Refuge and the Wilded Classroom: Figure, Practice, Space

University teaching in a context of escalating planetary crisis requires new approaches to pedagogical encounter. Reconceptualising the university classroom as a potential refuge from polycrisis, we identify symptoms and effects of the academic-industrial complex and ‘fast academia’ in our practice, and we develop ways to take refuge from these effects so as to resist or undo them. These paths of resistance include: conscious deceleration and willed slowness as method and ethos; greater openness to the specificities of place and to the interaction of place and learning; a loosening of goal orientation; and closer attention to non-human life-forms and to possibilities for interspecies co-existence in a mode of ‘wild diplomacy’. We draw on Baptiste Morizot's reflections on enforestment and tracking, which foreground reciprocal relationships between places and the creatures, including humans, who move and cohabit within them, and we activate these reflections to reconfigure pedagogical dynamics both within and outside the classroom. We elaborate an ethos of enforestment with reference to three examples from our practice: the wolf seminar, the woodland class and a walk in the woods. In each instance, the realities of ecological relation are determinedly confronted and acknowledged, not as theme, topic, or object of study, but as the very ground of academic practice.