Copyright © 2024 Hedge School
Site design by NLF
Hedge School seeks to recover, reconnect & restore our relationship with kith & kin. We aim to replenish cultural, environmental & personal resilience through traditional skills, plant work & unruly education.
We do this by facilitating immersive & connective experiences for adults. Hedge School specializes in delivering this work within marginalized, poor communities. Our organization has been nurtured from a belief that reconnecting with land is a means of recovery. Reconnecting to our bodies & the land through traditional skills, plant work & education has & can support us in recovering & restoring our health & the health of our lands. We hold great respect for our ancestors & believe that in relearning traditional practices we can collectively find sustainable, dynamic resolutions to complex problems. Hedge School envisages a future where communities are fed, in both a literal & symbolic sense. We envisage a future where we are supported by our communities, communities where humans hold a reverence for place & see themselves as interconnected beings with respect for kith & kin.
We are deeply concerned about the health of our planet & all its kin. We recognise that the polycrisis does not have one solution. The polycrisis is an interwoven mesh of yesterdays & tomorrows. Decisions & behaviors that are layered throughout time. We recognise that the polycrisis is imbued with those in power, with the makers of decisions that are so entrenched within the cultural scripts of growth & profit that they have forgotten they too are creatures, whom without Earth cannot survive. We recognise at Hedge School that all we have, all we ever have is one day at a time. We recognise that there are things we cannot change; to focus energies on what we cannot change distracts us from what we can, what is possible. Indeed this is part of the collective malaise, the drive toward apathy.
What we recognise at Hedge School & what we have spent over a decade thinking & inhabiting is this: Systems change starts with the body. It starts with the senses. It starts with the Self. It first starts within us, as living, breathing organisms, within the framework of our thoughts & our perceptions. The mess out there, is in part an exteriorisation of our own embodied violence, a conditioning that has been largely unconscious & distilled throughout centuries of oppression. Developing awareness of our bodies, of our senses, of our thoughts & perceptions can offer an antidote by means of enlivening & re-animating us. Change can start with one touch. One meeting. One decision. One conversation…if & when we are willing.
The actions that we choose to take at Hedge School are;
As a human I am part of nature. My body is nature. I am not separate from it. Similarly, Hedge School is part of an interwoven, multi-contextual community of beings. As humans, as mammals we can’t avoid the trace we leave on the planet.
However, at Hedge School we strive to minimize these impacts as much as possible, within the restrictions placed upon us by finance & budget. We try & tend to regenerative & reciprocal interactions between place & planet, rather than extractive, thoughtless actions. Through our own recovery, we have come to see that engaging with earth has offered many opportunities for learning & insight. Engaging meaningfully has offered many opportunities to connect. Connections that invoke a sense of responsibility to protect the places we inhabit, to give back what has been given.
We want our practices to be regenerative & reciprocal, to be aligned with those practices outlined in the “honorable harvest” by indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer:
“Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Take only what you need and leave some for others.
Use everything that you take.
Take only that which is given to you.
Share it, as the Earth has shared with you.
Be grateful. Reciprocate the gift.
Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever”
Hedge School is part of an interwoven, multi-contextual community of beings, like the moss or the river. Hedge School is part of a thriving ecosystem of other organizations, people & places. We have learnt over the last decade that approaching the earth through a lens of scarcity fuels a desire to hoard & to dominate. But, through traditional skills such as foraging we have come to see we are offered much of what we need by Earth. Approaching the system through a lens of abundance invokes a desire to support, co-operate & collaborate. It invokes a desire to celebrate oneanother’s accomplishments in whatever way we are able. Hedge School practices an approach of abundance. Partnering & collaborating with other organizations whose work & ethics are aligned with our own.
We would hope when people book onto our courses, it's because they’ve done so of their own volition & intuition. When people join us, we want to offer an experience that feels communal, immersive, connective. We want to share a culture that is & feels in relationship with the natural world. With that, our intention here isn’t to be the most profitable or the best. We're here to learn in community as community. We do not want to create an empire. What we want is to give back what has been given. We want to offer transformational, immersive experiences that contribute to the recovery, reconnection & restoration of relationships, personal growth & the development of traditional skills & knowledge.
Without technology, most of the folks who know about this work wouldn’t. Without technology we wouldn’t be able to follow the many inspiring writers & thinkers. We wouldn’t be able to connect with people across lands, across seas. We wouldn’t be able to collaborate with others as easily or as readily. Technology can be a space for the radical reclamation of the commons. We are very thankful for this.
However, when we’re in the woods, or on a walk, or in a learning space, we would prefer it if you left your technology elsewhere, at least out of the periphery of your attention. All day everyday our lives are infused with tech, from emails to phone-calls, to whatsapp. We are constantly bombarded. There are many people, who have never in their lifetimes, occupied a space that technology doesn’t also inhabit. Research shows this has a monumental impact on our physical & emotional health. With that we really do encourage you to go the day or the weekend without tech on your person. That being said, we do respect the needs of participants & should you need to keep devices on your person we ask & invite you to do so in a manner that doesn’t disrupt the needs of those who wish to be immersed in a space without tech.
Without play we don’t learn. Play is integral to the way many species learn to be in this world & humans are no exception. At Hedge School, we believe that unstructured ‘free play’ is integral to the recovery of our personal & collective health. Play is necessary for the development of stronger, longer-lasting neural pathways in our brains. Healthy play as adults can help us to re-socialise & restore relationships that are generative & life supporting. As Gregory says, play is the establishment & exploration of relationships. Relationships are what sustain any thriving ecosystem & without relationships the ecosystem suffers. The same applies to us. Unstructured play can harness our richest & deepest learning when we feel safe enough to give ourselves permission. At Hedge School we give priority to unstructured time in nature & creative activities. This is a foundational element of our pedagogy at Hedge School. Through unstructured play we encourage learners to develop a relationship with their senses, to come into dialogue with their bodies & to gain confidence in navigating a time-space that abstains from expectations or impositions.
“Play is the establishment & exploration of relationship” - Gregory Bateson
At Hedge School we practice an awareness that behaviour is often an expression of a need. With that, we do not label or view behaviour as ‘bad’ or ‘good’. We recognise that folks have different ways of expressing needs & people are generally trying their best with what they’ve got. At Hedge School we practice Non-Violent Communication, we seek to identify unmet needs through welcoming & accepting conversations, lovingly meeting needs & helping individuals to communicate their needs in safer, more open ways.
As an organization that has been birthed from a working-class poor community, cultural & economic accessibility is everything to us. This isn’t something that we try & incorporate into the way we do things. It’s at the heart of Hedge School. The gulf between capital light communities & capital heavy communities is currently the greatest it’s ever been. Such times need be met with unruly interventions. With that, Hedge School’s intention is to pollinate marginalized, poor communities with the skills & knowledge they were severed from. Hedge School’s intention is to fertilize the soil of psyche within these communities with a desire to recover, reconnect & restore their relationship to kith & kin, with land & community. And in doing so, tend to the premise that community is rebellion. Community is defiance. Hedge School is partnered with NHS Recovery Colleges, Kcrasac- Kirklees Rape & Sexual Assault Charity & Creative Recovery.
Within these organizations Hedge School delivers funded courses for participants to engage with practices & disciplines that would otherwise be closed to them. Our most recent project is the Public Health England’s ‘Things to Live For’ project, whose aim is to explore innovative, dynamic interventions to suicide. Alongside this, Hedge School courses are offered on a sliding scale, with scholarship places available. We offer donation-based & free classes across the community & seek funding sources to help us run courses in other more remote areas. At Hedge School we try & make all our classes accessible by Public Transport & in the event this isn’t possible, we arrange car-shares & lifts amongst participants.
In a culture that has lost & largely forgotten its own cultural practices, we find ourselves in a time-place where extracting other peoples feels acceptable. Hedge School recognises that many of the nature-based practices we hold in the West today are actually practices shared by indigenous peoples. Hedge School is very cautious about reproducing this extraction. The why, what & how we teach is something we take great care in. It’s one of the reasons we are cultivating our own pedagogy & research on ‘Recovering the Ecological Body’ here at Hedge School. Yorkshire & indeed England has a rich cultural heritage in the form of regional dialects, myths, folklore, music, dance & crafts. It's our job at Hedge School to reinvigorate our collective past, to reimagine our ceremonies & to re-member ourselves into an ecology of place that holds reverence for our own dreaming.
At Hedge School we want to create spaces that feel accepting & welcoming to all people, where no one feels unfairly judged, accused or discriminated against. We do not & will not discriminate against class, race, colour, religion, gender, gender expression, age, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, military status. These activities include, but aren’t limited to the provision of services. We are committed to curating welcoming, accepting environments for all the folks who engage with Hedge School & the work we do here.
We will adhere to legal requirements & acceptable best practices. At Hedge School we dedicate a lot of time to research & learning & pledge that we will keep up to date on environmental, legal, professional & safety matters. We will do our best to share knowledge that promotes awareness & respect of Earth. We will respect the responsibilities of other institutions & professions who engage with the research of this work.
Copyright © 2024 Hedge School
Site design by NLF
