Rewilding Education

Claire Waters writes about autism, school trauma, the natural world and sensory processing, arguing that neurodivergent children can teach us to broaden the spectrum of education.

Following a year of isolating covid restrictions - spent bumbling in bilberry bushes and clambering up streams - I tried to send my four-year-old to school.

The jarring contrast of fifty children in a room was an impossibility for him. With the sensory overwhelm, he sank like a stone.

The decline in his mental health was dramatic.

I asked school for accommodations, but they said that they couldn't oblige until we had received the formal autism diagnosis, a long wait away.

My previously joyful, chatty child had virtually stopped eating and sleeping. Although school told me “he’s fine”, he increasingly begged not to go.

School advised me to block up the bed to stop him hiding under it in the mornings and to force him in, and sent threatening letters about attendance.

I eventually broke. I couldn’t drag my child in so distraught anymore. It seemed just a few months of school had broken him.

We quit school. I felt we had no choice.

I reluctantly gave up my job as a Forest School leader to home educate, and now my child only wanted to be inside.

I am an outdoors person. The woods regulate me and bring me joy and fulfilment.

I tried to coax him to educational groups. The more I tried to persuade him, the more he refused to leave the house.

I was still blind to how steeped in behaviourism, coercion, childism and power-over expectations I was. I needed to regain his trust and re-establish the outside world as a safe place.

I yearned for the woods and felt flighty and trapped.

I began learning what I could about autism, declarative language and monotropism. I realised that the litany of transitions at school had sent him spinning. We overwintered mostly at home.

Two and a half years on and the outside world is open to him again. This winter his baseline anxiety was low enough that he could tolerate socks and a jumper. I’m relieved to roam outside.

He loves adders and fossils, quizzes me about deep time, and looks at lichens with his microscope. He scrambles off the footpaths, fearlessly galloping down hill impatient for his ambling mum to catch up.

Most crowded indoor spaces are still closed to us, but the doors are open to the woods, streams and moors. I don't take this for granted.

The autistic meltdowns aren’t gone but they are more manageable. Enthusiasm and curiosity and joy bound out of him like a labrador puppy. I drink too much coffee to try to keep up.

I’d spent a decade as a Forest School leader and have witnessed its kaleidoscopic benefits. I've also trained in The Art of Mentoring approach which actively encourages practising sensory perception as an important skill.

You might be expecting me to say that Forest School was the answer and slowly brought my son back to happiness and back out into the world. Not so.

During that first year of home education I dragged him to Forest School but the eye contact of circle time was excruciating, waiting for “free play” time whilst the leader ran too many adult-led games was painful.

Woods have sensory challenges such as scratchy waterproofs and wind.

There are some dogmas in Forest School that persist, for example “circle time” is often an unchallenged expectation with participation not always made explicitly optional.

Speaking or listening in a circle in front of a group may be very anxiety provoking for neurodivergent learners, rendering Forest School inaccessible if this format is insisted on.

Choice and learner-centred approach are baked into the Forest School principles. In practice, many leaders get too enthusiastic about their adult-led activities. It’s too easy to get dogmatic about the things you love.

I’ve been guilty of it myself whilst leading sessions.

We may believe that Forest School is the way to go for all children but sensory challenges may mean it is not a good fit for some. If a child is recovering from trauma or in autistic burnout, it may not be the right time or place.

We can impose dogmatic pedagogies or we can meet children where they are at. Forest School can provide a varied sensory environment that can accommodate a range of needs.

Micheal James’ excellent book Forest School and Autism, a practical guide contains suggestions about how to be more inclusive, such as sending out photos of safety briefings, staff and the site in advance so that learners know what to expect.

I’d love to see more Forest Schools allow children to turn up with their electronic devices, which can act as safety blankets as well as scaffolding for connections and shared special interests.

In non neurodivergent affirming spaces, I've encountered jaws dropping in shock and judgement at the suggestion of bringing along an iPad. Aren't we after all, trying to get children away from the bedevilled screens?

What brought my son’s lost joy back was screen time, TV and gaming. I’d trashed his sense of safety in the world by repeatedly forcing him into school. The screen gave him agency.

Open world games such as Minecraft provided autonomy to freely roam. He was still fit as a fiddle, running laps of the living room, utilising the doorway swing, mini trampoline and sofas as some kind of parkour training ground.

I left the window open a crack to let the air in.

It was only when I truly surrendered to his cocooning and stopped suggesting that we go out, abandoning most screen time limits, that he began to take his steps back into the outside world again.

What do video games have to do with rewilding education? What’s wild about binge watching TV or playing Minecraft for hours?

I’m inspired by the shared roots of the word wild and will. Self-willed, autonomous, untamed, not broken in.

Forced school attendance did temporarily break my son, but failed to break him in. His autonomy remains untamed, he defended it passionately. It is his most precious thing. In Wild, Jay Griffiths writes:

But what of the wild part of the word wilderness? …Nash writes, “In the early Teutonic and Norse Languages, from which the English word in large part developed, the root seems to have been ‘will’ with a descriptive meaning of self-willed, willful, or uncontrollable.”...And so, you could say, a wilderness is a self-willed land—easily my favourite definition. What is wild is not tilled. Self-willed land does what it likes, untilled, untold. While tilled land is told what to do.”

Learning from the rewilding land movement, it takes careful tending, reciprocal listening, trust, hard work and support to rewild a landscape.

Far from leaving somewhere entirely to its own devices, rewilding involves nurturing an ecosystem back into healthy abundance.

I have found the same to be true of my child.

I tended him but let him lead.

I had to eat humble pie about screen time. My son loves 3D design software. He invents creatures, mixing and matching chameleons with dragons, asking: how would you code a chameleon so it changes colour with each Minecraft biome?

I could choose not to see the value in this, but the joy in his face, the excitement in his body as he shape shifts through virtual Minecraft biomes, is palpable.

And having witnessed the disappearance of his joy, then it becomes the most important marker.

I hated how he wanted to have the curtains closed, but it helped soothe him back into his window of tolerance.

Sometimes I sat on the doorstep and slowly he began to join me, and then gradually we began walking from the house to visit the ‘real life biomes’ of the oak woods and meadows.

I have had the good fortune to live and work in off-grid environments for extended periods.

I have immersed myself in woodlands as a coppicer, regenerative woodland manager and Forest School leader, and forged my own rewilded learning path.

I have come to think of “off grid” as “on grid” from a sensory perspective: instead of my senses being overpowered by the hum of electricity, bright overhead lighting and the din of traffic, I began to feel plugged into the thrumming web of life.

Living by candlelight in the woods, I began to tendril into connection with the signals of the natural world. My senses became acute enough to notice a wider spectrum of light, sounds, smells and tastes. I became cognisant of more details.

Wild plants and creatures communicate and navigate in a rich dance of signals with messages often too subtle to be noticed by unacquainted ears.

Through extended periods in wild places, I had the opportunity to practise noticing and become more perceptive of sensory signalling inside and out.

I began to see and hear with my whole body and my sensory perception range became extended to subtler edges of the sensory spectrum.

Living and working in woodlands across Britain has afforded me the honour of seeing glow worms and bioluminescent mycelium glowing green into the night whilst tending to sparking charcoal kilns.

By day, my eyes broadened to take in more of the ultraviolet spectrum.

Sometimes I doubted what I’d seen and thought my eyes were playing tricks on me but as I began to trust my own senses, my peripheral vision practised catching glimmers.

I was relieved after years of turning up a blank that more recent research from the University of Georgia has now proven that some humans can see into the ultraviolet spectrum.

Dragonflies and damselflies can see polarised light reflected off surfaces.

I glimpsed this once whilst floating in water, my mind's eye became a sea of colourful lines, the damselflies were swooping and landing on my forehead repeatedly as I floated on my back, as if playing with me.

When I got home from that lake I set about investigating damselfly vision.

One evening, years ago, when I was woodsman Ben Law’s apprentice for a year, I experienced a smellscape.

In the darkness, I began to see a cloud around each tree. I could tell the alder from the hazel from the larch from the oak, each had their own visible smell-cloak. The flowers on the old chestnut emanated smell-lights spiralling out into the darkness like candles.

As I turned the corner a badger came hurtling down the track towards me. I wondered if badgers could see in smellscapes. The badgers' scampering had jolted me out of this way of seeing and I was back to normal vision as I picked my way home to my cabin.

My ongoing education has included hearing starlings singing the Curlew’s song, heralding their arrival. I’ve felt proprioceptive joy at the swing of a well crafted billhook in ancient coppice, perfectly weighted, tool design honed over centuries.

I’ve dreamt of dragonfly larvae emerging from water, the dog rose blooming, and the chicken of the woods fruiting. Perhaps their scents or spores or sounds flew on the breeze, my sleeping self sensing the pheromones, but each time I went out the next day and found them freshly emerged.

Nature's spectrums have widened my lenses.

What use is this experiential sensory learning? Sensory biologist Ed Yong speaks of the importance of stepping into the Umwelten of other species:

Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection. It detaches us from the cosmos. It drowns out the stimuli that link animals to their surroundings and to each other. In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet and preserve the dark.

This sensory education can connect us to ecosystems and stop us from overriding the limits of children and other species. If we don’t notice their distress signals, then we can reach traumatic tipping points and a collapse in connected biodiversity.

If we close off our senses, will anyone notice that the nightjars didn’t sing this summer? That the glow worms faded? And understand why that matters and do something about it?

I’ve outlined a few examples of glimmers above, rich treasures I’ve gleaned from nature immersion that shore up my sensory well-being.

In Deb Dana’s Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, she describes glimmers as a connecting force. Viewing learning through a nervous system lens changes our perspective from behaviourist and instead fosters connections.

I wish for a world where humans are perceptive to the internal and external sensory needs and signals of both children and the biosphere in order to ensure the needs of the ecosystem and the children are not pushed beyond their ability to cope.

Autistic burnout and ecosystem collapses warn us to tend wildness fiercely and gently. If we nurture our senses and create connections we are more able to co-create biodiversity in internal and external human and wild landscapes.

My son’s aversion to busy human places is still tricky; we can’t do much about the sounds of the main road or the smells in a cafe. I sometimes wish we could be like a ‘normal’ family. Robert Chapman reminds me that it’s ok not to be normal:

A radical politics of neurodivergent conservation is also consistent with a radical politics of environmental conservation. After all, it has been the same logics, the same system, that has ravaged the biodiversity of the planet as has sought to eliminate the neurological diversity of humanity.

Our current education system is a big part of these systems of domination. Self-directed learners take us away from the destructive status quo. Clinical psychologist Naomi Fisher says:

It seems like some children are born temperamentally sensitive to control and pressure … These children are a challenge. They are also a gift, because they sniff out control that other children miss, and which adults pretend isn't there.

I have been gifted one such wilful child. We have tough days and difficult weeks. It’s painful that the human world is so hard for him sometimes. However there is a rich silver lining and I am grateful that it has set our family on our own way.

Learning from neurodivergent differences in sensory processing can open up vast learning opportunities that are closed down by the narrow din of mainstream classrooms.

The medical model calls Sensory Processing Disorder a disorder, and the suffering and distress that can be caused by coercive education is undoubtedly disabling.

Exquisite senses forced into plastic uniforms, shoes on all day, squished on nylon carpets under strip lighting, eyes on the whiteboard, synthetic primary colours littering the walls, sounds bouncing off hard plastic ceilings and the smell of thirty bodies and a hundred dinners.

This is a recipe for nervous system activation.

For neurodivergent children, the classroom presents many disabling and painful sensory challenges. The social model of disability allows us to ask: what if the disorder was the din of the modern world’s sensory racket?

Coercive education makes it hard to heed the signals of our own bodies and the news bulletins from the worlds around us…

Don’t wriggle, don't wee, don’t talk, don't run, don’t notice the hatched thrum of dragon-fly wings flying past or the dog-rose blossom scent on the wind. Listen only to the teacher.

If neurodivergence is looked at through the social model of disability, what lessons can be learned to help all children thrive and work with their senses?

In school, children are actively taught to ignore and override their senses. Oftentimes they are penalised for regulating their own temperatures, blazers must be on in a heatwave, no coats allowed in the winter.

Autistic children may be permitted movement breaks or perhaps “sensory circuits” at prescribed times. More commonly, break times are taken away for non-compliance.

So-called Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA) or “school refusal” may ensue and behaviourist punishments and rewards are put in place in an attempt to train children out of their sensory overwhelm.

The hum of electricity and the sting of synthetic perfumes make it hard to hear the signals of our own bodies or the world around us.

For children with super-sensitive eyes and ears, or a vibrant life-force need to run and jump, or with monotropic minds that can leave no stone unturned before transitioning to another topic, mainstream school is a straight-jacket and they can quickly become the canaries of the classroom, fading into distress and mental health problems, anxiety and overwhelm, and met with shaming and behaviourism.

Instead of training children to repress, ignore and override, what if these exquisitely sensitive senses were celebrated, honed, accommodated and heeded? What diverse learning paths could that lead children along?

What if we widened the aperture of learning, broadening the lens from a single curriculum to the infinite learning threads that could be discovered by following sensory noticings? Could learning be expansive instead of reductionist?

Schools speak of “good listening” but they often mean “stop listening” … to your body, environment and your own thoughts. This closing down of curiosity, intrinsic motivation and bodily sovereignty can be torturous for some.

The classroom can be variously overstimulating and under-stimulating. A mainstream class treads a narrow learning path instead of thirty self-willed trails. In landscapes where we are in sore need of out-of-the-box thinkers and diverse perspectives, by-rote learning no longer serves us.

We walk uphill. I spot the wild strawberry flowers glimmering in the hedgerow, they bring a grin to my face, soothing me, as my son leads us up a new path. We marinade ourselves in spring; he snacks on bramble tips and I chew on young yarrow.

He wants to go wild swimming, sensory seeking in a Yorkshire March.

He runs beaming uphill, breezily chunnering on about Minecraft biomes and real life biomes. At the top, we immerse ourselves in the cold water, gasping and laughing, then do a joyful getting-warm-dance in the sun.

If we keep siloing children on the straight and narrow curriculum, and away from the natural world, then who’s listening to the biosphere? Our monocrop of children and land have parallel problems.

We can nurture kids to have eyes and ears wide open to innovative ideas and creations, to take part in the living web of life.

We can reinstate agency for both children and landscapes and allow both to communicate, touch and heed each other with all their plethora of spectrums and senses.

Let’s widen the lens of education to facilitate self-directed learners who notice the diverse glimmers of their internal and external landscapes, resourcing this appropriately to reflect the true value of children and wild places and those that tend them.

There is regeneration in self-willed learning.

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Bibliography / Further reading

Chapman, Robert, Empire of Normality, Neurodiversity and Capitalism, Pluto Press, London, 2023

Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, Norton, London, 2018

Dawes, Viv, Supporting Children and Young People Through Autistic Burnout,

Fisher, Naomi, Changing Our Minds, how children can take control of their own learning, Robinson, London, 2021

Griffiths, Jay, Wild, An Elemental Journey, Penguin books, London, 2008

May, Katherine, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home, Trapeze, London, 2018

Law, Ben, The Woodland Way, a permaculture approach to woodland management, Permanent Publications, 2013.

James, Micheal, Forest School and Autism, a practical guide. Jessica Kingsley, London, 2018

Yong, Ed. I Contain Multitudes, The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, Vintage, London, 2016

https://monotropism.org/

https://www.spectrumgaming.net/

https://www.autisticadvocate.co.uk/

https://forestschoolassociation.org/full-principles-and-criteria-for-good-practice/