Throughout my adult life, the lions’ share of my time, energy and attention has been dedicated to a meandering, sometimes challenging, but always nourishing conversation between theory and practice in the field of education. This conversation has been continuously generative. Over the last decade, following the threads of reflections, ideas and encounters has always led me to new ways of thinking, making sense, doing and being. I don’t see any end to this process.

The single most important understanding I have developed along that way is also one of the simplest. Children are people. Don’t let the simplicity of this statement fool you. This insight, shared by the spaces I value the most, the people who nurture them, and the ideas that underpin them, is radical, perhaps even revolutionary. If we thought through and acted upon all of the implications of this idea, the world would be a very different place.

For the past five years, I have been living on a farm gone feral in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain. At first glance, the farm and the mountains appear truly wild, especially seen through eyes more accustomed to the hyper-domesticated landscape of East Anglia. Look closer, however, and it becomes apparent that this landscape is neither wild nor domesticated. It is a third kind of space, new to me but certainly nothing new, a place shaped by ongoing reciprocal relationships between humans and the biome they are a part of.

Our farm hosts Banana Mountain, a democratic learning community for 6 to 18 year olds which I founded and co-ordinate, an expanding regenerative agroforestry project which is working to transform degraded land into complex mixed forests, and a small residential centre for adult education which seeks to offer a rich and nurturing space for creative practice and transformative learning of all kinds.

These individual projects and their co-existence on a single site was not something we planned ahead, but rather, something which emerged over time. This process continues. As it does the shape of what we have been co-creating slowly but surely becomes clear; an ecosystem of learning which attends not only to the well-being of humans but to the flourishing of all life, all of our more-than-human kin who also call this place home.