Shoots of change and dilemmas of Wild Pedagogies in early childhood education in Denmark

How do early childhood pedagogies balance attention to children’s play and learning processes with care and respect for the living world? The paper aims to explore and discuss, the change processes and pedagogical dilemmas arising when addressing this question by introducing wild pedagogies to pedagogical employees in Danish early childhood institutions.

The paper is theoretically inspired by studies on transgressive learning within the field of Environment and Sustainability Education research, that have explored and discussed how micro-processes of socio-cultural change can hold potential to challenge status quo, highlighting the role of historical and contextual roots (Chavez et al. 2017; Macintyre et al 2020). Hence, in this paper we explore how the philosophy of wild pedagogies, founded on the ambition to unfold education in ways that are intentional but do not exercise control over nature, the learners, or the outcomes (Jørgensen-Vittersø et al. 2022; Blenkinsop et al. 2022), speaks to cultural roots and to ongoing tensions in the context of Danish early childhood education (Broström 2022).

We draw analytical inspiration from the ‘spiral model of change’, as presented by Macintyre et al. (2020). The analysis is based on fieldnotes from observations, protocols from cooperating laboratory days, qualitative group interviews with pedagogical employees and video recordings of children in the context of early childhood science, nature and sustainability education. The empirical material has been collected as part of the NAVADA project (2023-2028), a large ongoing R&D project evolving around cooperations between researchers and 10 Danish early childhood education institutions, inspired by Design-Based-Research. In collaboration with researchers, pedagogical employees design, develop, experiment with and evaluate new designs for play- and learning environments.

In experiments ignited by wild pedagogies, we have identified three ‘shoots of change’, which have a potential for pushing status quo. Centering on altering the place of nature in early childhood education, changing the positioning of adults, and carving out time for more open approaches, these shoots are in close dialogue with both wild pedagogies and cultural roots of nordic early childhood education.