Space to Step Back and Think Anew: A Pupil Referral Unit and A Forest School

Within the neoliberal education system, market forces and associated performativity pressures percolate and thrive, foregrounding individualism and competition and pushing aside concerns around social justice, thereby fuelling educational inequalities, marginalisation and exclusion. Against this backdrop, marginalised students urgently need to find safe spaces and places, moments and possibilities, to see themselves anew. In order to be transformative, these spaces need to be away from the pressures of the mainstream classroom, where these students have been stigmatised and labelled as inadequate, slow learners, poor students, failures or trouble-makers. Our research explores the possibilities of one such place and moment, where experienced mentors at a Forest School, work with a small group of excluded students from a Pupil Referral Unit in a deprived urban area, to tackle their disengagement, marginalisation and exclusion from school. The students take part in various hands-on, practical activities outdoors, weeding, digging and climbing, as well as sharing chores, building fires and preparing food together. Working alongside each other for extended periods of time, mentor and mentee can gradually engage in dialogue, without being penned in and constrained, and hence can begin to explore disquieting, unsettling and discomforting experiences. Pedagogies of discomfort and critical pedagogies, argue that transformation and the raising of critical consciousness begin with questioning, critiquing and dialogue, to read the world - and your place in it - anew and see that things could indeed be otherwise. Here, students can begin to see their histories, educational trajectories and contexts as part of a wider struggle, making connections between the individual and the social, the private and the public. Through so doing, they can begin their journey to seeing themselves differently, as learners and as part of the wider community. This research offers a site of critical hope for others to draw from.