of rewilding to each of these facets could be a starting point. For instance,
- Rewilding teaching: Exploring all aspects of curriculum design and delivery as well as learning experience for ideologically forced homogeneity and devising and studying rewilding- inspired alternatives. If a river could be alive (Macfarlane, 2025), how does that change how we learn and teach about nature, ‘resources’ and the world?
- Rewilding knowledge creation: To re-search(Smith, 2012) is problematic. How could we dispense with the term Re-search and focus on creation of wild, emancipatory, post-research knowledge?
- Rewilding higher education relationality: To explore together how higher education could rewild itself into a space less about ‘command, control and examine’ relationships, and more about a relationality of trust. A relationship that encourages celebrating our diversity and our unique epistemologies and translating these epistemologies into knowledge.
I encourage you to read about Knepp and similar rewilding successes around the world, and imagine what would a higher education space and pedagogical practice would look like within a rewilded space. Please feel free to leave a comment below if you’d like to discuss further.
Gaurish Chawla
References
Boidin, C., Cohen, J. and Grosfoguel, R. (2012). Introduction: From University to Pluriversity: A Decolonial Approach to the Present Crisis of Western Universities. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (on-line), 10. https://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol10/iss1/2.
Gillies, C. and Compton, M. (2025). Prof Cathy Elliott’s Inaugural Lecture: ‘Rewilding The University’ (on-line). https://www.ucl.ac.uk/political-science/events/2025/mar/prof-cathy-elliotts-inaugural-lecture-rewilding-university. Accessed 4 August 2025.
Macfarlane, R. (2025). Is a river alive? Random House. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=3OYrEQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR2&dq=river+alive&ots=qkeDnTuv74&sig=ZUAlOI0hQgNujHEM4aXsprxcCBI. Accessed 4 August 2025.
Prof Cathy Elliott’s Inaugural Lecture: ‘Rewilding The University’ (2025). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFuq5T10P5s. Accessed 4 August 2025.
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd Revised edition edition). London: Zed Books Ltd.
The Walking Seminar. https://www.ahk.nl/onderzoek/artist-in-residence-air/publicaties/the-walking-seminar/. Accessed 4 August 2025.
Tyler, R. W. (1949). Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. OU Univ.
Woods, A., Luke, A. and Weir, K. (2010). Curriculum and Syllabus Design. In: P. Peterson, E. Baker & B. McGaw (eds) International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition). Oxford: Elsevier. pp.362–367. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080448947000580. Accessed 4 August 2025.
