Wild and willful pedagogies: Education policy and practice to embrace the spirits of a more-than-human world

Education faces a dilemma: policy and practice are primarily humanist in orientation, and yet the environmental challenges education hopes to confront require moving beyond humanist perspectives – to posthumanist awareness. Recent policy advances in Victoria, Australia, highlight the empowerment of students. Yet widening the scope of education policy to embrace posthumanist ideas and the more-than-human world is a challenge not yet conceived by most policy-makers and teachers. In this paper the relevance of posthumanist ideas to education is taken seriously, and arguments presented which connect policy and wildness, two words not often considered co-supportive. Wildness and policy come together in habits, in practices, where self-will and social civility are bonded together. I introduce anthropomorphism, in its connection with irreducible anthropocentrism, as a means to understand human engagement with the wills, spirits, habits, of nonhumans, in a more-than-human world. Anthropomorphism is one way to enable moral consideration to be extended beyond humans, offering a way to shift education policy and practices, thereby supporting understanding of wild pedagogies.