Rewilding the Critical-Constructive Bildung Tradition with Nature as Co-Teacher: A Cross-Cultural Reimagination

Modern Western education has been criticised for its human-centred orientation and for legitimising the exploitation of nature, thereby contributing to the environmental crisis. This article responds by rethinking a specific Northern European strand of the Bildung tradition, namely the modern critical-constructive approach associated with Humboldt and Klafki, as a pedagogical framework concerned with how teaching and educational practices could and should support processes of self-formation. Drawing on reflections from an international Wild Pedagogies (WP) gathering in Sweden, we engage the WP concept of Nature as Co-Teacher to develop three re-imaginations of critical-constructive approaches to Bildung. First, we reimagine Bildung as dialogical co-development in a more-than-human world. Second, we reimagine Bildung as place-specific pedagogical practices oriented towards engagement with, in, and for the living world. Third, we reimagine Bildung within a nature-, place-, and life-centred horizon in which the living world provides the highest context of meaning and value. Together, these re-imaginations contribute to ongoing debates in Environmental and Sustainability Education and related fields about how pedagogical traditions can respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.