Kanina Holmes

Abstract

This research note offers early observations, questions, and ideas about relationality in journalism by considering engagement and collaboration with the more than human. Building on the notion that we are earthly creatures rather than observers of earth (Abram, 1996), this note riffs off recent fieldwork and emerging scholarship, playing with a theory of practice in education known as wild pedagogies (Jickling et al., 2018; Blenkinsop et al., 2022; Blenkinsop & Fettes, 2020). Wild pedagogies invite disruption to education and, by extension, to journalism as a close sister of education. In wanting to re-wild education, wild pedagogies also provoke the potential to wild journalism, to reframe and re-story journalistic narratives, ethics, and to recreate and reimagine journalistic norms and practices.-based research.

Keywords: wild pedagogies, more than human, journalism pedagogy, Yukon, journalism norms

Résumé

La présente note de recherche contient des observations préliminaires, des questions et des réflexions sur la relationnalité dans le journalisme par l’angle de l’engagement et de la collaboration avec le « plus qu’humain ». S’appuyant sur l’idée que nous sommes des êtres terrestres plutôt que de simples observateurs de la terre (Abram, 1996), la présente note s’inspire de travaux de terrain récents et de travaux universitaires émergents et joue avec une théorie de la pratique en éducation connue sous le nom de « pédagogies sauvages » (wild pedagogies) (Jickling et coll., 2018 ; Blenkinsop et coll., 2022 ; Blenkinsop et Fettes, 2020). Les pédagogies sauvages introduisent des disruptions au sein de l’éducation et, par extension, du journalisme (à titre de discipline étroitement liée à l’éducation). Par la réintroduction du « sauvage » dans l’éducation, les pédagogies sauvages offrent également l’occasion d’introduire du « sauvage » dans le journalisme ; de recadrer et de revoir les récits et l’éthique journalistiques, de même que de recréer et de réimaginer les normes et pratiques du journalisme.

Mots-clés : pédagogies sauvages; plus qu’humain; pédagogie du journalisme; Yukon; normes journalistiques

Research note | Note de recherche

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Wilding journalism: Up a creek and searching for a paddle

Kanina Holmes

 

Conceptual roots, curiosities, and context

As a first dip, this research note focuses on asking questions, on wonder, and wondering. Wilding journalism is, by nature, slow, iterative journalism. This work is currently cocooning. The vignettes below offer glimpses. I take heart and hints from a theory of practice known as wild pedagogies (Jickling et al., 2018, Blenkinsop et al., 2022) that rethinks education and relationality in several ways. The touchstones of wild pedagogies include: nature as co-teacher; complexity, the unknown and spontaneity; locating the wild; cultural change, alliance and community building; learning that is loving, caring, compassionate and imaginative (Jickling et al., 2018).

Wild pedagogies urge educators to be in the world, to venture beyond the structures of traditional schooling and outside the constructs of classrooms. A desire to categorize this enterprise might lead one to label wild pedagogies as experiential learning or outdoor education. A similar urge to describe this work in the realm of journalism might lead to calling this nature writing or environmental reportage. While these notions are a good start—it should go without saying that we need to venture outside—I hope this research can build on and take journalism and journalism education beyond much current thinking and practice, transforming story ideation, sourcing, forms, ethics, relationships, and responsibilities. This work takes place at a time of emerging policy and jurisprudence—Canadian and international—granting protections and inherent rights of personhood, under law, of natural habitats, including caribou and rivers (Choiniere, 2025; Dioré de Périgny & Tessier-Burns, 2026; Greene, 2026).

My research mucks around (in a mud-between-toes way) and meanders in a watershed, wildlife, and First Nations traditional travel corridor called Chasàn Chùa (McIntyre Creek), situated in Whitehorse, Yukon. It encompasses an ecosystem that’s adapting, moving, evolving, supporting. It’s now a place under pressure—a growing northern town expanding unexpectedly quickly, replete with roads, homes, pipes, vibrations, traffic, and contested hierarchies of use. In June, 2025, the territorial government designated Chasàn Chùa a 36-square-kilometre protected area, a park, collaboratively managed by the Yukon, municipal, and First Nation—Kwanlin Dün and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council—governments.

In journalism education, we often urge students to reveal larger lessons by starting with a tight frame. We talk about the power of specificity. We also seek out the tension in stories, part of a suite of narrative practices and values we convey to emerging reporters. That friction, though, is narrowly conceptualized. What we consider as story, as knowledge, as evidence, and expertise may also miss the mark.

The land that hosts and enables my research drips in detail and the creatures feature all kinds of suspense, life-and-death jousts, cries for help, revelry, swift action, persistent growth.

On my walks and wanders in the watershed I see displays of power—an eagle plunging into a pond and extracting a slippery grayling; dynamics of negotiation—a mother squirrel hiding her brood in a dead tree’s hollow; and acts of geopolitics—a displaced Ukrainian over-foraging for mushrooms because they’ve known scarcity. A conservation group planted camera traps in this part of the boreal forest for a public education campaign a few years ago, to document and demonstrate the value of this place through the wildlife who use these paths. We are under surveillance too. What do the wild ones think about us? What if we open, adjust, and change the lens?

Creek vignette #1

The creek burbles and rushes through a criss-cross network of trails made by moose, fox, coyotes, lynx, pine martin, pine beetle, and people who come here on hooves, paws, feet, mountain bikes, skis, and snowshoes. Sometimes our paths diverge. Often, they overlap and we are none the wiser.

As I sit by the water, I think about the university ethics process, the institutional legitimization for doing work here. Humans were cared for in the documents of informed consent outlining the research ethics process and the risks participants could incur, including walking on uneven ground, dehydration, encountering wildlife. (How do members of ethics boards picture a place that’s remote to them, and everyday and home to others?).

There’s scant reference—in a multiple-page, carefully designed form—to soliciting feedback from and building reciprocity with, among others, wildflowers, ducks, squirrels, algae, and bears. And so, after receiving official ethics approval, but lacking other permissions, I do what feels appropriate and place myself creek-side to start the re-search.^[1]  

What does it mean to engage?

When we talk about and enact community-engaged journalism, how are we conceptualizing community and engagement? What if we extended our notions of relationship, interaction, and community to deeply include and consider the land on which we work and the more-than-human inhabitants who dwell there? What could unfold, what comes into question, what shifts—ontologically, epistemologically, and axiologically—if journalists acknowledged, queried, listened, and infused their work with the natural world, respecting nature—creatures, trees, winds as voices, as experts, as co-teachers and coauthors?

What if we could try to understand the inseparability of history and landscape to our labour and comprehend how land is layered, geomorphic, agentic, social, and spiritual? What if we could receive and accept an invitation to interact with the world as physical and sensory sheets, skins of information, multiple intelligences? Space for appreciation, care and agency, ways to humbly and respectfully protect, constructively co-exist and create new narratives (Kreimer, 2023), all with the constant reminder and guidance of those who came before (Donald, 2021; Weber-Pillwax, 2021).

Creek vignette #2

Sun ripens sage. Spruce breezes sing amid a slight stench of organic matter. I kneel beside a tiny tributary, state out loud my intentions and questions, ask for permission, maybe even a blessing. I promise to respect and demonstrate appreciation for the watershed where I’ve requested to do fieldwork. I dip my hands into cool water, make a cup, and attempt a self-propelled ablution. Splash face and connect creek to early-summer sweat. At that moment, as I look up at blue sky and back to cyan creek, I witness a small creature, spread-eagled and floating quickly down this squiggly section of stream. This creature drifts right past, through the water where I had, five seconds ago, sourced an informal and slightly ridiculous baptism. A vole, apparently, on a joy ride.

Heart and mind

This fieldwork probes the parallel relationship between the climate crisis and the destruction and decay of journalistic reach and journalistic storytelling. At their roots, these are wicked problems, caused and enabled by multiple arrogances and assumptions, systemic failures, and gaps in empathy and compassion. However, as audiences fragment, as journalistic storytelling frays in its frames and functions—and this is where hope (like the vole!) floats—it retains affordances to reach, attract and connect. Echo chambers grow, META extends its reach, AI hallucinates, and the membranes of communication bubbles grow more impermeable and homogeneous. Yet, there are compelling and constructive stories produced through journalism, and journalistic sensibilities and values that can inform, enlighten, question, educate, and reach beyond division (Gutsche & Hess, 2018; Mäder & Rinsdorf, 2022).

Taking a cue from the layers of the watershed and how some research has been framed, I see this research taking shape as a palimpsest (Marshall et al., 2017; Roberts & Butler, 2022). A scroll, partially erased, rewritten over many years, acknowledging and building on others’ work, creating layers of conversations. Multiple exposures, recombining to help us see in new ways. Encouraging us to take part in an ongoing process of alteration and, hopefully, renewal. Palimpsests as dynamic documentation, a key part of re-storying and creating with living texts (Styres, 2019).

Creek vignette # 3

I want to work in this area because it’s near my Yukon home. I enjoy devoting time and attention here as many days of the year as possible. As someone who’s lived many places and once dreamed of being a foreign correspondent, it’s surprising to me that I am becoming a hyper-local rapporteur—perhaps even a wild flâneur. In the process, I’m learning, maybe a bit like Alastair Humphreys (2024), that local is often so foreign and fully surprising, difficult to know and understand, and more intriguing than ever expected.

Pushing boundaries

As I consider a new set of practices, values, and connections in journalism, enacted and in scholarship, I am intrigued by how journalism is situated, how it sees itself, its functions and its dysfunctions. What are its boundaries? How flexible are the containers (Zelizer, 2017) we’ve carved around fields of knowledge, form, and structure of story? Tischauser and Benn (2019) say if journalism can be situated inside a community and if agency is attached to culture, there’s an opportunity for journalists to become “mediators and translators” (p. 130) between publics to strengthen understanding between communities.

Mainstream and legacy news organizations, journalists, and journalism educators often evoke the language and ideals of relationality in efforts to build or display public trust but without truly engaging in relationships. What gets in the way? What blocks genuine connections? One of the key tenets embedded in journalistic codes of ethics is the stance and standard of independence. In asserting and prioritizing freedom to report without influence of external forces—a hangover and fiction of objectivity—we risk missing both the forest and the trees. What if independence transitioned to interdependence? Ecology offers expansive and humbling examples and lessons of the imperatives of connections.

In thinking about how to mend rifts and strengthen relationality, I am working through the concept of collaborative intelligence, used both in journalism and ecology. Media scholar Tom Rosenstiel started writing about the notion of journalism as “collaborative intelligence” a decade ago (2015). For Rosenstiel, collaborative intelligence is contingent on technology—the capacity to find and transmit data quickly and to connect with audiences with multiple perspectives and collective experiences—and also dependent on journalists who have access to interrogate people in power, the ability to triangulate computer and networked data, and to synthesize that information into accessible narratives (Rostenstiel, 2015).

What’s missing, though, from Rosenstiel’s notion of collaborative intelligence is reference to the role of nature as an active contributor. While he refers to a news “ecosystem” (p. 11), he’s likely not thinking about tundra, wetland, prairie, forest, or freshwater or of any kind of organic connection between journalism and the more-than-human.

Educator Rebecca A. Martusewicz writes of collaborative intelligence in the context of a multi-year project she worked on, alongside community members, to clean up a deteriorating neighbourhood in Detroit. She saw relationships growing out of and nurturing a “collaborative intelligence,” necessary to human cultures and all living systems (Martusewicz, 2009). She also saw the emergence of a set of practices, relationships, and accompanying language patterns that manifested as the cultural and environmental commons and offered a way into recognizing human dependence on and interaction with such a system of intelligence. She was working with a pedagogy that pays attention to community wellbeing, among humans as well as between humans and a wide range of denizens.

What would journalism look like, how could it be practiced with a more expansive conceptualization of collaborative intelligence? What sorts of practices, relationships and languages could emerge? What if collaboration could expand an understanding of what journalism could be when connected to land and an expanded conceptualization of community?

The “what if” of wild

Wilding journalism beckons to a re-storying. As Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013, p. 9) writes, acknowledging the work of Gary Nathan, re-storying is a form of “re-story-ation,” alongside ecological, cultural, and social restoration. “Our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them?” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 9).

Dynamics and obligations of relationship are central to wild pedagogies and could also be to wild journalisms. In her work on land as pedagogy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson highlights voice, consent, self-determination, kindness and love as key elements (Simpson 2014). When I think about re-story-ation and restoration in the context of journalistic storytelling, it’s not to rebuild something back to what it once was, a misplaced sense of nostalgia about what some may see as glory days of journalism. I see potential for a paradigmatic shift, characterized by some journalists and journalism scholars as nothing short of a reckoning in practices and in relationships (Callison & Young, 2020).

Other questions that emerge: If wild implies untamed and unconstrained, what happens with relationality when we consider responsibilities, when wildness nudges up against and releases rituals, standards, ethical codes, and uproots newsrooms and legacy-media cultures? How do we work, constructively, with, against and beyond these tensions? Could responses and reactions become some of the necessary labours of reconciliation with land, the more than human, and each other?

Wild pedagogies aspire for education to catalyze cultural change (Morse et al., 2018). They call out extractions and hierarchies embedded and perpetuated by colonialism. Its advocates emphasize the urgency of the environmental crisis and the role of education and educational reform in preparing students for an uncertain future that will require information, insight, aptitudes, and empathies that status quo schooling does not seem capable of providing (Morse et al., 2018).

Schmidt (2022) adds dimension and implicates wild pedagogy in a more overtly political project, acknowledging formative work in critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), and through notions of queer space and time (Tongson, 2011). Schmidt argues that explicitly considering ongoing ideologies and impacts of settler colonialism and its imprints on place, we can more clearly grapple with human-caused environmental harm, as well relationships with place, land, water and the more-than-human (Schmidt, 2022).

As I learn more about wild pedagogies and ruminate on how/whether wild approaches to teaching and learning could be initiated and adapted to other fields, like journalism, I feel curious, excited and uncertain. The land and landscape, physically and politically, moves beneath our feet.

Creek vignette #4

“I’m not a biologist. I’m not a naturalist. I have a ton to learn, to know if a tree is speaking to me or what it’s saying or what it’s communicating. But we’re not really attuned to that. I think it also cuts so close to the fine line between, like, facts and fiction. The second you give something that can’t speak a voice, you’re creating a fantasy, in a sense. It’s a fantasy for a purpose, and that purpose might be grounded in reality, but nonetheless, you’ve now left fact, and you are firmly in fiction.

– Andrew (journalist and research participant)

 My fieldwork launches with invitations to several people to walk with me around the watershed where the creek lives. On some of these ambles, my translators and interpreters are artists, First Nation citizens, scientists, environmentalists, fellow journalists (some are former students). Their identities, perspectives, and ideas shape the palimpsest. I ask what they notice and hear and smell and feel as we walk. I wonder how they might story and support and speak to, with, through this place. Active imagining. Tentative and speculative, which, as the above quote from Andrew—a journalist and one of my research participants—suggests, is extremely problematic to journalism. This needs to be troubled.

Wild journalism connects with any journalism educator and any journalist who’s ever felt stuck inside a classroom or newsroom, anticipating the moment they can depart from a hermetically sealed office and step outdoors. Onto a sidewalk. Onto grass. Through a puddle. With a strong desire to simply, appreciatively, and deeply breathe, whatever the weather. I’ve started sending students outdoors to find story ideas by spending 20 minutes beside the Rideau, the river that runs beside the building where I teach at Carleton. It encourages them to connect dots, ducks, water, fish, policy, and change, etc.

In The Journalism Manifesto, Zelizer et al. (2022) have a come-to-Jesus conversation with journalism. It’s time, these long-time journalism and communication scholars say, to change or die, to help or hinder.

“Before it’s too late and journalism as we know it vanishes into thin air, we need to rethink and reimagine the environment in which journalism resides to better envision a more productive link to the world around it. In other words, we need to recouple the conditions in the imagination with the conditions on the ground.” (Zelizer et al., 2022 p. 23).

These authors aren’t explicitly referring to the natural world. That’s where my work and, I’m sure, the work of others will one day flow. Wild journalism could take many forms. Maybe it’s in the story of a farmer who becomes emotional and talks about having a dialogue with the bats she’s trying to save from wind turbines (Segal, 2025). Perhaps it’s in acknowledging the trembling aspens in a community’s firebreak. While I’m not ready to prescribe or define, I feel there are currents that run through wild journalism, an energy that could change the way we teach, our prompts and perspectives, how we work, what we consider “stories,” what we value, what we think others value, who we ask, what we ask, how we ask.

Wild journalism(s) could become an application of wild pedagogies in the shape of a single journalism course, part of a core curricular offering, a touchstone for a re-imaged program in climate crisis journalism and communication. I know that when I consider wild pedagogies—as evolving theory of practice—I’m also encouraged to think differently and disruptively about journalism and journalism education.

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Kanina Holmes is a Whitehorse-based associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, and a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, part of a Yukon cohort focused on educational leadership. She’s the founder of Stories North (www.storiesnorth.com) and editor-in-chief of The Yukon Magazine. In April, 2026, Kanina was named a co-recipient of the Michener—L. Richard O’Hagan Fellowship for Journalism Education.

Email: KaninaHolmes@cunet.carleton.ca

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References

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Blenkinsop, S., & Fettes, M. (2020). Land, language and listening: The transformations that can flow from acknowledging Indigenous land. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(4), 1033–1046. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12470

Blenkinsop, S., Morse, M., & Jickling, B. (2022). Wild pedagogies: Opportunities and challenges for practice. In M. Paulsen, J. Jagodzinski, & S. M. Hawke (Eds.), Pedagogy in the Anthropocene (pp. 33–51). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90980-2_2

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^[1]  Ethics approval for this doctoral project was obtained through Simon Fraser University, research ethics board certificate #30003192.