In the relatively new discipline of design education we have the opportunity to frame the way that design education is formulated. The relative lack of theorists in the field of design education studies leaves unquestioned the relevance of conventional practices of design education that are premised on only tangentially relevant Art, Science and Information Technology models. There is a gap in design education development regarding how to mediate ecological concerns with techno-scientific imperatives. Environmental education researchers can influence this new field by challenging existing approaches to design education with particular attention to the ways design either contributes to or hinders the development of a sustainable society. In order to enter this discussion with environmental education researchers we identify three ecological issues faced by designers and design educators, here we pay particular attention to Industrial Design. The question for this paper is, can environmental education researchers offer advice to the design education area that may help us develop ecologically sustainable design-based programs. The newness of ecological concerns in the design research and design education areas means that we have a great deal to learn. If environmental education researchers are able to assist us with our reflections on designing curricula that in turn encourages a more ecologically aware design profession then this would be a worthwhile contribution to design practice in Australia, and indeed the world.

Three themes are set out in this paper. The first is that learning about ecologically sensitive living–and putting that living into practice–are central to Aboriginal indigenous education. Second, Australia's first peoples were and are deprived of landscapes providing the base to their spirituality; continuing processes maintain that loss of independence. The third is that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians need to address quickly courses of action which provide for a reinvigoration of that landscape connection and independence. This need has points of significance for environmental educators, several of which are presented.

Using hermeneutic phenomenology to aid the reader ‘experience’ the data collected, this study reports on 18 college students, 4 staff members and the author's trip to a remote island on the Great Barrier Reef. It is a story of the (re)discovery of the social and natural ecologies that bind us together, and of how explicit teaching and learning about these ecologies can make a difference to young people's abilities to consciously be part of, contribute to, and sustain these ecologies. A grounded theory of five dimensions of giving (to self, others, communities, environment, and the whole) is offered as a beginning framework from which to imbue teaching and learning with meaning and social concern.

The discipline of knowledge management (KM) considers knowledge as potentially the most valuable organisational asset that must be shared among staff and stakeholders and even communities in order to yield considerable returns and benefits. However, in a real-world context, managers in industries such as high technology, manufacturing and finance jealously guard their valuable knowledge and prevent other entities from gaining access to this resource. Open cases of knowledge sharing among stakeholders such as staff, customers, business partners, competitors and the public are rare. Therefore, the philosophical premise of KM — knowledge must be openly shared — is often unrealised. Knowledge of environmental sustainability is a valuable resource for ecotourism operators because they operate in natural environments such as the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and Sipadan Marine Park in Malaysia, and depend on the quality of these environments for their ongoing success. This research provides evidence that knowledge dissemination in the form of environmental sustainability knowledge can be openly shared among staff, customers, competitors and the public, thereby linking KM and environmental education. This article provides an interpretivist analysis of knowledge sharing by innovative ecotourism operators in Australia and South East Asia (Malaysia and Thailand). Data were collected through in-depth interviews with 14 executives, field observations and analysis of company documents. Results from this research found that ecotourism managers are passionate believers of environmental sustainability and benevolently share their valuable organisational knowledge and beliefs with all stakeholders.

Early childhood is an important time for building children’s affinity with nature and the environment. Early childhood professionals play a crucial role in developing young children’s understanding of the natural world. Over the past 50 years, there has been a movement in early childhood education and care contexts to provide young children with the opportunity to learn in natural surroundings such as forest schools and nature kindergartens. This research, occurred in four bush kinders, an Australian example of nature-based, early years education influenced by the forest school approach to education. In this paper we interrogate key ideas concerning environmental education, drawing on seminal empirical research, guiding curriculum documents such as Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework and government policy documents to build understandings of how children’s play can be observed by educators who can then support the children to develop their understandings of the natural world around them. Through ethnography, a methodology that uses both participation and observation of research participants, it became apparent that young children’s play-based learning offers opportunities for development of understandings of the environment. Applying a recent definition of environmental education from the US Environmental Protection Authority (2022), we analysed four vignettes which provide examples of educators and children’s interactions supporting children to build an affinity with nature observed during the research. This research’s implications are novel when considering the relatively new bush kinder approach to early childhood education as the findings remind us of the benefits of bush kinders in generating opportunities for young children’s environmental education.

Despite the bad press surrounding the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), the outcomes of the event confirm that WSSD served to reinvigorate global commitments and actions to sustainable development.

The Summit, which took place from 26 August - 4 September 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, aimed to review progress made towards Sustainable Development over the past 10 years and to work towards commitments to action (UN General Assembly Resolution 55/199). It saw the largest ever gathering of world leaders and over 21,000 participants from 191 government, intergovernmental and non-government organisations, the private sector, academia and the scientific community (IISD, 2002). The mere presence of these stakeholders, willing to engage in the negotiation process, demonstrates that sustainable development is very much alive and relevant.

President Thabo Mbeki opened by characterising the growing gap between North and South as “global apartheid” and highlighting the crises of poverty and ecological degradation. It was clear then that the outcomes of the Summit had to go beyond the Rio 1992 commitments which focused on environmental actions. He called for a practicable and meaningful Johannesburg Plan of Implementation to fulfil the framework of Agenda 21 within the Summit theme of “People, Planet and Prosperity”.

When considering a topic as broad as research in environmental education it seems worthwhile, at the outset, to make some basic distinctions. First, establishing research priorities is not simply an empirical question. While it is undoubtedly useful to try to establish perceived needs and interests, and to consider them when establishing research priorities, this can only describe part of the task at hand. There are surely some logical requirements as well.

Second, a much more challenging task, it seems to me, is to more clearly understand the nature of the questions to which we seek answers. We must seek to distinguish between those research techniques which are more or less consistent with the nature of our task. Unfortunately, research in education generally, and in environmental education, in particular, has been hindered by a failure on the part of the research community to recognize the need for a more complete range of research perspectives than those customarily found, and by a failure to recognize the occasional and inevitable misapplications of technique which can occur when appropriate methodologies do not seem available.

With some misgivings about the scope of research in environmental education in mind, I am led to my concern: How do we go about furthering our understanding of concepts central to our field of study? In exploring this question I propose that conceptual analysis is an important research area. Further, I also argue that it is not simply an option, but rather a logical necessity if we are to establish greater coherence within environmental education and avoid unnecessary confusion (see for example: Barrow & Milburn, 1986; Scheffler, 1960; Soltis, 1978; and Wilson, 1969). Further, it is in the nature of this question that we find appeal for this particular approach to research.

Programs designed to promote the use of natural environments for leisure purposes need to be based on a sound and justifiable environmental ethic. This paper attempts to develop such an ethic. The general and basic ecological attitude, arguments relating to the need for human survival, other arguments which relate to human interests such as the need for beauty, recreation and scientific endeavours and utilitarian arguments relating to the needs of future generations are examined and are seen as being morally and practically inadequate.

The only justifiable environmental ethic is seen as one which has. as its central concept, the interdependent natural community in which the interests of all individual members of the community (including the interests of human beings) are regarded as secondary to the good of the total community. In the ethic, humans protect the natural environment because the entities of nature are “fellow-travellers”, members of the same moral community.

This article presents an analysis of three uniquely situated garden-based research studies. As colleagues intrigued by the rich, intricate, learning dynamics playing out within the garden spaces, our collaboration explored the broader meaning and potential for garden-based programming. As we discussed the three garden studies, two themes emerged as valuable for analysis: relationality and decolonisation. We understand the themes in relation to Gregory Cajete’s (2005) conceptualisation of coming to resonance within oneself, one’s community, and the surrounding ecosystem as being integral aspects of a holistic learning program. In addition, centring learning around relationality with place requires, as Delores Calderon (2014) asserts, a critique of colonisation that has shaped place over time. In our collaboration on the three studies and reading of current developments in the literature, it became clear that garden- and place-based education must grapple with the troubled histories of place and work towards decolonisation. Each garden project provided unique insight, but our collective analysis elicited an examination of assumptions about pedagogy and potential for decolonisation of land, body, and minds.

In this article, I draw on interviews with graduates from an Outdoor and Environmental Education course to explore the ways in which their environmental ethics changed since leaving university. I do this in relation to the graduates' personal and professional experiences, particularly in the context of teaching Outdoor Education and Physical Education in secondary schools. By offering two alternative readings of graduates' experiences, this research contributes to existing education literature about the ‘wash-out effect’ of teacher education courses once beginning teachers become immersed in schools. In the first reading I find evidence of regulatory and normalising strategies of society and school communities and a ‘plateauing’ of graduates' engagement with environmental practices. In a second reading, framed by Foucault's theory of power and ethics, I discern acts of ‘tactical’ resistance. This reading foregrounds strategies graduates use to negotiate the constraining spaces of schools.

The assemblage of water/watery/watering is a lively cartography of how water may be accounted for when theorising with and through environmental education research. Challenging the universalising claims of Western technoscience and the colonial logic of extraction, the article develops an alternative theoretical mapping of environmental education through engagements with Ingold’s (2007, 2012, 2015) concepts of lines, knots, and knotting. For this article and for the Special Issue in which it is housed, the concepts of such knottings are defined as an assemblage of haecceities, lived events that are looped, tethered and entangled as material and conceptual agencies that inhere within situated encounters. Thus, this article grapples with the need to account for water differently in contemporary posthuman ecologies. To overcome anthropocentric and mastery-oriented approaches, various other ways to account for water in science or environmental education will continue to come to the surface, bubbling and rushing like a waterfall as they have done in this work. Some of these will include thinking with water, which will be central to a theoretical mapping of water that seeks embrace sticky knots. The article explores a (re)turn to artful practices and encounters as spaces in which posthumanist concepts for environmental education might be cultivated.

Over the last decade, a growing number of universities have committed to ensuring that sustainability is integral to higher education with the intent of preparing eco-literate graduates who can make positive contributions to the sustainability of the environment. With particular consideration for the increasingly internationalised teaching environment of many higher education institutions, this study sought to explore how academics’ conceptions of teaching sustainability might differ across disciplines. This study builds upon the seminal work of Reid and Petocz (2006), Cotton, Bailey, Warren, and Bissell (2009) and Cotton, Warren, Maiboroda, and Bailey (2007), who explored the views of academics across a range of disciplines not traditionally associated with sustainability. This study extends their research by specifically identifying academics from a variety of disciplines who might be considered experts in the field of sustainability.

The study takes a constructivist view of ‘conceptions’ that are developed through one's experiences, beliefs and interactions with community. The theoretical framing also identifies pedagogical approaches recommended in the fields of sustainability and intercultural education, and establishes eco-literacy and environmental ethics as integral to one's conceptions of sustainability.

This research applied a multi case-study approach, including open-ended interview questions with participants from four different faculties of Monash University, namely: Science; Business and Economics; Education; and Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. All four participants were selected on the basis of the synopsis of the unit they taught overtly stating that sustainability-related content was included in the syllabus, and thus might be defined as experts in the teaching of sustainability. The data was analysed using descriptive followed by interpretative coding, which ultimately identified six different components that might contribute to the participants’ conceptions about their teaching. These components included: discipline; conceptions of sustainability; ethical position; pedagogical approach; approach to intercultural education; and approach to eco-literacy.

The findings of the study conclude that there were likely to be disciplinary differences in the academics’ conceptions of teaching sustainability. While there was no evidence of a disciplinary link to the academics’ understanding of what sustainability is, the research did appear to support a correlation between an academic's previous education and their ethical position. Furthermore, the current discipline of their unit appeared to strongly reflect their pedagogical approach to teaching sustainability. The research also highlights that, while there are clearly some innovative teaching strategies being utilised, there is room for more transformational learning to be included in syllabus design. Additionally, as the number of unit outlines that overtly referred to sustainability was surprisingly low, and not all sustainability-related units seemed to demonstrate a comprehensive approach to the teaching of eco-literacy, questions are raised about whether all students are actually engaging in sustainability education as signatories of the Talloires Declaration have pledged.

The significant contribution of this study is represented by its implications for the development of curriculum and syllabus design in the field of sustainability education. Having highlighted the potential disciplinary differences between approaches to teaching sustainability, a range of stakeholders, including university faculties and individual academics, can review how sustainability education is taught in their curriculum and address areas that require greater attention to ensure students receive a comprehensive exposure to the skills and knowledge required to develop eco-literacy.

This paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant’s lived experiences into another layer of ‘force field of differentiation’ (Alaimo, Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 14) where stories, flesh and sea became no longer discrete, where the ground is not solid but watery, the movement is not walking or speaking but swimming and the body is not just human but human-animal. Watery assemblages enabled the fluid and affective entanglements with complex and thick experiences of gender and racial harassment. Entangling with images and stories I explore how the affective and material agency of sea, swimming and shark as concept and a performative multiplicity (Protevi, Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) works as praxis and provocations for thinkings and doings.

This article examines learning design in a postgraduate preservice teacher setting. The overarching aim was to embed environmentally responsive approaches throughout two companion units for diverse student cohorts. This article reports on a teacher educator self-study in a regional university with extensive online delivery for large units (300–800 students) in a 1-year course. The author examines how assessment tasks in literacy- and numeracy-oriented units are designed to meaningfully integrate environmental sustainability using contextual cues, collaborative learning, complex tasks, and reflexivity. The author argues for the use of these four key guidelines of environmentally responsive pedagogies alongside environmental education programs to emphasise messages of sustainability even in units that are not traditionally environmentally oriented. Challenges include problematising the nature of effective teaching and dealing with the complexities of purposeful learning. Innovative unit learning design alone, however, is inadequate if the surrounding systems are fragmented and seen as separate to learning about sustainability.

The purpose of the study was to compare demographic profiles, agents of socialisation on participation in outdoor activities and preferences for spending time in natural areas of New Zealand and Danish physical education students. The data were gathered by questionnaire from 270 Danish and 241 Mew Zealand students. New Zealand students expressed a stronger perception of being an outdoor person and may be linked to the fact that 12% of the Danish students have lived their lives in rural areas in contrast to 30% of the New Zealand students. Further, school and sport clubs were ranked higher by New Zealand students as factors of influence on outdoor life activities. Friends and parents/family were the most influential agencies of socialisation with no differences between nations. More than 92% of the Danish and New Zealand students had previous experiences of longer lasting outdoor trips. The study provide data for ongoing interpretation and create a basis for questions and reflections for the benefit of students in both institutions.

The ethical dimensions of environmental study are considered with particular reference to environmental education. It is argued that moral considerations and value judgements are an inevitable component of any form of environmental investigation or education and the nature of environmental ethics is explored in this context. Methods for transmitting environmental ethics are considered critically and the article concludes by suggesting some alternative approaches to exploring environmental ethics in education.