Conference Agenda

In the era of the poly-crisis characterized by climate instability and a deepening "nature-deficit disorder" (Louv, 2008) forest education emerges as a vital response in the European educational landscape. While forest kindergartens have long traditions in Scandinavia and Germany, the movement in Poland is relatively young, with the first institutions appearing only in 2015. Despite this late start, the growing network of Polish forest kindergartens offers a unique laboratory for observing how nature-based education interacts with urban, often nature-alienated, lifestyles.

This study shifts the focus from the child to the parent, conceptualizing the forest kindergartens not merely as a childcare facility but as a space for adult environmental education and a way to counteract the nature-deficit disorder in the whole family unit. The research is grounded in Transformative Learning Theory (Mezirow, 1991) and the nature connection framework, which identifies specific pathways to fostering a bond with the natural world (Lumber et al., 2017; Cudworth & Lumber, 2021). The disorienting dilemma experienced by parents confronting their children’s exposure to dirt, cold, and perceived risk serves as a catalyst for potential shifts in their own environmental worldviews and a source of inspiration for sustainable development through experiential pedagogy. This paper explores the tension between parental expectations of traditional "safe/clean" education and the reality of forest pedagogy in a post-communist, urbanizing society. The study aims to demonstrate that forest preschools can trigger a "domino effect," where children’s experiences pull entire families back into nature, fostering sustainability practices within the domestic micro-system.

Emerging research shows how planetary crisis causes worry to a significant amount of young people around the world (see e.g. Hickman et al. 2021). Although, for example, the political dimension has been found to shape experiences of climate concern more strongly than generational differences (Marlon et al. 2022), studies have shown that many young people believe they know more about the planetary crisis than older generations do and are more concerned about the situation than older people are (Reilly et al. 2024).

This perception of being more knowledgeable than older generations brings tension to the pedagogical relation, which has implications to the roots of education. Traditionally education theorists (e.g. Friesen, 2017; Saevi, 2015) define pedagogical relation as the relationship between the educator, who is typically an adult, and presumably someone who has achieved full competence to function in society, and the one being educated, the educatee. This feature of the relationship gives power and pedagogical responsibility to the educator to guide and educate the educatee towards competences needed and valued in society.

But in these times of existential threat many young people feel a need to educate older people, to turn around the traditional order of the pedagogical relation. In an international study, many young people described teaching adults about climate change as a duty they have to do, because they have gained more information about climate change than adults have (Reilly et al. 2024, Mansikka-aho et al. forthcoming).

This phenomenon of young people teaching adults has not been investigated with educational concepts. Although there are empirical studies on intergenerational learning, which have explored how young people can teach adults most efficiently (e.g. Chineka & Yasukawa, 2020; Lawson et al. 2019), but there is thin theoretical work on the phenomenon (see Mannion, 2016). In this presentation I will outline the normative concept of ‘reverse pedagogical relation’ (hencefort ‘RPR’). In more detail I will especially look what kind of a role self-cultivation plays in it.

When an educatee has gained epistemic authority through acquiring knowledge of planetary crises that the educator lacks, the conventional framework of pedagogical relations is being destabilised trough RPR, as described before. Compared to traditional pedagogical relation, RPR is typically more fleeting in nature, happening often momentarily, due to the fundamental position of authority that older people typically occupy. In this way, the ‘reversal’ of pedagogical relations occurs in specific instances, but less rarely as turned around ‘fully’.

Because the inversion unfolds inside the traditional pedagogical relation, young people need some other means of pedagogies than adults do. In RPR the educatee wants to have an impact on their educators’ thinking and behaviour. This is done, for example by an attempt to impact educators own process of self-cultivation. Kallio (2023, 160) defines self-cultivation as “a goal-oriented educational activity directed at the self, in which a person develops her or his own thinking, her or his ability to reflect on her or his feelings and her or his own actions in a relational relationship with other people, the environment and society”. Traditionally self-cultivation is defined as something only adults do and it is seen as a goal of the education itself (see e.g. Bohlin, 2008). In this inquiry I look how young people, the educatee’s already uses self-cultivation.

The core aim of the study I present is to further develop the conceptual framework of RPR by combining it with the concept of self-cultivation. The objectives of this study are underpinned by the following two questions:

1. What is the normative concept of reverse pedagogical relation?

1. How could self-cultivation develop the concept of reverse pedagogical relation?

The Galápagos is a small archipelago of 21 main islands located about 1,000 km off the coast of

Ecuador. One hundred years after the islands were made famous by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, they were declared a National Park of Ecuador and subsequently added to the list of UNESCO Natural World Heritage Sites in 1978 (‘2 COM VIII.38 - Decision, Review of Nominations to the World Heritage List’, 1978) both actions drawing more international attention to the enchanted isles. In addition to a plethora of intriguing non-human species in the natural world, the islands are also home to ~30,000 human residents, and within that number, ~7,500 school aged children, who live near the internationally renowned natural space. Distinctly, there are no people Indigenous to the islands, meaning that the human communities in Galapagos are recently-established, and effectively, introduced species to fragile ecosystems (Hennessy, 2019). While Indigenous knowledge is present on the islands through migrant Indigenous communities who, like all other residents of the islands, have moved there from either Ecuadorian, or international regions, this research focuses on how an introduced human population can effectively build robust and deeply affective conservation through equally robust and affective environmental education and learning.

Despite this unique arrangement, and tremendously successful case study in conservation and locally-supported sustainability efforts, there is little research on and with Galapagos human communities to both understand and further hone local initiatives and to serve as a valuable example for international urgency in biodiversity conservation amidst the global poly-crisis. Even further, research with the youngest generation of Galapaguenos, about the environmental education and learning that they engage with in their home ecosystems, has received paltry attention academically and internationally.

This study aims to fill these gaps. Research included fieldwork with younger children in the Galapagos Islands, with an aim to understand how they physically and practically engage with the local natural world, how they think about and value both their home ecosystems and how that translates to value and care for international ones they learn about, and if and how environmental emotions play a role in shaping their lived environmental education. In effect, this research strives to learn from Galapagos children how to preserve and encourage more humanity in how we learn about, care for, and preserve the natural world, and more ecocentrism in how environmental education and learning is framed. In the context of the gravity of the environmental polycrisis, all parts of which have been instigated and exponentially worsened by human impact, exploitation of the ecosphere, and anthropocentric global human powers, I am keenly interested in how Galápagos children construct and use Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) to engage in ecocentric stewardship of the ecosphere and “[return] to the protection of nature for nature's sake” (McCauley, 2006, p. 27).

This research is important not only for informing and furthering conservation efforts in the

Galápagos, but essential for questions of how children engage with environmental concerns, what their worldviews and knowledge are and how adults might use data produced from children to best equip them and adult-run programs to lead stewardship and conservation locally and globally. As Durham (2021) notes, “Galápagos is a valuable test bed for the sustainability challenges facing the whole of planet earth” (p. 302).