From Seedlings to Elders: Cultivating Regenerative Learning Ecologies Across Generations

There's a particular kind of magic that happens when a five-year-old discovers a beetle beneath a log, when a middle schooler realizes they can navigate by stars, when a grandmother plants seeds she'll never harvest but tends anyway. It's the magic of reciprocity—of humans remembering we belong to something larger than ourselves.

This is the work of Outdoor Nature Based (ONB) pedagogy, and it's not confined to a single age group or season of life. At Mycelium Cooperative, we've spent years deepening this understanding, and now we're ready to expand it across the full spectrum of human experience: from birth through our wisest years.

A Coalition of Services, One Regenerative Vision

Our journey began with early childhood—with the recognition that ages 0-6 represent a critical window for cultivating ecological belonging and justice-oriented learning. That work remains central. But as we've listened to families, practitioners, and our own community, we've realized something essential: regenerative learning ecologies don't end at kindergarten. They deepen, evolve, and transform across a lifetime.

Today, Mycelium Cooperative offers a coalition of services designed to meet multi-generational and multi-lingual communities where they are:

• Outdoor Nature Based Preschools (Ages 0-6): Where early childhood wonder meets justice-oriented practice, and belonging to place becomes the foundation for all future learning.

• Grassland Gardens School (Ages 5-11): Homeschool enrichment two days a week, extending ONB pedagogy into the elementary years with emergent curriculum, place-based learning, and both/and thinking.

• Forest School Sessions (Grades 1-8): Institutional partnerships and standalone programs that deepen ecological citizenship, academic integration through play, and peer-to-peer learning in wild places.

• Rooted Wisdom Program (Seniors): A revolutionary approach to later-life learning that honors the wisdom of elders while inviting them into active ecological stewardship and intergenerational knowledge-sharing.

• Emergent Strategy Wildcraft Workshops (Adults): Coming soon—family and adult workshops grounded in wild crafting, reciprocity, and the regenerative practices that sustain both humans and more-than-human communities.

Why Multi-Generational? Why Now?

In a culture that often fragments learning by age, that treats childhood as preparation for adulthood rather than a full life in itself, and that too frequently isolates elders from meaningful participation, ONB pedagogy offers something radically different. It asks: What if learning were lifelong? What if every generation had something essential to teach and receive?

As the podcast Can We Create a Village in a Competitive Culture? explores, we're living in a moment of profound disconnection—from each other, from place, from the rhythms that sustained human communities for millennia. Competitive culture fragments us. But regenerative learning ecologies do the opposite. They weave us together. They create the conditions for what the podcast calls "village"—interdependence, reciprocal care, and shared stewardship across generations.

When a grandmother learns to identify medicinal plants alongside her grandchild, when a middle schooler mentors a preschooler in forest skills, when adults gather to practice wildcraft and remember their own belonging to the land—that's not just education. That's the rebuilding of community. That's resistance to isolation. That's regeneration.

Expanding Impact Through the Generations

Our previous blog posts have emphasized the power of early childhood education—the reality that ages 0-6 represent a critical, often overlooked foundation for ecological citizenship and justice-oriented learning. That work remains at our heart. But we've learned something equally important: early childhood doesn't exist in isolation. It's most powerful when embedded in a multi-generational ecosystem where learning flows in all directions.

The expansion from preschool to K-8 Forest School to Rooted Wisdom to adult wildcraft workshops isn't about diluting our focus. It's about deepening it. It's about recognizing that regenerative pedagogy is a lifelong practice, that every age group brings irreplaceable gifts, and that true community healing requires all of us.

A child who experiences ONB preschool, then continues through Forest School, then grows up to facilitate wildcraft workshops for their own children and aging parents—that's a regenerative learning ecology in action. That's what we're building.

Invitation and Belonging

Whether you're a parent seeking something different for your young child, an educator hungry for place-based practice, a grandmother wanting to stay engaged and alive in your later years, or an adult ready to remember your own wild nature—there's a place for you in this coalition of services. We're committed to accessibility, to solidarity economics, to centering justice and belonging for multi-generational and multi-lingual communities.

The work of regenerative learning ecologies is the work of remembering: remembering that we belong to the land, to each other, to the more-than-human world. It's work that spans from the first moment a baby feels soil between their fingers to the last season an elder tends a garden they'll leave as legacy.

My writing serves diverse audiences—families, guardians, parents, practitioners, graduate students, and community adults—covering "Tangled Bank" (Darwin's enduring metaphor) interests, initiatives, and networks.

Through Outdoor Nature Based Preschools, K-8 Forest School, and Emergent Strategy Wildcraft Workshops for Adults, we explore perception, observation, interpretation, and reciprocity from human and more-than-human perspectives. Central to all age groups remains this concept: Early Childhood is "Not just cute, but powerful and incredibly important." - So applied to middle and late childhood, adolescence, adulthood and becoming elders this is not just a fun enriching activity it is deepening our community and cultural roots and re-wilding ourselves to where we naturally belong.