Teaching to transgress through residential education: Nurturing pedagogical innovation to tackle the climate and nature emergencies in higher education

ABSTRACT

Universities occupy a contested space regarding their responses to the climate and nature emergencies. They are criticised for their neoliberalism, marketisation and corporatism yet they provide education to the leaders of tomorrow who are essential for the transition to a sustainable world. In this paper, residential education is explored through a three-phase Rites of Passage framework based on teaching to transgress. Dependable and trustworthy literature sources were identified to develop strands of a pedagogical framework. Autoethnographic vignettes added further novel strands based on insights into residential education from the authors’ lived experiences. Thus a residential education pedagogical web emerges to reimagine learning, teaching and research in higher education that deals directly with the climate and nature emergencies. We argue that more residential education centres should be developed to operate as semi-autonomous satellites of their parent universities because they can be more participatory, flexible and dynamic.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate and nature emergencies
• experiential learning
• Place-Based Education
• residential education
• teaching to transgress

We seem to be running out of ways of saying that there are real and present climate and nature emergencies.

We seem to be running out of ways of getting people to listen.

We seem to be running out of ways to act.

We seem to be running out of time.

And yet …

Robbie and Pete: The Pass of Drumochter is a spectacular upland pass, a watershed and crossing point that connects the lowland south of Scotland with the highland north. We travel this route often taking students from our city-based university campus in Edinburgh to a residential centre in the Cairngorms National Park. At around 460 m elevation this is the highest point of any main railway line in the United Kingdom and in winter the conditions can be so severe that drifting snow frequently blocks the road. The landscape is a mixture of mountain and moorland threaded through by numerous watercourses which gather together and tumble downhill on their relentless journey seaward. The briefest of glimpses through the window by passing motorists would not fail to register that this is a place of rugged beauty, at least for some, or bleak, remote wilderness for others. But one way or another, and by any measure, this is a magnificent landscape.

We are not passing motorists and so we stop, Robbie driving one minibus and Pete the other. The students pile out and gather by the roadside. Pete points to the drumlins. There are hundreds of them. If you were passing at 60mph you might not notice them. Now that the drumlins have been noticed Pete describes how this is a glaciated region with clues coming from the steep sided hills and u-shaped valleys. The drumlins are small hills made up of glacial deposits. It is curious because when you look closely they clearly have differences in their oval-like shapes but collectively they have the appearance of uniformity, a patchwork of natural forms and stretched geometric shapes assembled by unseen forces, thousands of years in the past, and now sitting there like a huge egg tray stretching across the landscape as far as the eye can see. Robbie might then ask the students to look at the surrounding landscape not simply to see but to interpret. If glaciation was one of the factors that formed this landscape is there any visible evidence of others? For example, through some combination of prior knowledge and prompts from us the students will come to notice that the heather is part of a patchwork landscape. The patches in this case have been formed by muirburn. This is an intentional management practice where setting fire to older moorland vegetation encourages new growth. What we are looking at is a grouse moor. The new growth provides nutritious food for grouse, the older lank heather, that is purposely not burnt, provides protection from predators and shelter for nesting. This mosaic landscape is managed this way to maximise grouse production. Maximal bird density is essential for grouse-shooting as a sport but the scale of its impact is, to say the least, contentious. The Land Rover tracks that lead to the higher tops of the hills are a landscape scar for some but a necessary part of this form of grouse shooting.

From stepping out of our minibuses only minutes earlier and seeing a landscape apparently untouched since the passage of the glaciers this perception is carefully unravelled and replaced by new layers of meaning that point to a landscape that is as highly managed as industrial farmland.

There are four points we would like to develop from this shared autoethnographic vignette about how we theory-build and develop student understanding in our teaching practice. First, in one sense, this teaching moment/event has a life all of its own. As such, it can partly be explained by its beginning, when the students exited the minibus, and by its end, when they stepped back in, with a period of teaching and learning in between. Second, although it is possible to bookend teaching episodes, as we just have with a ‘beginning’ and an ‘end’, it is perhaps due more to an act of institutional convenience than good pedagogy to do so. What is not evident from sharing this vignette is that this teaching episode was purposely connected to previous teaching episodes. These students will typically have been studying towards an MSc in Outdoor Education or an MSc in Outdoor, Environmental and Sustainability Education, in which case they will already have undertaken campus-based learning with Pete around land ownership, interpreting the landscape and land management. This meant we were able to make connections between the students’ previous class learning and this field experience (connecting learning in the present to learning from the past). Another thing not evident from the vignette is that although the students were at that stage unaware, as tutors we had already planned teaching episodes for this course and future courses that would return to this episode with the intention of deepening and broadening their knowledge even further. This way of teaching has its roots in the concept of ‘continuity’ and the experiential learning theories of luminaries such as Dewey (1963), Freire (1996) Rogers (1983) Vygotsky (1978) and Whitehead (1967), something we will return to.

It is important to note that what might at first appear to be a spontaneous interlude by the roadside was in fact a careful act of ‘intentional serendipity’.¹ Intentional serendipity has the appearance of spontaneity from the students’ perspective but it is also something that has been systematically prepared for by the teacher. Even though the level of detail might not be predicted in advance by the teacher, the important point is that whatever spontaneity occurs has been planned for in the event that it might happen. This is not the sort of academy sponsored teaching that is determined in advance by carefully developed learning outcomes that have to be prepared before any teaching takes place. Instead, teaching is guided by a loose framework based on openness and what might be possible in that place, and a readiness on the part of the teacher for whatever might happen. This is essential because the teacher will not know the intimate detail of each student’s knowledge base, nor their life history. For example, in the context of the vignette above, we have had students on our programmes who have detailed geological knowledge of glaciers and drumlins, those with moorland ecology expertise, and others who have worked on highland sporting estates (and those with none of this knowledge). This sort of interdisciplinary pedagogy requires active participation on the parts of both students and teachers, something we develop throughout this paper.

In open-ended teaching situations such as these there is one further dimension to consider, and that is where nature becomes your co-teacher and is ‘actively engaged with, listened to, and taken seriously as part of the educative process’ (Jickling et al., 2018, p. 80). When the teacher does not control the learning environment, which they rarely can anyway, the unexpected inevitably happens. If a golden eagle were to swoop and carry off a grouse, student interest would almost certainly move from person-as-teacher to nature-as-teacher and what an incredible opportunity to link this unintended, visceral experience with the conceptual developments already begun. If one is to teach like this, then it is important to ‘expect the unexpected’ and be prepared to teach with intentional serendipity in mind.

This leads to the third point and it is to do with what bell hooks (1994) refers to as ‘excitement’. Excitement is both a principle of teaching and learning as well as a challenge to any sort of conventional wisdom that posits the idea that the proper and perhaps the only place for learning is the classrooms, laboratories and lecture rooms of the campus-based, city-centric academy. Excitement in this sense does not refer simply to its relation with the content of learning, the sharing of information, and the fairly dubious assumption that what is taught is what is learned. These conceptions are far too narrow and linear to take account of the pedagogy shared in the above vignette and how this learning relates to the climate and nature emergencies. This is more about movement beyond the boundaries of the campus-based academy to allow for spontaneous changes of direction but also to actively transgress curricular boundaries. In her own words ‘excitement could not be generated without a full recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices’ (hooks, 1994, p. 7).

The fourth point is that the minibus journey itself marks an important educational transition. From the university campus to Cairngorms National Park takes just under three hours and it is more than the simple translocation from one place of education (the campus) to another (the residential centre). The transition itself adds complexity and deeper layers of meaning to the autoethnographic vignette provided above. Western literature is richly illustrated with journeys of self-discovery. The oft-quoted Greek journeys of Achilles, Odysseus and Gilgamesh, the Anglo Saxon coming of age story for Beowulf, the biblical call to adventure of Jonah, all have been internationalised and integrated into popular culture through the ‘call to adventure’ inherent in the literary world of mono-myths such as Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (1998) and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey (2008). Some indigenous cultures too have Rites of Passage rituals, such as living in the ‘wilderness’ and practices that follow in their ancestors’ footpaths as a way of knowing and being in the landscape. It is not the purpose of this paper to provide a detailed account of these practices nor to offer critical perspectives of them, so much as to say that they all follow a similar age-old Rites of Passage structure, a structure rarely seen in modern higher education. Andrews (1999, p. 35) suggests that these normally involve three phases:

separation, in which participants are removed from the structure of everyday life in the social order; transition … in which participants undergo an intense experience with different norms and characteristics from those accompanying the regular patterns of social organisation; and … (re)incorporation through which participants re-enter the social order in a different place, status, or state of being.

This structure is helpful in understanding the relationship between campus-based education and residential education, and the educational possibilities that exist in the transitions between both.

Separation²

Robbie: I often worry about the number of crises affecting higher education across the globe right now and these make for painful reading for those of us committed to the sector. Despite all the wonderful opportunities that the academy offers I still feel entrapment cycles that go on and on like some never-ending process repeating itself through homogenous reflection, what Donna Haraway has referred to as the Sacred Image of the Same. I am reminded of Max Weber’s Iron Cage of Rationality that seems to have imprisoned our western institutions, our universities bureaucratised by the socio-economic forces that drive them, the muscular management that leads them, the hierarchies, top-down systems, and efficiency measures that maintain the status quo. I worry too that this is a complex homeostasis reinforced by processes that disconnect management systems from pedagogical delivery, driving a wedge between that most important interface that our universities are supposed to cherish—staff and students. Caught up in these entrapment cycles time to be pedagogically innovative just seems to drain away as academics become stifled, spending time maintaining the Iron Cages that entrap us.

What is it that universities are supposed to do?

In the higher education literature, there is no shortage of criticisms about the failings of modern universities. These have led Sterling (2022) to suggest that an ecological zeitgeist is required to help guide them towards nature-based climate education. The general theme is that universities are currently driven by a set of unsustainable internal contradictions that are dominated by neoliberal marketisation and corporatism designed to help drive the economy. Sterling (2024, p. 64) argues that this multi-dimensional ‘squeeze’ has had a significant impact on ‘educational policy and practice, including erosion of the notion of higher education as a public and common good.’

One of the most scathing criticisms comes from Tassone et al. (2018, p. 218) who, in seeking new visions for higher education have said its

mental models, mind-sets and ways of thinking can be characterised by their tendency towards commodification (turning public goods, nature, etc. into tradeable units that have economic value and can be consumed), reductionism (creating boundaries, distinctions, sectors and disciplines), efficiency and accountability (and associated forms of management and control) and competition (celebrating meritocracy, continuous innovation, excellence, survival of the fittest and the implicit acceptance of inequality) and growth thinking (the idea of continuous personal and economic growth).

The reason for presenting these arguments is not to provide a comprehensive critique of the higher education sector. It is more to point out that ‘teaching to transgress’ is not simply a pedagogical activity but it also means transgressing against, and finding alternatives to what makes universities unsustainable in the first place. Grant’s (2021) suggestion for change is to start by distinguishing between Old Power and New Power universities. Old Power institutions are characterised by formal structures, centralised power, and governed by top-down management practices. In terms of their drivers, Grant (2021, p. 25) notes a self-perpetuating unsustainable cycle where universities want to do well in league tables

as part of their marketing strategies to attract international students; they want to attract international students as, typically, they will pay twice, sometimes three times, as much as domestic students in tuition fees; and universities want those premium tuition fees as they need to subsidise loss-making research activities, which drive those league tables.

This is the sort of higher education provision that Tassone et al. (2018) critique above. However, for us this does not mean ‘out with the old and in with the new’ and in any case this is not what Grant is suggesting since he argues that individual universities tend to be a hybrid blend of old and new power. And so we are in agreement with de Oliveira (2021, pp. 17–18) who in her critique of modernity and the educational institutions it has spawned states this ‘is not a corrupt project of the West that needs to be defeated and replaced with a more righteous and virtuous non-Western alternative’.

The reason we are drawn to the idea of New Power is because of its focus on reimagining the purpose of the 21^st century university, perhaps that envisioned by de Sousa Santos (2021) in referring to The Polyphonic University. New Power institutions tend to regard old power managerial structures and their organisational cultures as stifling and seek to operate differently by developing innovative teaching, research, knowledge exchange and community engagement practices. They would tend to be more participatory, flexible and dynamic and therefore much more responsive to the threats posed by the climate and nature emergencies and the timeframes these impose upon us. Wals (2022, p. 217) has stated:

if higher education is to make a significant contribution to the transition towards a more sustainable world, it will need to break the resilient practices of ‘business-as-usual’ that normalise growth orientation, individualism, inequality, anthropocentrism, exclusion, exploitation and even catastrophes.

For Barnett (2017, p. 1) this means developing an ecological university to help bridge the gap ‘between the way the world is and the potential of the university to play its part in and for the world’. The sheer size and scale of most universities can make this very difficult for them to be ‘polyphonic’ or ‘ecological’ and so in our own work with residential education we have sought to step temporarily away from the Iron Cage (the separation) to a much smaller and more intimate ‘polyphonic’ and ‘ecological’ setting. In so doing, we seek to offer different stories than those that are currently heard within the academy, stories that help us, and our university leaders, step back and consider the core purposes of the institution we work in and beyond. Stories like those we are telling now.

What about residential education?

Although most universities may be residential in the sense that they offer students living accommodation there is an important distinction that we need to make. The residential education we are advocating does not refer just to living accommodation on a city-based campus but takes place at a distance from it while operating as a semi-autonomous educational satellite. The theoretical framing of this is better understood when the critiques of higher education just alluded to are located within the first two of the three-phase template referred to above. In terms of the Separation phase, the university, its politics, the Iron Cage, and its rules are (mostly) left behind having departed the city-based campus to experience greater educational freedoms to engage with students. The teaching episode described at Drumochter (and indeed many others which are discussed while travelling in the minibus) are part of the Transition. This second educational phase continues and includes being at the residential centre where students spend time indoors and outdoors and also reflecting on the campus and the Iron Cages they have just left. During this Transition phase, time and space are used and experienced very differently by staff and students than at campus. There is much more of a focus on the students by engaging in experiential and relational (to the landscape) approaches to their learning. The way this is achieved is by focussing very directly on how learning and living interact. We will now map out how this happens through a pedagogical web that has several inter-connected strands. In no particular order one is intentional serendipity, another is boundaried space, another is open time, another is co-created teaching and learning, another is immersive dwelling, another is whole-person attention and another is Place-Based Education (PBE).

Having already discussed intentional serendipity, we move to the next strand, boundaried space, where students and staff will eat, sleep and work in and from the residential centre. Staff do not go back to their offices, nor do students attend other classes; staff and students are far enough away from the home institution that normal commuting is not practical. Space is not boundaried in the sense that it is ‘hermetically sealed’, a social enclosure, with no comings and goings nor is there a desire to make it so. It simply means that residential space sets up a range of possibilities for different encounters on a very regular basis as staff and students go about their daily lives interacting with one another. This is a space where, unlike the majority of university learning environments the ‘concatenation (connection and interplay) of learning and environment, the individual and collective learner are brought into an immediate relation to the meaning and well-being of the community and the planet’ (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2023).

This redrawing of normal spatial boundaries and displacement from the bureaucracy and institutionalisation of the university campus provides opportunities for staff and students to spend open time together. By accompanying the noun ‘time’ with the adjective ‘open’ we intend to provoke further discussion of time as an educational concept in higher education. In most higher education institutions time is ‘captured’ through ‘time’tables that are an institutional convenience as they are used to plan and predict mass periods of teaching. In the academy, course teaching is based on contact ‘time’ and thus ‘time’ is first captured and then commodified through bureaucratic processes. But as Mikulan and Sinclair (2023) have stated

school (university) life formalizes unreflective or unthought presuppositions of temporality by continually narrativizing homogeneous time, linear narrative and progressive teleology as tropisms of before and after, past and futurity.

In this sense, modern institutions have tended to ‘imprison’ time, appropriating it for performativity purposes. This linearity means that time proceeds no matter where you are or who you are. Yet this conflicts with the philosophy of experiential education, the centrality of students and their lived experiences, the importance of their backgrounds and also their hopes for the future. Within the paradigm of modernity and its colonising ways, and along this singular axis, time ends up being divisive, discriminatory and oppressive as there is not enough of it to dwell within complex and overlapping intersectional issues. In response, Mikulan and Sinclair (2023) have said that

‘sustainability’ calls for epistemological, axiological and curricular strategies of untimeliness that depend on both a deep engagement with time, timing, pacing, tempo and thinking against time, the segregated and stratified times we live in. What is being called upon is a certain reimagining of what will be possible, when, how much and for whom?

Robbie: As part of a residential education Masters level course I wrote on a white board the words ‘climate and nature emergencies’. I sat down and asked the group of students ‘what does that mean to you’? It was three hours before I rose from my chair having been part of a discussion that had involved tears, laughter, anger, frustration and expressions of love and hurt.

Like boundaried space the idea of time as something that is open is relative. I had not planned in advance the length of time the students would need to discuss this question. I do know though that questions like this will sometimes take less time and sometimes more, depending on a complex range of inter-related factors. While such an exercise can take place in non-residential settings (e.g. tutorial rooms), the restrictions of timetabling and the expectations of both staff and students and a range of other bureaucratic factors mean that it would be a rarity. The point is that as part of residential education, time is experienced differently, by teachers and students, and can be consciously used in a creative way to challenge, disrupt, liberate and transgress.

The next strand is co-created teaching and learning and Robbie’s autoethnographic vignette just above helps to show how this happens. The students had already expected to study ecological sustainability as it is part of the content of their masters’ programmes and published in advance (and so this is not co-created). Co-creation happens when students are involved in decision-making, not just of what they are to learn, but in choosing methods that will help with their learning. We have experienced this in a variety of ways with for example students proposing specific areas to visit, issues they want to talk about, theories they want to learn more of, and so on.

Lubicz-Nawrocka and Bovill (2023), who have conducted research into learning and teaching in higher education, point out that co-creation can help with meta-cognitive development and also with shifts in students’ identities. Their research is not about residential education per se but they did note that whilst co-creation is becoming more common in higher education, it remains a niche way of working. While residential education could claim no monopoly on co-creation it is ideally suited to do so and indeed there is a propensity towards this sort of pedagogy. Furthermore, Lubicz-Nawrocka and Bovill (2023) make the connection between co-creation and its potential for disrupting old ways of knowing while developing new forms of action, making it an ideal way to practice transgressive teaching and learning.

One of the reasons for this propensity is due to the immersive dwelling that takes place in residential settings. Dwelling is a concept that has been used by Ingold (2000) with a well-trodden conceptual trail leading back to Heidegger’s ideas on knowing, being, building and belonging. Because of its orientation back in time, it is not a trail we wish to retrace so much as to acknowledge its intellectual provenance. The provenance comes in part from a crucible of ideas brought to fruition through the concept of lifeworlds, but it has been pointed out that we are generally unaware of the individual and collective lifeworlds in which we find ourselves. Seamon (2018, p. 12) warns, ‘we habitually assume that the world as we know and experience it is the only world’. One could debate the extent to which this is correct, but it does provide an interesting perspective into why universities seem so slow in responding to the climate and nature emergencies with more radical educational innovations. Could this be part of a failure to reimagine institution-wide alternatives because of being an only world? It is also a fact that universities are commuter organisations, their staff and students for the most part itinerant, placeless, transients. And so the ontological basis we seek to build upon is to (re)locate human beings within their landscape(s) to learn from the Earth together through immersive dwelling involving reimagined lifeworlds. Purposeful residential education can help with this where living and learning come together in a co-ordinated way and students are central to the development of reimagined individual and social learning.

Pete: For fifty years our programmes have included a residential week-long field-course on the Isle of Rùm off the west coast of Scotland. As an island it provides a ‘bounded space’ for a sequence of ‘puzzles’ the students are introduced to throughout the week. These relate to almost all the ‘taught’ aspects of the course: geology, moor and bog ecology, freshwater ecology, the deer population, the shearwater colony, management of the surrounding marine environment, abandoned 19th Century settlements, population and agricultural history from Neolithic times. Students are asked to think about and research these puzzles over the week, but to keep their thoughts to themselves rather than try to answer each in turn. These are all drawn together in a concluding discussion where the students invariably ‘join-the-dots’, as they realise the island’s geology and nutrient availability are implicated in all of the above (see Higgins, 2020). This then leads to a final consideration of planetary limits and boundaries.

Immersive experiences such as those on the Isle of Rùm are central to this pedagogy of dwelling and it is not without precedent in higher education. In the US living-learning-communities (LLCs) are known for a range of benefits that result from immersive dwelling including ‘heightened capacities for critical thinking … improvements to a student’s overall academic performance … a sense of being part of a community … and more opportunities to interact with faculty’ (Eidum & Lomicka, 2023, p. 5). As pointed out above, the residential education we are referring to does not happen on a city-based campus but at a distance from it while operating as a semi-autonomous satellite. It therefore provides an immersive learning and teaching context in its own right, with all the benefits identified by Eidum and Lomicka (2023), while also providing the opportunity to reflect on and critique the host institution from a distance.

These immersive experiences are also important because as Lozzi (2010) has noted few institutions approach the curriculum holistically and intentionally in a way that deals with the cognitive and affective domains simultaneously (this is another well-trodden conceptual trail in the literature). It is though important to continually reinforce this point because very little of the above can be achieved within institutions, which are dominated by Old Power paradigms, that are in turn influenced by the Cartesian tendency to separate body from mind, and thought from feeling, something that tends to characterise campus-based, content-focussed, subject-oriented, outcome-based, teaching and learning metrics. Instead, there needs to be a clear and direct focus on the sort of onto-epistemic and ethical diversity that draws on multiple ways of knowing and being. This is not about students meeting predetermined learning outcomes nor being asked to answer questions set by someone else but instead trying to seek out the right sorts of questions to ask in the first place. What is required is whole person attention, something that focusses on the living as well as learning environment. In other words, cognition is required to develop the knowledge required to understand the science behind the climate and nature emergencies, while affective learning helps to promote forms of engagement that require social interaction and full-body engagement, as illustrated in Pete’s vignette about Rùm. Whole person attention is also stimulated on our residentials by days spent outdoors in nature - walking in forests and the hills, canoeing rivers, overnight camps etc. providing open-time for provocation, discussion and reflection, with students being encouraged to use their field note-books and/or electronic devices creatively (including sketching, writing prose and poetry) as well as to summarise information. Goralnik, et al. (2012, pp. 416–417) point out that integrating the intellect and emotion along with values and actions are necessary preconditions to develop

a theory of environmental ethical learning that aims not just to provide knowledge about ethics and the environment, but also to cultivate both an understanding of environmental ethics’ role in problem-solving and a personal and collective motivation to participate in the address of environmental issues.

Barad (2007, p. 34) has proposed the term ‘agential realism’ to develop a framework that moves beyond binaries such as the human and nonhuman, the material and discursive, the natural and cultural. This is an invitation to develop theories and forms of practice that specifically seek to make ‘visible a range of different connections between … disparate fields that have not previously been explored’ and then opening up new ways of interpreting them. So although Cartesian dualisms may be another fairly well trodden conceptual path, this is an invitation from Barad to open up new ways of thinking about old problems.

Due to their Old Power modernist traditions universities tend to be placeless institutions. This stems from some of the globalisation processes already referred to but also human mobility where increasing proportions of students arrive at their universities from all over the world. To do so, they have left their place of origin behind and become temporarily located in their chosen academic city before moving on geographically after graduation, as the majority tend to do. The irony is that globalisation helps to promote and increase some types of interconnections around the world but at the same time it increases a sense of placelessness because of the emphasis to move and not dwell (at least for those with the means to move in the first place). This is not to say that universities do not have identities associated with places where for example our own university has a strong association with the City of Edinburgh—a ‘university city’. But this does not mean that universities are necessarily place-based, or place conscious.

Place-Based Education (PBE) is first and foremost a challenge to neo-liberal discourse (Gruenewald, 2005) such as the sorts of critiques we have been making of higher education above. At one level, the challenge of PBE is to develop conceptual curricular learning that helps students better understand the planet as a whole (a global visioning based on theory). At another level PBE needs to be located within a defined sphere of influence where individual and group experiences and actions are possible (at a local, community scale). For Gruenwald and Smith (2008) this means combining a theoretical understanding of grand narratives associated with ecological, economic, social, political and cultural dimensions that are then brought to bear and focussed within a local context. It is therefore necessary to seek out, or establish from new, local cultures and places of learning in which to develop shared practices that are bounded by common interest. The ethical justification for this is because the moral significance of our relationships with local places and communities is determined by direct proximity and the experiential attention we pay to them (Nicol, 2014). Thus, residential centres can become learning contexts to anchor educational practices that hold in creative frisson the global conceptions of the climate and nature emergencies with, in Freirean terms, the ontological purpose of people and their education, which is to intervene critically in situations that surround them (Freire, 1996) in order to transgress them (bell hooks, 1994).

This is possible because PBE is based on experiential approaches to learning which are not simply a method of practical teaching, as the theoretical references to challenging neo-liberal discourses make clear. Also, in this paper, we are using the disruptive origins of PBE to help redefine aspects of university education to envision the sorts of ecological education that can address the specific challenges of the climate and nature emergencies where bell hooks’ (1994) ideas around transgression would be helpful. In this sense, PBE is a learning process that helps to ensure that staff and students engage with local places and their communities. As Seamon (2018, p. 13) points out ‘place is not the material environment distinct from the people associated with it but, rather, the indivisible, normally unnoticed phenomenon of person-or-people-experiencing-place’ which makes residential centres ideal crucibles for this sort of transgressive teaching and learning. Also, because PBE requires active learning modalities (Yemini et al., 2023) the continuous physical movement of students in-and-out-of-buildings and into local places and communities provides opportunities for experiential engagement with the social and natural worlds (Sobel, 2013) and the more-than-human (Abram, 1997), together with all the other educational benefits we have already pointed out that are associated with residential living.

Place-Based Education in residential contexts provides the opportunity to re-envision models of higher education around our species’ role in the future environmental sustainability of the planet. It is not used here just as a reaction to what is wrong and a criticism of existing higher education practices. Instead it is an urgent call to develop new ideas that fundamentally change existing onto-epistemic and ethical ways of knowing and being and then developing Concept-Based Practices (Nicol, 2014) that allows students to engage with that reality.

(Re)incorporation into the campus

At the end of the residential (for us it is normally between 1–2 weeks) when it is time to return to the campus, the third of the three-phase educational transitions takes place. The (re)incorporation phase sees the students moving from the residential centre back to the city-based campus where the majority of their degrees will be taught (for other approaches to residential education see Eidum & Lomicka, 2023). In this final section, we offer some thoughts on what it is the students return with (experiences and learning informed by the pedagogical web) and what they return to (places where they might choose to transgress).

In this paper, we have developed what we have called ‘a pedagogical web’ that has several strands. These strands include intentional serendipity, boundaried space, open time, co-created teaching and learning, immersive dwelling, whole person attention and Place-Based Education. In presenting this pedagogical web, it is important to point out that that none of these strands are unique to residential education because each can be ‘delivered’ at city-based campuses; although there may well be questions over the extent to which this actually does happen or could happen. What makes these strands unique is when they are considered not as separate but together, as an interconnected web. In fact, there are far more than the seven strands we have developed here. For example, more strands could be developed from the theories of transdisciplinarity or ideas based on nature as teacher, community participation, and so on. But also the precise intersection between any one strand, together with any other, would produce a much larger and more compelling web. For these reasons, the pedagogical web we have developed here should be considered for its illustrative purposes only as it currently remains work in progress. However, what might it illustrate in its present state?

Teaching to transgress is a term famously coined by bell hooks (1994) and a term we have borrowed here. She used the term to draw attention to intersections. She saw that to do otherwise would simply reinforce the separation, isolation and marginalisation of issues that affected class, race and gender, and then reduce them to someone else’s problems. For universities, she advocated a form of ‘engaged pedagogy’ based on intersections—not just things in isolation, not just content knowledge, not just staff-student relationships, not just places of learning, and not just teaching methods. For her the essential nature of education was characterised by the lived experience, and this is the reason we have articulated our residential education work through a web of relations.

In one sense, to transgress means to break rules and many people feel the need to do this through climate marches, nature demonstrations and other forms of civil disobedience. But to transgress also means to move beyond. In terms of the climate and nature emergencies universities could be doing much more in this respect to challenge Old Power values to ‘change the root metaphor of higher education’ (Kinchin, 2023), and experiment with new ways of doing teaching, learning and research. A major purpose of residential education in this (re)incorporation phase is for staff and students on their return to actively challenge, disrupt, liberate and transgress institutional boundaries.

Sterling (2022) has optimistically suggested that ‘universities have unrivalled capacity to shape the values, knowledge, skills and research that are crucial to a society in transition to a low carbon and safe future, and many are making critically important contributions towards this end’. Lissovoy (2011) has stated that ‘in moments of transition, education becomes a staging ground, or experimental space, for larger democratic projects’.

Residential education centres could be one of those experimental spaces while operating as a satellite of the university. This semi-autonomous satellite model can be designed as a place to take risks, risks that can be managed differently than at home institutions because of their semi-autonomous status and smaller scale. A residential education centre can then become a place of experimentation and limit testing, a site of transgression. As a satellite it could be based on New Power values that are more participatory, flexible and dynamic than those associated with Old Power institutions. A residential education centre based on ecological first principles in its design and functions could then provide reciprocity—whatever works is fed back into the home institution to help reimagine it.

In support of the three-phase model we have presented, Hensley (2019) in referring to higher education, has stated:

when theorists and practitioners recognize the transformational potential embedded within reflection, a shift of theory and pedagogy can take place. This shift of pedagogy becomes more significant when experience is situated within the framework of a rite of passage.

The climate and nature emergencies are not going to wait for a cosy organisational transition from Old Power to New Power values. It might not be possible to move directly or quickly from Old Power values to a post-capitalist, post-colonial, post-patriarchal, Polyphonic (de Sousa, 2021) or Ecological (Barnett, 2017) university, but residential centres as described here could be used as a stepping stone towards those ends. What we are advocating for in this paper is a 21^st century re-enlightenment project for higher education. To develop residential centres as places of transgression that make contributions to learning, teaching, scholarship, knowledge exchange and building a sense of community. To do this we need to be imaginative, courageous, moral and radical, because this is what our times require. Teaching to transgress through residential education is a pedagogical approach and learning context that requires more attention from university managers, educators and researchers. For this to happen, there needs to be investment in university estates to develop residential education centres that operate as semi-autonomous educational satellites of their parent universities—places that are intentionally more participatory, flexible and dynamic in their approaches to teaching and learning.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robbie Nicol

Robbie Nicol is Professor of Place-Based Education at the University of Edinburgh.

Pete Higgins

Pete Higgins is Professor of Outdoor, Environmental, and Sustainability Education at the University of Edinburgh.

Notes

1. We would like to thank Anna Shockley, one of our 2023–24 Masters students for coming up with this term during a conversation in a residential setting which was itself serendipitous. In a moment of ‘downtime’ from planned teaching activity Anna was sitting on a stairwell looking out of the window painting a water-colour of the landscape. Robbie passed by and stopped to admire what Anna was doing and she kindly stopped painting for an informal, unplanned chat.

2. Separation in this context happens when students and staff depart their city-based campus and travel to a residential education centre at a distance from the parent institution.