This article proposes that Education for Sustainability (EfS), with its focus on transformative and learner-centred approaches, and higher order thinking skills, enriches teaching and learning in Vocational Education and Training (VET), with implications for quality pedagogy more generally. EfS pedagogy has the potential to inform a new discourse on VET's role in citizenship and responsibility for the future, characterised by some as a shift from productivism to ecologism, and described by UNESCO/ILO as critical thinking towards sustainable development. After reviewing the literature on quality pedagogy in VET, as well as on EfS itself, this article evaluates the impact and effectiveness of a nationwide professional development program to upskill VET practitioners in EfS pedagogy. Early findings indicate personal transformations for participants both as individuals and VET professionals, with high levels of teaching practice enhancement generally through uptake of EfS principles and practice. Based on our findings, we draw conclusions and make recommendations for further research.

Public health practitioners have important roles to play in addressing environmental sustainability imperatives that have an impact on human health. Yet, to date, the extent to which practitioners are willing and able to address these issues is an understudied subject. This article draws on the findings of two qualitative studies involving 49 interviews with public health and/or sustainability practitioners and academics from Australia to highlight the capacity-building needs of the sector within the ‘health and sustainability’ space. The findings of this study raise several issues for workforce development and partnership building, contending that content on environmental sustainability should be integrated into all university courses. Underscoring gaps and opportunities, the article also reflects themes in the literature in relation to health-related education for sustainability; in particular, requirements for generic and transferable professional competencies and the role of universities in knowledge exchange and creation.

In most Victorian schools outdoor education has meant the weekend bushwalk or the end of year camp. It has been extra-curricula. But that is changing.

Outdoor education appears poised to achieve subject status is Victoria. It is included in official curriculum developments and is served by recognised specialist tertiary courses.

Outdoor education has been distinguished from physical education by its focus on environmental education, and a converse argument probably applies. But is the environmental education which occurs in outdoor education distinguished by anything other than an association with adventure activities? After all, field trips are not a new idea.

This paper argues that the distinctiveness of outdoor education as a form of environmental education is derived from its physical and conceptual isolation from schooling. Conceptual isolation provides the opportunity to construct powerfully affective forms of de-schooled environmental education.

The ways in which an outdoor education context can provide different situational constraints from those existing in schools or other institutions are outlined. An action research project is used to exemplify ways in which teachers might reconceive education within those new constraints.

The paper concludes that outdoor education can allow powerful forms of environmental education to develop, but that a technocratic rationalisation of the field associated with its increasing institutionalisation threatens to negate that potential.

The paper discusses the nature of an ecocentric view of humans and the Earth, and how this connects with the development of human spirituality. The relationship of these ideas to environmental education is explored, and an outline provided of how humanistic educational methods might contribute to students developing ecocentric views, their unique spirituality and environmentally supportive behaviours.

Operation Magpie was a citizen science project that involved the community in collecting data about magpies. This article describes one aspect of the project from an education perspective. The study began with a collaboration of teacher educators, environmental scientists and a local radio station. After an initial workshop with 75 teachers, three teacher educators met regularly with 13 primary teachers who each volunteered to plan and teach a unit of work on birds. Meeting regularly in focus groups, the teachers shared their pedagogical strategies that supported students to connect with their local environment. Findings include the importance of focused professional learning for teachers through ongoing, needs-based support during the planning and teaching of the unit, and the innovative ways that teachers approached the unit. One unexpected finding was that teachers tended to identify student learning in terms of the English curriculum rather than the science curriculum.

The case study reported here seeks to promote the sharing of successful practice in Education for Sustainability (EfS). It uses literature and three personal and professional autobiographies as background to the development of a set of sustainability educational practices integrated into a primary/middle school teacher education program. The set of activities focus on developing in students an understanding of EfS and of processes appropriate to it that they can use in their classrooms on graduation. It is the authors’ view that their collaborative building on shared beliefs, contemporary ecojustice literature and three decades of developing enabling pedagogical practices has assisted their efforts to ‘get’ EfS, and to ensure that their students, particularly as beginning teachers, ‘got it’. The ecojustice principles for teacher education programs are outlined in this article and are believed to have wide applicability in many aspects of ecojustice approaches to pro-ecosocial education.

This paper presents a gender inclusive curriculum model for environmental studies at the senior secondary level. The curriculum model is based on three sources of information about gender and environmental studies: ecofeminist theory concerning Western constructions of the humanity–nature relation, socialist feminist critique of academic and professional practice in the environmental disciplines, and an analysis of syllabus documents produced for senior secondary environmental studies courses in South Australia and Victoria. The model induces recommendations concerning the representation of the concept ‘environment’ in the syllabus, the portrayal of women in the syllabus, and the pedagogic and assessment strategies promoted in the syllabus.

In closing his 2008 Myer Lecture, the scientist and environmentalist Dr Tim Flannery said that this century will be defined by the search for sustainability. How perilous therefore that nowadays there is so much overuse of the word “sustainability” that it has become a cliché. Today's tertiary students studying architecture and energy-related subjects are so exposed to this linguistic devaluation that most of them appear to have accepted the vagueness of the term and are on their way to becoming the next generation of misusers. This paper presents a case study of an attempt to sharpen up the debate with some university students from these particular disciplines. A model of the four principles of sustainable development that has been found to be particularly useful is described. The students in question were challenged to think about the meaning of some of the words ascribed to new buildings and about the implications of the four principles to energy supply systems.

The paper considers the connections between the environmental crisis and patterns of consumption in the Western, and Westernised, worlds. These patterns are named as ‘malconsumption’, a concept which is defined and then discussed In terms of its importance to the work of environmental educators. Malconsumption as a means of ‘meaning-making’ and of countering ‘the empty self, and as a consequence of the activities of the advertising and other industries is explained. The paper closes with a summary of the orientation and activities associated with the practice of permaculture, and a proposition that a consideration of this practice in environmental education might contribute to a countering of the drive towards malconsumption.

It is not only worth talking about the chances of survival in the fight against emerging environmental and socio-economic threats, but it is necessary to use all possible means to influence public awareness. It is awareness that shapes our attitudes and literacy. The core of these tools is cross-sectoral place-based education. This raises the question of the role of new energy actors in the education process. As ‘first movers’, they have enormous power in the local community. Are they therefore merely energy producers, or perhaps, using their position, are they actively involved in creating local energy behaviours? A combination of social research methods including qualitative studies helped respond to this question. As the study shows, an opportunity for effective education is contextualisation, embedding educators in the local social structure and including first movers – energy producers – in this process. Biogas entrepreneurs transpose the knowledge of renewable energy – a globally known issue – to the local level. The provision of comprehensive education requires institutional support focused on building partnerships between policy makers, teachers and practitioners, enabling not only trans-sectoral contact but also the exchange of experience.

The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) 2005-2014 provides a significant platform to enhance the profile of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in formal and informal learning spaces and ultimately to assist in transforming our future into a more sustainable one. The article presents a brief summary of Australia's response to the DESD since its announcement in 2003. It argues that if stakeholders interpret the Decade as “business as usual”, rather than as a chance to reflect on how to be more strategic and reach out to key decision-makers or how to be more effective in involving a greater number of stakeholders in learning and change for sustainability, then the opportunities presented by the DESD will be missed.

The expectation is that higher education curricula which purports to incorporate education for sustainable development (ESD) supports university graduates in becoming more sustainable. It would then follow that if academics are to offer such curricula they need to be adequately equipped with the motivations, knowledge and skills to teach it. However, the extent to which ESD has resulted in genuine higher education curriculum change, and academic readiness for it, is debatable. As such, this article presents the academic experiences of three of the authors involved in a curriculum change process to embed ESD within a Bachelor of Arts (Textile Design) degree program. Individual post-project narratives of our experiences are summarised and thematically analysed. The analysis reveals these experiences as disorienting, yet subsequently transformative. The findings suggest promoting academics’ transformative learning should be a focus of ESD curriculum change efforts. The findings support commitment to long-term, facilitated professional development to achieve transformative change; an often espoused, yet under-reported initiative.

Current methods of agricultural and environmental education for indigenous farmers in Papua New Guinea (PNG) fail to provide high level engagement. Indigenous knowledge (IK) forms the basis of natural resource management, agriculture and health of farmers in PNG, yet its value to agricultural and environmental education in PNG is rarely recognised. The argument made in this article is that valuing indigenous knowledge will enhance agricultural and environmental education. The purpose of this empirical study was to assess the application of a knowledge management model in understanding indigenous knowledge to enhance agricultural and environmental education. This article focuses on agricultural and environmental indigenous knowledge and culture in two villages in the Western Highlands of PNG. Participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and apprentice observations were methods to collect data from small-scale indigenous farmers. The study found that as farmers shift to cash crops, IK is devalued against Western knowledge. The study also found that trust, culture, and social barriers limit sharing of knowledge. The article concludes with recommendations for future agricultural and environmental education in the PNG highlands.

Popularised feminist discourse has devalued daily cooking and implicitly defined it as work that reinforces women's second-class status. In an era of climate change linked to industrialised foods and disease epidemics caused by the modern Western diet, kitchen work has acquired political importance. Daily cooking must be understood as public, as well as private. Neither feminist theorists nor environmental educators have integrated cooking in the kitchen, specifically, into discourse. By examining two local foods activist groups, we measure one site where feminists value cooking, and we develop a feminist theory of gender-inclusivity. Based on our survey, feminists who cook with local foods are only beginning to ideologically integrate feminism and sustainable foods cooking; however, we argue that in practice, the connection is strong and that it is time to conceptualise a new discourse on the kitchen for a feminist-environmental theory of cooking.

Anthropogenic climate change and the necessary transformation of society to mitigate its consequences constitutes an unprecedented educational challenge. Responding to the climate emergency and to society’s awakening climate activism generates a complex situation for school leadership in particular. Here, we report findings from our research with climate activist students and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that school leadership plays a crucial role in enabling student and teacher agency and the development of effective Climate Change Education in schools. We utilise assemblage thinking, situating this within the new materialisms, to conceptualise schools and their leadership as dynamic assemblages, and we discuss teacher and student experiences as actors across such assemblages. We conclude that deterritorialisation and decoding of educational institutions and their leadership practices can promote and enable education to become a driver of the cultural transformation of society that the climate emergency mandates.

In 1993 a secondary school in Queensland was surveyed in order to measure the environmental attitudes and knowledge of its community. A questionnaire was developed using published items wherever possible. This report describes the responses provided by the year 11 population of the school. Demographic data on gender, region of birth, neighbourhood type and subject orientation were collected. Attitudinal data was collected in three parts: an affective component using the New Environmental Paradigm scale, a verbal commitment component and an actual commitment component. Data on factual and conceptual knowledge were also collected. Respondents registered highly positive attitudes and commitments to the environment but generally low scores on the knowledge scales. Demographic, attitudinal and knowledge data were analysed for possible interrleationships; correlations obtained were similar to those reported in the literature. However, the respondents' gender and academic orientation were not statistically related to their pro-environmental attitudes or knowledge.

A cultural discourse is not usually considered to be a barrier to the implementation of sustainability in schools. A study conducted in four different state primary schools in regional Queensland, found leading environmental educators did not wish to be identified as “greenies”. “Greenie” is a highly recognisable and well-used community discourse in regional Australia. The social appellation is shorthand for environmentalist and its use is divided almost irreconcilably between pejorative and nonpejorative attributions. To be at variance with dominant social and cultural practices and disorder an established status quo in order to transform schooling, teachers and principals must also indicate they know how to get the ordering right. This is why study participants maintain they are not “greenies” while they implement state recognised sustainability initiatives at school. This paper considers the pejorative aspect of a cultural discourse as a possible barrier to the wider uptake of sustainability in schools in regional Australia.

Lessons from a pilot introduction of environmental education into a teacher education programme designed to address pupil disengagement from school science, are discussed in this paper. Pre-service teachers discovered that environmental education can be a potent context for creativity and continuity in curriculum planning. Interpretation of the responses demonstrates that environmental education can be used to develop scientific and eco-literacy and that pre-service teachers can be imaginative when offered the opportunity to link disparate areas of science in this context, but the timing of the intervention appears to be critical. Exposure to school culture appears to inhibit their ability to plan imaginatively. This has implications for pre-service teacher education and practising teachers internationally, if pupil disenchantment with science is to be halted.

Although environmental and heritage interpretation aims to connect humans with their natural and cultural heritage, and has the potential to contribute to a vision of sustainable living, it often falls short of engaging and inspiring its audiences. Some interpreters advocate the use of artistic approaches to create more affective (imaginary-emotional-sensory-aesthetic) experiences. One approach considered compatible is drama. Powerful dramatic experiences can embed interpretive stories in the emotions and leave enduring impressions. Drama is accepted as an interpretive tool overseas, yet it is under-utilised in Australia. How can it be used to strengthen interpretation in this country? This paper presents the outcomes of research investigating the perceptions of ten Queensland practitioners of dramatised interpretation regarding drama's strengths, limitations and value as a tool in interpretation. The authors contend that drama has much to offer interpretation, although further evaluative studies are clearly needed.