This essay names one of the central tensions of rewilding as a pedagogy: the paradox that the very guidance meant to help students grow can, if overdone, domesticate the wildness we claim to value.
It is less an argument than a field note—an attempt to live honestly inside the tension.
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Recently, while hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains and looking up from the trail to check my direction, I noticed a brush mark of blue paint on a tree just ahead of me.
It assured me, This is the way.
As I continued my hike, with brush marks of blue encouraging me along the way, I found myself wondering:
How did the park rangers decide which color to use?
They were not hot pink.
Nor fluorescent green.
The blue was not that bright.
In fact, there was barely any contrast between the blue paint and the tree’s bark.
How did the park rangers decide on the distance between marks?
How did they decide how many marks were just enough to keep hikers on the right path without crowding out their own sense of direction?
“Oh,” I thought, “this is the pedagogy of the wild.”
Like the park rangers of Shenandoah National Forest, when rewilding your students, you must strike a careful balance between independence and guidance.
You will have to decide the number and type of check-ins you will have with your students—enough to ensure they stay oriented, but not so many that you deprive them of the chance to fail, recover, and discover the path on their own.
You must decide how often you will ask your students, Are you okay?
While this question can be comforting, asked too often it can tilt into something else—something closer to gaslighting.
Think about it: how often can someone be asked Are you okay? before they begin answering a different question entirely—Am I okay?
For each of your students, you will have to ask yourself repeatedly:
Am I pushing them too far beyond their edge of growth—or keeping them too safely within it?
Whenever we were in Honduras, and our classroom community was reframing a rookie’s choice from resist or flee their fears into us versus them (the fears), I watched our rookies with equal parts admiration and worry.
Was the experience too much?
Too intense?
Too soon?
In moments their loved ones back home might have readily rescued them from, I suppressed my instinct to step in.
“Be patient,” I admonished myself.
“This experience is a gift.”
It was.
It still is.
Just as the forces of industrialized education relentlessly strive to keep students from becoming who they were born to be, an equal and opposite force—of comparable strength and intensity—must be counterpoised against them.
That countervailing force was our classroom community.
Our eyes on them.
Our presence steady.
Our only persistent question: Are they one of us?
Our collective judgment regarding whether they were—or were not.
Yet even knowing this, I was ethically obligated to ask whether the experience was too much, too soon.
At the same time, if I lowered the intensity by stepping in too quickly, the experience my students needed to experience would never actually be experienced.
You too will be obligated to distinguish between experiences that expand possibilities and those that diminish them.
You too will have to calibrate—and recalibrate, and recalibrate again—the intensity of the experiences your students are having.
And you will have to do this for each student, in real time.
You are training your students in the ways of the wild.
And that right there is the fundamental paradox of rewilding:
the more training you give them, the less wild they become.
Teaching students to embrace their inner wildness while still providing the structure they need to grow requires a deep understanding of oneself, one’s students, and the ecosystem of relationships that make up a classroom community.
Will you allow your students the benefits of getting lost?
Of trying different routes and having to backtrack?
Of encountering dead ends—and pressing onward anyway?
Will you put a blue paint mark on every tree?
Or will you put one on every other tree?
Every third tree?
Or fewer still?
I don’t have answers for how to square this circle.
I have learned instead to live inside the tension.
What I do know is this: we must become critically wary of our education system’s excessive zeal to comfort students—a zeal that fosters a competitive environment in which educators, in an effort to demonstrate care, engage in a kind of convenience arms race.
We do this by making lecture notes endlessly available, providing ever more detailed guides, clearly articulating what constitutes an A, B, C, D, or F, and otherwise smoothing the path—often at the expense of truly transformative learning.
I do know that rewilding, practiced with humility and a love of curiosity, has real gifts to give our students.
And to us.
