Into the Wild

Wilderness Education as a Transformative Approach to ESD

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_23How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Education for Sustainability; SDGs; Transformative Learning; Wilderness Camp; Wilderness Education

Abstract

A variety of approaches to implementing the concept of education for sustainable development (ESD) now exist. These approaches are thematically dedicated to the SDGs and establish transformative forms of teaching and learning. One such approach is wilderness education, which ties in with the widely discussed topic of wilderness in terms of content and addresses issues relating to core problems of global change, the future and human–environment relationships, as well as sustainable development. Alongside national park-specific approaches, wilderness education can be considered a facet of ESD from an institutional educational perspective. The topic of wilderness provides numerous starting points for reflecting on one’s own and society’s ways of life through personal wilderness experiences. Areas such as national parks, near-natural river meadows, developed or undeveloped urban wastelands, old railway stations or factory sites, and urban forests can be used as learning opportunities for wilderness education in the context of ESD, as can a ‘wild corner’ in a garden, city parks, and schoolyards. Spending time in wild or semi-wild areas enables various target groups to step outside their comfort zones by visiting protected areas (e.g. national parks), as well as suburban or urban spaces with corresponding wilderness features. This allows them to analyse these spaces and reflect on their own lives. A key element of wilderness education is the wilderness camp, which provides participants with a central community and a safe space. This article presents wilderness education as a holistic approach to ESD and transformative learning, discussing its potential and challenges.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Anne-Kathrin Lindau
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/08/23
TI  - Into the Wild
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference of Growing up the Future: Education for Sustainability (GROUFES 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 263
EP  - 273
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_23
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-760-6_23
ID  - Lindau2026
ER  -