This paper presents the results of a study that explored the effectiveness of three intervention strategies in facilitating energy saving behaviour among resident undergraduate university students. In contrast to a dominant practice of motivating with rewards or competition this study sought to appeal to students' intrinsic motivations. An experimental design was used with two intervention groups and a control group. The interventions were the provision of real-time feedback provided by an inhouse energy consumption display unit (ecoMeter) and a targeted social marketing approach. They were evaluated using energy consumption data and self-report data from the participants via an on-line survey and focus groups. Across the three research phases the rate of reduced electricity consumption for the interventions ranged from an average of 17% to 28% less than the control group. The findings provide evidence that facilitation of intrinsically motivated behaviours can result in reduced energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

This year of 1990 is an appropriate time to review the place of environmental education in the Australian school curriculum. After a period in the mid 1980s when environmental issues and political attention to the environment were on the back burner in comparison with economic issues, the environment is again a top international political priority. With Green victories in a number of European elections, even the hitherto unmindful Thatcher government in Britain is claiming an environmental concern and announcing several conservation measures, albeit with rather distant targets compared with a number of their prospective partners in Europe.

The Hawke government in its third term sensed a growing environmental disenchantment among its supporters, and appointed one of its heavy-weights to the Environment portfolio. This move, and the strong action he took over several sensitive issues, were enough to keep the Green preferences in line and ensure in 1990 a fourth, unprecedented Labor term of office.

The first Australian government involving official Green support appeared in Tasmania and in most of the other states the governments have upgraded Conservation and the Environment among their ministries.

Most Australians, according to a poll conducted late in May (The Age, 15 June, 1990), feel that the threat to the environment is real, and that its protection should be put ahead of economic growth. Such strong public support for the environment would have been unthinkable a decade ago, even though the evidence for much of the now widely recognised damage to the Australian and global environment was available.

Graduate students are often plagued by stress and anxiety in their journeys of becoming researchers. Concerned by the prevalence of poor graduate student wellbeing in Australia, we share our experiences of kin-making and collaboration within #aaeeer (Australasian Association for Environmental Education Emerging Researchers), a collective of graduate students and early career researchers formed in response to the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) conference in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2014. In this article, we begin to address the shortage of research into graduate student wellbeing, led by graduate students. Inspired by Donna Haraway's work on making kin in the Chthulucene, we present an exploration that draws together stories from the authors about the positive experiences our kin-making collective enables, and how it has supported our wellbeing and allowed us to work collaboratively. Specifically, we find that #aaeeer offers us a form of refuge from academic stressors, creating spaces for ‘composting together’ through processes of ‘decomposing’ and ‘recomposing’. Our rejection of neoliberal norms has gifted us experiences of joyful collective pleasures. We share our experiences here in the hope of supporting and inspiring other emerging and established researchers to ‘make kin’ and challenge the potentially isolating processes of becoming researchers.

This study sought to distil recommendations and curriculum design principles that could underpin the re-imagination of the RMIT University coursework Masters of Sustainable Practice (MSP). The aim of the study was to redesign the program to better meet the expectations of contemporary working professionals. Four data sources were used to develop 12 program recommendations: postgraduate sustainability education literature, postgraduate coursework literature, publicly available information for contemporary coursework Masters sustainability programs both in Australia and overseas, and interview data from current and graduate students from the RMIT University Masters of Sustainable Practice. The study proposes a novel curriculum (re)design model comprised of six curriculum design principles that the authors argue are essential for the development of curricula for contemporary working professionals. Sustainable practice coursework Masters programs need to: offer choice, flexibility and authentic work-based assessment opportunities; provide significant guidance to achieve individual aspirations and to customise the program for each student; recognise learning through current workplace roles and through continuing professional development opportunities; use integrative assessments to achieve the Australian Qualification Framework knowledge and skills application requirements; incorporate short credit-bearing courses, in particular for the development of employability skills; and support students to transition to professional practice.

This paper revisits the history of environmental education in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s and draws parallels between these and current events in four countries, including Australia. It is argued that little has changed and that few environmental educators confront the inherently political nature of their work. It is concluded that environmental education activity must adopt a wider scope that includes political activity if progress is to be made.

Context is an important element in understanding the nature of the curriculum in any field and its goals. Thus, Cornbleth (1988: 89) describes curriculum as “an ongoing social activity shaped by various contextual influences within and beyond the classroom”. She argues that curriculum is a “contextualized social process” which:

Similarly, Berlak and Berlak (1981: 24) write of the need to investigate teachers' decision making in terms of “the social, cultural and political forces and structures that are omnipresent in all social situations”. Sharp and Green (1975) argue that comprehensive explanations of teaching require an investigation of the “sociology of situations, their underlying structure and interconnections and the constraints and contingencies they impose” (p. 25).

Underwater photo-elicitation is a novel experiential marine education technique that combines direct experience in the marine environment with the use of digital underwater cameras. A program called Show Us Your Ocean! (SUYO!) was created, utilising a mixed methodology (qualitative and quantitative methods) to test the efficacy of this technique. Participants (adults and high school students) snorkelled, explored the ocean, and captured images both in and out of the water. Underwater photo-elicitation was proven effective at increasing awareness, eliciting emotional reactions, and fostering a sense of connection to the ocean. However, it was not necessarily effective for raising awareness of environmental issues nor for motivating pro-environmental behaviour. Interestingly, while some attitudes about and behaviours toward the ocean did become more environmentally sensitive, others appeared to shift unexpectedly away from environmental concern. This result was perhaps due to the lack in the program of an ecological knowledge-based component. Participants enjoying the beauty of the ocean did not realise the threats facing it or what to do about these. If the goal is to achieve significant attitude change and cultivate pro-environmental behaviour, this new approach should be supplemented with critical thinking/action competence and ecological/ocean literacy.

The paper reports a study within the Chinese cultural context of Hong Kong of the influence which people's perception of the probable effectiveness of their actions has on the relationship between attitudes and actions. As expected, respondents with pro-environmental attitudes and a perception that their actions would be effective indicated a likelihood to act in an environmentally responsible manner which was greater than those whose attitudes were not so pro-environmental and whose perceptions were that their actions would not be effective. However, amongst the group of respondents with little indication of pro-environmental attitudes and a perception that their actions would not be effective there were some who, nonetheless, said they would act in environmentally responsible ways. This observation is discussed in terms of a social ethic of conformity, obedience and suppression of personal beliefs.

This paper discusses the emerging field of place-based education or place-based pedagogy - an approach that seeks to enhance childrens perspective of ‘place’ via school and community related environmental projects. Place-based education is proposed as an approach that enables students to establish a connection to a place, its people, and to the world beyond the school gate. Through initiating teaching and learning experiences that respond to the unique and local places where children live, play and go to school, place-based education is notable as a significant educational tool. Gregory Smith's place-based framework (2002) and a Tasmanian case study are put forward to highlight the significance of place-based pedagogy for environmental education.

This article reports on an inquiry that used permaculture design thinking to create a science and sustainability education intervention for a secondary science class. The aims were to cultivate student attitudes towards science, towards learning science in school, and towards the environment, and to trellis learning of science and sustainability. Research into impacts of the intervention took the form of an interpretive, mixed methods case study, which included the use of questionnaires, interviews and observations. As a context for learning, local permaculture food production projects, as experienced through field trips in the intervention, appear to promote the relevance of science and sustainability learning and the ability to engage students. Science and sustainability learning outcomes appeared to vary among students, although nearly all of them reported they enjoyed learning science with a focus on the environment, including one group of students who reported they did not generally enjoy learning science in school. There was some evidence that the teacher transformed his own thinking through his participation in the intervention.

Following the inaugural Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) research symposium in November 2014, we — a group of emerging researchers in Environmental Education/Sustainability Education (EE/SE) — commenced an online collaboration to identify and articulate our responses to the main themes of the symposium. Identifying as #aaeeer, our discussions coalesced into four main areas that we felt captured not only some of our current research interests, but also ‘under-explored’ areas that need further attention and that also held the potential for meaningful and ‘dangerous’ contributions to EE/SE research and practice. These themes were: (1) uncertain futures, (2) traditional knowledges for the future, (3) community EE/SE, and (4) the rise of the digital, explorations of which we present in this article. By no means intended to capture all that is worth researching in this field, these themes, and this article, are deliberately presented by #aaeeer to spark discussions, as well as showcase an example of online collaboration between researchers in a number of countries.

Despite school-community partnerships having much potential to provide educational organisations with authentic teaching and learning opportunities through community-based action projects, they remain under-utilised largely due to the structural constraints and pressures faced by teachers. This study helps fill a gap in scholarly discourse about the specific ways in which school-community partnerships can effectively be developed by providing an in-depth account of an 18-month pilot project with the aim to develop a conservation education program (Kids Greening Taupō) through a partnership structure in Aotearoa New Zealand. An evaluation of the pilot project was conducted using an ethnographic approach, which sought stakeholder perspectives about the program's developmental process through an interpretive lens. Qualitative data were collected through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, and then thematically analysed. The findings provided in this article illuminate stakeholder insights and perspectives about the structures established and processes utilised over the three broad stages of program planning, implementation and maintenance, and the resultant environmental initiatives and programs. Through this study, a Collaborative Community Education Model has emerged that may serve as a potential framework or starting point for those interested in creating a new school-community partnership or to modify an existing one.

In an earlier paper (Skamp, Boyes, & Stanisstreet, 2009b), students' beliefs and willingness to act in relation to 16 specific actions related to global warming were compared across the primary secondary interface. More primary students believed in the effectiveness of most actions to reduce global warming and were willing to take those actions. In general there was a disparity between students' beliefs and their actions and explanations were proffered for these differences. Using these data, a derived measure of the potential effectiveness of education in encouraging each of these pro-environmental actions to reduce global warming is reported. This measure, and other derived indices, suggests where education could be most effective in encouraging willingness to take pro-environmental actions to reduce global warming.

The paper offers three examples of passionate immersion with strange objects and working with peculiar multispecies assemblages, such as the assemblage of a dove called Romeo and the technology to humidify a greenhouse called ‘Princess’, or the experiment of orienteering in forests for years, accounting for slips, scratches and tumbles as being taught by the forest — and prioritising these over the more commonplace educational narratives. The paper is structured in a nonconventional way in that most space is reserved for reports from these ongoing inquiries. The authors will each discuss how they situate themselves in relation to strangeness in research and how they proceed methodologically, locating their approaches as postqualitative. The questions each example addresses are: What is a strange object? How do we come across them? What do we begin to do/produce with them? The additive orientation described in the research stories is proposed to be an important constituent for new survival knowledge especially relevant for environmental education, addressing environmental problems as wicked, and demanding approaches that reach beyond methodological divides.

In 1980-81 when I last wrote about the future of environmental education in Australian schools I was quite pessimistic and concluded that environmental education had been a phenomenon of the affluent seventies in Australia. This conclusion was based on observations, reading and experience with schools, education authorities and curriculum projects over the preceding seven years.

Environmental education aims to develop not only awareness, understanding and skills. Most importantly, it also aims to encourage feelings of concern for the environment and protection. This means that it is concerned with social reconstruction — environmental education programs must have moral and political components if they are to achieve the accepted aims of environmental education. In 1980-81 I argued that environmental education had been subjected to incorporation within the existing hegemoney of schools in a neutralised form — the radical ‘action’ components of the environmental education aims had been deleted from school programs whilst the less controversial cognitive and skill aims had been retained, together with the name ‘environmental education’. There was evidence that programs of this genre had increased during the seventies, including an increased environmental content in traditional subjects in the curriculum. In general terms there was little inducement for schools to implement all the aims of environmental education.

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has become popular in recent moves to embed approaches such as the new materialist and the posthuman in environmental education. Certainly, a newfound respect for the material universe, including the comprehension of the human place in it, and the tendency to a posthuman theoretical position, are both important given the contemporary environmental crisis, named as the Anthropocene. However, this article will argue that both these philosophies do not go far enough. This is because they must retain a political, social and critical edge if they are to be effective, and this edge can be too easily disregarded in the pursuit of increased engagement with the material and everything not human. In contrast, this article will put forward a Deleuzian approach to environmental education, based on the intellectual quadrant of Spinoza-Marx-Nietzsche-Bergson (Figure 1). It will be argued that only by fully connecting these often conflicting and disparate philosophies that a workable new synthesis for environmental education and a cartography for learning can be achieved. The Deleuzian approach to environmental education will be exemplified through an analysis of current environmental practises in schools as assemblage.

Environmental interpretation can be defined as a kind of non-formal environmental education carried out in predominantly recreational settings within which visitors are provided with opportunities to become more aware of particular concepts and phenomena through first hand experiences. The fundamental objective of environmental interpretation programs is commonly given as increasing visitors' empathy for environmental conservation: the visit becomes a transformatory experience as a result of which it is intended that visitors become more committed to ensuring the continued integrity and sustainability of the environment. This paper argues that, as presently practised, environmental interpretation is informed largely by a somewhat conservative, traditional pedagogy, and as such tends to be didactic, knowledge-driven, and shaped more by technique than by philosophy. An attempt is made to outline, at least conceptually, an interpretive process influenced more by the principles of an alternative educational framework called andragogy, one which acknowledges the (earning characteristics of adults, accentuates the affective domain of learning, and which might ultimately lead to greater levels of visitor involvement in learning processes.

Survey results are described for the perceived, implementation of the NSW Environmental Education Curriculum Statement in one School Region. Data provide a picture of the extent to which schools have documented Environmental Education policies and the amount and kind of implementation at school level. Reference is made to the use of field study centres, community involvement, and the extent and possible impact of professional development opportunities on these measures. Comparisons are made between the primary and secondary sectors. Professional development does appear to have had some impact, and the ‘across curricula’ approach seems to have had partial success. Reasons for the limited involvement of secondary schools are suggested. The extent of primary project work which was occurring appeared encouraging but there were unanswered questions about whole school programs. NSW Government initiatives such as Field Study Centres and the Greening of Schools program appeared to be playing important roles.

Growing a nature kindergarten that can flourish takes a community, careful planning, and sustained support. In 2011, the Sooke School District in British Columbia, Canada undertook the project of creating a nature kindergarten when outdoor programs of this kind did not exist in the Canadian public school system. Inspired by the well-established forest school and nature preschool models in northern Europe, a program to take 22 kindergarten students outside into nature every morning, regardless of the weather, was developed. This article explores how a unique framework and set of guiding principles were co-created by a diverse advisory committee. It also describes how the hiring, education, and ongoing support of the program's two educators — a kindergarten teacher and an early childhood educator — became critical to its success. The article offers an overview on steps taken, including how the idea was born, working within the public school system, building a framework and principles, hiring and education, preparing the educators, learning from our first year, ongoing support, and remaining questions. The authors’ intention is not to articulate best practices, but to share key aspects of the program's development and implementation phases that allowed the nature kindergarten to thrive over the last 5 years.