Contribution short abstract:

This paper considers the unwriting of sustainability education through embodied community practice in Scotland. Thinking with ‘ecologies,’ I explore peer learning across place-based environmental education, land work, and culture making with/in more-than-human communities.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper presents an ecological understanding of peer-to-peer learning in rural communities as a case study of unwriting conventional forms of sustainability education.

I explore how networks of practitioners across place-based environmental education, land work, and culture making in Scotland might comprise dynamic living systems with/in the landscape and more-than-human communities. How can the co-creative, non-linear action of ecologies invite inclusion and innovation while centring TEK and I/indigenous ways of being? How and why this is an important question in Scotland is evident in the work of Williams (2024), Smith (2024), Barding (2023), Sandilands and McFadyen (2022), and others. Flow and change are necessary for ecologies to survive, ie. be sustainable.

Learning communities as ‘ecologies’ builds on Affifi's (2022) ecologizing education, and particularly on the ‘wild pedagogies’ of Jickling, Blenkinsop, et al (2018, 2022), which illuminates the agency of more-than-human beings as teachers and partners in education. My inquiry shifts from their focus on children and teachers-in-training to consider the relationships among practitioners, particularly those outside the school system, and their larger communities.

These forms of education resonate with the work of Indigenous scholars Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013, 2024), who writes of plants as teachers and invites the possibility of ‘becoming indigenous,’ and Randy Woodley (2012), who presents a dynamic, active peace within ‘the community of creation.’ Perhaps in an echo of Abrams’s (2017, 2020) and Rosenfeld’s (2021) wild ethics in the Humilocene, the paper imagines ecologies as a model for practical action towards ecocultural peace building.