The Headwaters Philosophy
Flourishing of the individual in community
Our Purpose
Our Aim
Founded on the belief that a meaningful relationship with the natural world is necessary for both the future of the planet and for a flourishing human life, we bring together philosophy, education, and wilderness experiences to address the most pressing challenges of our time and, in the process, come to know a life fully lived.
Our Mission & Strategy
Be at the forefront of environmental philosophy and education, advancing a movement – through research and practice – to weave the values of wild nature into the foundation of educational systems, bringing about an environmentally moral education.
Intentionally integrate the pillars of research-based Development, Practice (Implementation), and Dissemination within our engagement in – and advancement of – the study of how to best conduct environmentally moral education.
Live such environmentally moral education in practice, bringing it about in the world through the creation and facilitation of meaningful, wilderness-based programs.
Our Practice & Actions
We achieve our aim by implementing our mission and strategy in two ways:
1) Program facilitation in numerous capacities.
2) Research, development, implementation, and educational partnerships.
Our program facilitation includes Wilderness Voyages, Field Philosophy, School & Youth programs, professional development for Teachers & Educators, programs for Organizations, NGOs, Businesses, & Non-Profits, and Community Programs.
Our research, development, implementation, and educational partnerships are conducted through our Headwaters Institute initiative, through which we regularly present at conferences, publish unique research, and conduct research projects both ourselves and in partnership with others.
More than just a wilderness trip, our programs for youth, adults, educators, schools, and organizations aim to build good people. People who care deeply, who act intently, and who know the full richness of life. The conditions, we find, which enable this vibrancy of human experience are a relationship with nature and a relationship with community.
Technological Foundations of Our Practice
All humans use technologies, even ones as seemingly natural as language and clothing. However, no technologies are neutral: all shape (either consciously or subconsciously) what we are enabled or disabled and encouraged or discouraged from thinking and doing. The same holds true for education. Before an educational programs even begins, the technologies being utilized have shaped, and will continually re-shape, not only the outcome, but also the possibilities of what can or cannot be learned.
As such, at Headwaters we take our technological choices very seriously. Four foundational mediating technologies, or lack thereof, shape our practice. Each one was chosen based on extensive field research into their educational impacts.
Natural Time
By removing all time-keeping devices from our programs, we escape the ordering power of mechanical time, enabling us to connect with the natural time under which all other living beings still exist.
Relational Transportation
Utilizing modes of transportation which only work by being in self-propelled harmony with the land and water through which they travel (such as canoes, snowshoes, and cross-country skis), we enable a relationality that is not possible when travelling via the domination and brute force of cars, planes, and other motorized vehicles.
Unplugging to Re-Connect
There are no digital devices permitted in our programs. This enables us to be present in the relationships of the real world. In an age turning further away from the real in favour of the digital, the opportunity to focus on the present moment and turn toward the near-in of life is a rare gift.
Harmonious Shelter
The story being told by most modern shelter is that nature ought to be escaped from. Shelters which are relational to natural conditions (such as quinzhees, tents, and winter clothing) shelter us for rather than from the wilderness, counteracting this moral lesson. Providing an alternative story, these forms of shelter necessitate living in harmony – adapting one's needs to the natural surroundings, rather than re-constructing the surroundings to fit one's needs.
Starting Point
We start from two premises:
1. Humans are born into relationships not only with each other, but with all nature. Yet we have, to a large degree, severed these relationships, leading to a pervasive alienation from the planet and its living beings. This alienation is a primary cause of the environmental annihilation (warming climate, mass extinction, ocean death, omnipresent pollution, and habitat destruction all threatening the very survival of life) reigned so ruthlessly upon the Earth. We need to get back to nature, not merely through rhetoric, but materially as well. Education plays a foundational part in this. As such, Headwaters must necessarily be a wilderness-based program.
2. There is work to be done in thinking about nature-based educational philosophy, and in enacting nature-based pedagogy. Headwaters seeks to merge these together, recognizing that educational philosophy and pedagogy – thinking and acting – are opposite banks of the same river: the foundation which gives education its direction. Remove one or the other, and the water spills out, directionless and adrift.
Thus, the aim of the Headwaters Wilderness Program is to develop and implement the educational philosophy and pedagogy needed in the Anthropocene. To practice education for the present time, aimed at the long-term.
Philosophy: A River's Direction
We are interested in educating for how to be in the world, as that is what all education fundamentally is. Foundationally, we believe, following Thoreau, that in the long run one can only achieve what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. To this end, we are interested in producing, disseminating, and re-producing (in a word: educating for) ways of being and modes of living aimed toward the mutual flourishing of all living beings on the planet.
In our aim to develop and implement educational philosophy and pedagogy for the Anthropocene, we seek an education which provides for communities of mutual flourishing for all living beings. However, our philosophy is not set, as long-term needs are always changing; we have a direction, but not a prescribed path. It is a wild process, enlivened and free. We intentionally seek to engage as the Headwaters community in producing and re-producing our values and actions, forming them into a practice.
Our name – Headwaters Wilderness Program – is a reflection of this. We aim to be the headwaters – the starting point – for a watershed of educational change that forms and adapts itself to the landscape down stream, influenced by the characteristics of each local tributary joining-in along the way, and influencing those tributaries in return.
Pedagogy: A Nature-Based Community Education
Headwaters is a philosophical wilderness education program, a small but devoted group of nature philosophers and educators. We are guided by the idea that if we concern ourselves firstly with education – not that of the teaching of knowledge, but of discovering the wisdom of how to live – then surely there is nothing we cannot achieve. To this end, there are three essential components to how we enact pedagogy – how we practice education.
1. In our programs, we foster resiliency. To be resilient is to have the capacity to aim toward the highest virtues, to work toward the highest goals. For when aiming high material failure is likely, but in aiming low moral failure is assured. Too often lost in our time of continual acceleration and present-mindedness, the ability to aim high over the long-term, even in the face of present failure, is a foundational capacity not only for individuals to live well, but for building good societies. As the core of moral character, the pedagogy of Headwaters centres on resiliency, empowering individuals and communities to ask themselves: what is worth doing, even if you fail?
2. The educator is an orchestrator. A conductor whose role is to discover the inherent wisdom within their ensemble and to let that wisdom sing. Doing so, importantly, in a way which brings out the communal joy of the experience, for a world lacking in joy is an impoverished world indeed. The educator finds out what the students want to do (even if the students themselves have not yet realized it), and enables, but never spoon-feeds, their endeavours, bringing to light the discoveries which the students themselves uncovered. Allowing (indeed, rejoicing) in challenge and failure, while subtly illuminating new ways of thinking and acting, the educator enables the students' self-willed discovery of how to live.
3. What justifies the teacher-student relationship, wherein the teacher possesses authority to dictate educational happenings while the students are subordinates? Finding relationships based in power imbalances to be unjustified, we re-position it as a wisdom relationship: the educator is responsible for facilitating the program as they hold particular wisdom which they seek to help others acquire (much as a sports coach possesses particular wisdom regarding the playing of a particular sport). Education being reciprocal, we find that there are many instances in which those in our programs (kids and adults alike), and those we encounter along the way (chickadees, butterflies, beavers, jack pines, starry nights, rainy days, and the wind in the trees), are the ones with much wisdom to share. When those opportunities arise, the role of educator beautifully emerges within them, unrestrained by hierarchies. Set free from the teacher-student power relationship, education finds itself a facilitator of reciprocal wisdom, taking its direction from myriad co-teachers; for to engage in education is as equally to learn as it is to teach.
Joy, Care, Wonder, Awe, and Respect
Our core values inform everything we do. As an organization, we seek to live by and instill the values of joy, care, wonder, awe, and respect for the wilderness with which we travel, the human and nonhuman communities with which we connect, and ourselves.
All values have attendant virtues of action – ways in which we act in order to achieve the values. For us, those are coming to deeply know, caring for, and playfully living with wilderness, human and nonhuman communities, and ourselves. By designing our program around these virtues, we enable the conditions for ourselves and our participants to learn and come to live a life of care, wonder, awe, and respect for themselves and the world around them. In so doing, our hope is that the world is made just a little bit better of a place.
Joy | in the immediate: a feeling of elation, happiness, and pleasure in our current experience; in the long-term: a comforting contentment in life, bringing a sense of safety and abiding satisfaction from the feelings of one's experiences
Care | a genuine concern for not only the welfare, but also the flourishing, of both other life and ourselves; a feeling of holding safe and being held
Wonder | a deep curiosity for all that is around us, and a feeling that what is around us matters
Awe | a sense of amazement for the world in which we live; a recognition of the sublime (a majesty beyond rationalization) in grand vistas and the smallest critters alike
Respect | a feeling of duty regarding the sanctity of wilderness, human and nonhuman others, and ourselves to be self-willed (to be wild) toward flourishing
Coming to deeply know | an attentive, prolonged engagement such that we wholly come to know wilderness, human and nonhuman others, and ourselves
Caring for | once known, the enacting of care in ways which enable each particular being and community to flourish
Playfully living with | a continual process of living with wilderness, human and nonhuman communities, and ourselves in a manner which celebrates the joyful playfulness only found in loving relationships
Program Development – The Headwaters Approach
The Headwaters Wilderness Program is an educational organization guided by the purpose of developing, implementing, and practicing education for the present time, aimed toward the long-term. Centred around enabling entwined relationships with nature and with community, we view thoughtful wilderness travel as an ideal medium for a wild, flourishing education. To this end, Headwaters runs intentional wilderness trips and, taking lessons from these experiences, also creates and facilitates local programs for school groups, organizations, and teacher professional development, bringing the teachings of the wilderness home with us to our domesticated places and human communities.
"[Self-propelled wilderness travel] should promote feelings of belonging to the place, of experiencing its hospitality, first as a guest and later as a full member of the household in that place"
~ Bert Horwood,
Tasting the Berries: Deep Ecology and Experiential Education, 1991