Reflecting and Responding: The Heart of Regenerative Pedagogy

How Emergent Curriculum Embodies Both/And Thinking in Nature-Based Learning

Part of facilitating a "Pedagogy of Play" lies in reflecting and responding to observations and wonders—a practice that embodies what I've come to understand as regenerative education as lived experience. This approach requires moving beyond either/or thinking about curriculum versus student interest toward both/and integration that honors children's inherent wisdom while supporting deep learning.

Recently, after a Forest School day characterized by wet feet, multiple sock changes, and at least two hours of creekside play, I witnessed this integration in action. Despite lesson plans designed around flowers, pollinators, and seeds, the children showed persistent fascination with water, worms, and soil. In compliance-based, standards-driven environments (common in conventional schools where I've taught since 2004), the pressure would be to interrupt natural curiosity and force adherence to predetermined objectives.

However, our bodies were responding to weather, and emergent curriculum surfaced: centering the elements and creatures (water, worms, soil) that support the original plan of flowers, pollinators, and seeds. This represents what I call "border crossing"—moving fluidly between planned and emergent learning while remaining accountable to educational depth and justice.

Beyond Either/Or: Academic Rigor AND Play-Based Learning

Some families experience conflict about choosing between Outdoor Nature-Based Preschools or Forest Schools (perceived as radical, new, or extreme) versus "regular" indoor programs. This false binary reflects dominant cultural assumptions about what constitutes "real" learning—assumptions rooted in systems that have historically excluded diverse ways of knowing and being.

On this wet day where pollinators were absent, I followed students' learning with questions and enthusiasm around worms, mud, and living soil. Alongside these regenerative ecology topics, students still developed social skills, speaking and listening abilities, letter sounds, consonant blends, and ASL signs from the original lesson plan. When aligned with Colorado Early Learning Development Guidelines, this emergent curriculum easily maps to required competencies while honoring children's authentic interests.

This behind-the-scenes planning often goes unappreciated. To untrained observers, it might appear as "cute nature play" with questions about "when school will start." To developmental psychologists and trained Forest School practitioners, school "starts" with first curiosity and play. Reflection by students, teachers, guides, and families crystallizes learning, providing foundation for deeper exploration.

Professional Validation: What Regenerative Learning Looks Like

Dr. Jessica Reyka, licensed psychologist from Grass Roots Healing, observed our outdoor preschool to experience nature play's potential for all of us. As part of the Colorado Collective for Nature Based Early Learning steering committee, I regularly support these site visits within our peer-to-peer training network—similar to England's Forest School Association—promoting place-responsive quality improvement culture.

This culture embodies Regenerative Learning Ecology principles: finding mutualism within programming (even when seemingly competitive) to support life-sustaining approaches that give back more than we take. This connects to broader movements for economic and educational justice that recognize our liberation as interconnected.

Dr. Reyka's reflection captures what emerges when we center children's inherent capacity:

"I cannot thank you enough for allowing me to witness and engage in the nature school and with the kiddos today. It not only brought so much lightness and creative energy to my system, it also reminded me of how beautiful the world is and how we aren't always given the opportunities to see and explore it.

What you are both doing is absolutely profound and beyond needed. I watched you both light up with love, care and curiosity with the kids and any (and everything) that they brought to you."

The Learning Below the Surface

Dr. Reyka witnessed children developing:

• Greeting others and inviting play engagement • Setting and respecting boundaries around personal space and preferences

• Patience and respect for land and resident creatures • Honoring big feelings and taking space when overwhelmed • Asking for help with difficult emotions and situations • Building trust and safe, direct communication with peers • Honoring privacy for self and others • Celebrating differences and providing mutual care • Roaming freely while checking in, feeling safe in body and mind • Requesting permission and consent, sharing through words rather than aggression • Compromising and accommodating others' needs for inclusion • Caring for self, body, and belongings while staying creative and open-minded

These outcomes aren't unique to Mycelium Cooperative programs, nor exclusive to Forest Schools or Outdoor Preschools. Any school following Play-Based Pedagogy where "Learning is the Outcome and Play is the Method" can unlock deep learning found "below the tip of the iceberg."

Modeling Regenerative Practice

While I "follow their lead" in student-initiated discovery, I also model and facilitate deep learning through language, demonstration, and support during everything from conflict to transitions. This aspect of Pedagogy of Play unlocks "below the tip of the iceberg skills": broad vocabulary, language interest, curiosity, persistence, attentiveness, incidental learning, drive to learn, predictability, memory, and self-control.

My common practices include:

• Complex vocabulary modeling in experiential context with ASL signs and body language • Authentic curiosity demonstration for our surrounding world • Persistence and attentiveness practice in my own learning • Incidental learning embrace as we shift from planned pollinator lessons to emergent worm and soil exploration • Adult excitement and curiosity (rather than knowing everything) combined with rituals and songs supporting predictability, memory, and self-control

The Power of Reflection: Learning from Experience

Caylin Gans, mentor and coach who runs Forest Schooled in Ottawa, Canada, shares this insight from Richard Irvine in her reflection training tools:

"[It's] worth bearing in mind that reviewing/reflecting can be on prior experience (where we are at), current experience (what am I/are we doing), and future potential experience (what are we going to do?). It can be at many levels, descriptive (factual), delve into emotional response to an experience, ponder the consequences of an experience etc. etc. etc... What is important is that it happens. Dewey supposedly said that, 'We do not learn from an experience... We learn from reflecting on an experience.'"

This connects to my understanding that regenerative education requires contemplative practice—the kind of reflection that allows us to "grow our comfort zones" when engaging across difference, as Van Jones describes in social justice work.

Small Groups, Deep Relationships

Mycelium Cooperative maintains small groups (typical 1:6 ratios with maximum 18 students), expanding possibilities for emergent curriculum, student voice in learning reflection, and comfort with deep reflection processes. I know each student well, enabling dynamic adaptation to weather, natural cycles, and sudden changes in behavior or interest.

This represents what grows when something life-affirming emerges from systems that have prioritized compliance over curiosity, standardization over relationship, and individual achievement over collective flourishing.

Toward a Rewilded Generation

Mycelium Cooperative programs embody the understanding that combining play with worms, soil, water, roots, shoots, flowers, pollinators, and seeds AT ALL AGES cultivates what Rewilding Education founders envision:

"Those who are part of a rewilded generation are healthy, confident and secure in themselves, without any tendencies towards self-destructiveness. They would then be less likely to inflict destruction onto the planet."

This vision extends beyond individual development toward collective healing—recognizing that children who develop secure attachment to themselves, each other, and the more-than-human world become adults capable of creating just, sustainable communities.

The Ripple Effects of Regenerative Learning

When we honor children's authentic interests while supporting academic development, we model the both/and thinking essential for addressing complex challenges like climate change, social inequality, and educational access. We demonstrate that rigor and joy, structure and flexibility, individual growth and collective care can coexist and strengthen each other.

This work requires examining our own assumptions about what constitutes "real" learning while remaining accountable to supporting children's development across all domains. It means using whatever privilege we carry—educational, economic, racial—to create more accessible, justice-oriented learning environments.

My blog posts serve diverse audiences—families, guardians, parents, practitioners, graduate students, and community adults—covering the "Tangled Bank" (Darwin's enduring metaphor) of interests, initiatives, and networks weaving together when we center justice, relationships, and regeneration.

Through Outdoor Nature Based Preschools, K-8 Forest Schools, 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 understanding: Early Childhood is "not just cute, but powerful and incredibly important."