Sean Blenkinsop

Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University

"I came to dialogue-archive from two different directions. First, through my practice as an outdoor and experiential teacher/facilitator in various alternative venues and second, through my philosophical and theoretical interest in the work of Martin Buber. I have long wanted to better understand and help grow our relationships with ourselves, others, and the larger world."

Sean Blenkinsop is a Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He grew up in the boreal forests of northern Canada and has more than 30 years of background in outdoor, environmental, and experiential education. He also spent 5 years teaching in the semester for dialogue.  Now, as a researcher and educator he has been involved in starting and researching three nature-based, place-based, eco-schools (all in the public system). He is the author of more than one hundred articles and chapters, editor of The Imagination in Education (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), and most recently, author and editor of Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for renegotiating education and the environment in the Anthropocene (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018).  He is currently working on two books due in early 2021. The first explores and offers examples of a research method, ecoportraiture, that seeks to engage with the natural world and its myriad denizens as active, agential voices and co-researchers.  The second, Teaching and Learning as if Nature Mattered, builds on more than 10 years of research in environmental public schools and offers theories and practices related to cultural change in public education as a necessary part of a sustainable, flourishing, ecological project.