Gwyneth Hagan is a poet, educator, and designer living in the United States. Born in Maine, she grew up in a military family and moved every few years to a new town or state. With each move, Gwyneth sought “the peace of wild things” to help ground herself in place and create a sense of home. That relationship with the natural world also shaped her writing. From a young age, she has written poetry drawing imagery and inspiration from landscapes, patterns, and rhythms of nature.
As an educator, Gwyneth has worked with young people and adults to create learning rooted in place and purpose. She began her career inspired by Reggio Emilia practices in her work with young children and later worked with older students and adults to develop project- and place-based learning experiences. As she transitioned to working primarily with adult learners, Gwyneth began to focus on organizational learning and community-based redesign through her work with organizations such as EL Education and Transcend Education. In recent years, she has launched her own consulting practice, where she supports leaders and teams to think and act more like the forest than the factory.
Her approach to this work is called Wild Design for Learning. Wild Design draws on lessons and patterns from nature to cultivate thriving learning ecosystems— where abundance, relationships, adaptation, and renewal can flourish.
Gwyneth is the author of Wild Design for Learning: Moving Mental Models from the Factory to the Forest, forthcoming from Routledge in November 2026. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a focus on sociology and education, and a Master’s of Education in Adult Learning and Organizational Development.