Wild Design for Learning Moving Mental Models from the Factory to the Forest

Part 1: The Why of Wild Design  1. Factory to the Forest  2. Wild Design  Part 2: The What of Wild Design  3. Symmetry  4. Spirals  5. Waves  6. Bubbles  7. Fractures  8. Fractals  9. Dynamics  Part 3: The How of Wild Design  10. Weaving it Together

Biography

Gwyneth Hagan is the founder of Design to Learn Consulting, where she supports mission-driven organizations in reimaging how people learn and work together. She holds a Master’s Degree in Adult Learning and Organizational Development and brings more than 20 years of experience in education and nonprofit leadership as a teacher, coach, consultant, and learning designer. She lives in Virginia, where she enjoys writing and walking in the woods with her family and dog, Bean.

Praise for Wild Design for Learning:

“Gwyneth Hagan—a unique educator, scholar, and poet—offers us a fresh and compelling vision to exchange our rigid frameworks for a constellation of natural metaphors and practices, guiding us toward more fulfilling and productive professional and personal lives.”

—Ron Berger, Senior Advisor at EL Education, Author of An Ethic of Excellence, & Leaders of Their Own Learning

"Hagan asks a question our field rarely sits with: what if learning were a relationship with the living world, not a process to optimize? Wild Design for Learning answers with abundance, relationship, adaptation, and renewal — the conditions learning needs to thrive. Her argument is simple and radical: learning is not a product to deliver but an ecosystem to tend. Wild Design for Learning offers educators and leaders the language for that work and the courage to try it."

—Aylon Samouha, CEO at Transcend, Author Extraordinary Learning For All

“Gwyneth Hagan has been the best kind of intellectual friend to me - the kind whose thinking is so different from mine that I've grown immensely as a thinker and a human being. In Wild Design for Learning, she extends that gift to all of us, inviting us to reimagine learning through the wonder and wisdom of nature and reminding us of what we keep forgetting: we are nature.

In an age of artificial intelligence and technological acceleration, Wild Design grounds us in what endures. It returns us to ourselves - not as machines to be optimized, but as living systems learning the way nature learns.”

—Lori Batista McEwen, Ph.d, Executive Director, What Schools Could Be

“When Gwyneth calls Wild Design for Learning a 'how-might'' book rather than a 'how-to' manual, she's right. It's also a campfire story, inviting us--beckoning us--into the woods to gather with groups of educators to find our ways into our instinctual stories of beautiful, whole learning -- and to take that journey along its many braided paths that begin as all things, small like a spiral, with a next step into the forest.”

—Becca Katz, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Good Natured Learning

“As we look around for what comes next as educators, leaders, and people who want a healthy, happy, and hopeful future, Wild Design for Learning offers us a map with deeply researched theory, artful design, and practical protocols for cultivating learning communities that flourish.

Gwyneth Hagan has created an opportunity for everyone to not only think differently about what our learning ecosystems look like, but a chance to feel hope and act with intention.” 

—Chris Widmaier, Educator and Executive Director of Rochester Ecology Partners

"Wild Design for Learning offers exactly the mental model shift education needs: away from rigid, mechanistic systems and toward learning environments that are adaptive, relational, and alive. Gwyneth Hagan has written a generous and imaginative guide for anyone ready to design learning differently."

—Jeff Wetzler, co-founder of Transcend and author of Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You