In December 1997 I was privileged—and very pleasantly surprised—to receive the inaugural Allen Strom Eureka Prize for Environmental Education for ‘environmental education research of a substantive nature which contributes to professional thinking and practice’. According to the program for the prize-giving ceremony, I was awarded the prize ‘for research on recent cultural and philosophical movements, such as postmodernism, which has translated and applied complex social theories to theory and practice in environmental education’.

I want to take this opportunity to repeat my thanks to the New South Wales Environment Protection Authority for their generous sponsorship of this prize. I offer these thanks not only as an individual recipient but also on behalf of the wider Australian environmental education community. I see particular significance in the Allen Strom Eureka Prize for Environmental Education being awarded in a suite that includes separate prizes for environmental research and environmental journalism. This helps to distinguish our field from other disciplines with which it is sometimes confused. My own research emphasises that environmental education is not just another type of environmental study but more a form of cultural and media literacy.

How learners come to grips and can transform their thinking about something extremely complex such as environmental issues are addressed with this research. It is argued that the qualities of the visual mode of information processing are of particular relevance for cognition in the environmental context. This paper reports on a study of the photographic experience of nineteen participants who worked individually on an environmental photography project of their choice over a period of up to ten weeks. It was found that on completion of their project, the participants' conceptualisations of their topics became more differentiated, complex and defined; multiple perspectives were constructed and their own positions and feelings clarified. Above all, a notion of optimism emerged after Initial conceptualisations of environmental issues as issues of pollution, degradation, violation and death. This paper discusses the cognitive potential of the visual mode for the development of environmental thinking and presents some examples of conceptual shifts through the photographic work.

The Maui's Dolphin Challenge was a litter reduction project that was run twice at a secondary school in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project drew on a theoretical framework encompassing four psycho-social principles: values, embodied learning, efficacy, and perceived social norms. It challenged students to reduce the litter at the school by offering to donate $200 a week for 3 weeks to help protect the endangered Maui's dolphin. However, for every piece of litter found, $1 would come off this total. The challenge was accompanied by feedback on progress, posters, assemblies, and videos. Both times it was run, litter dropped by approximately half. After the first iteration, a survey found that students (n = 275 surveys) appeared motivated not to litter primarily due to a desire to care for the Maui's dolphin. Interviews and a focus group with staff and students (n = 14) after the second iteration also found the dolphins were important, but there was a cultural norm against picking up litter. The limitations of the project, its impact on the school's sustainability culture, and implications for other whole-school environmental projects, especially those with a waste focus, are discussed.

This article explores innovative praxis in Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) in four preservice teacher education programmes in Canada. ESE is finding its way into teacher education in a variety of innovative and interdisciplinary ways, as both part of mainstream programmes and in their co-curricular margins. Using a case study approach, each case builds on unique connections to Indigenous education, art education, cultural learning or educational gardening, which supports a variety of differing aspects in relation to ESE. These cases share a common theme of building relationships at the heart of ESE teaching and learning in the mainstream and the margins of the academy. Brought together through a Canadian network of faculty, researchers, policy-makers and community educators that was formed in 2016, these cases demonstrate a deep commitment and imaginative capacity for embedding ESE in Canada’s teacher education systems.

What meanings and values does the community (the general public) attach to the term “sustainability”? As this complex concept is widely used in academic, political and policy arenas and gradually becomes embedded at institutional level, it is possible that the community does not share the understandings of sustainability that are guiding developments in many spheres which affect their lives. Use of terminology at policy level which is unfamiliar to the community is not unusual, so does it matter in the case of “sustainability”? This paper reviews research, both qualitative and quantitative, undertaken between 2000 and 2004 for the NSW Department of Environment and Conservation in the context of development of a sustainability education program known as Our Environment: It's a Living Thing. This research both explored understanding and concepts of sustainability and developed a community segmentation on the basis of environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. The implications of this research for future research and for programs aimed at developing community understanding of, and commitment to, sustainability are also discussed.

In this paper we propose the concept of ‘becoming-with’ in relation to the experience of the catastrophic fires in the summer of 2019–2020 in Australia, and their implications for research into young children’s response to bushfires, and their learning about bushfire recovery, which resulted in the development of an arts-based project to explore emergent curriculum and pedagogies for planetary wellbeing. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising that ‘the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’; and ‘Spatio-temporal relations’ as ‘not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities of events as encounters’ to theorise how ‘becoming-with’ fires enabled the development of emergent curriculum and pedagogies in an early learning centre, which can ultimately contribute to planetary wellbeing.

Guidelines for sustainability linked to the government-approved National Curriculum for education in New Zealand emphasise values of empathy and respect for all life. These instruct educators to discuss different values around sustainability and conservation.

I reviewed educational resources published or endorsed by government agencies to determine compliance with these sustainability Guidelines. The resources reviewed promote the view that non-native mammals should be killed. Some resources go further in giving instructions to children on how to do this, and how to source kill traps.

Children are provided with material designed to engender dislike towards non-native mammals, particularly possums. Resources conflate issues of conservation by tying it in with protection of tourism, ornamental plants and primary industries.

This encouragement of killing in environmental educational resources appears unique to New Zealand. It is discussed in light of increasing evidence that performing or witnessing animal abuse is a causal factor for future violence towards human and non-human animals.

This transversal and transilient thought-experiment explores the application and significance of Japanese animism for environmental education and environmental philosophy. Through the exploration of indigenous knowledge found in Japanese folklore and Japanese Buddhism, the thought-experiment offers a critique of a certain strand of contemporary fatalistic and nihilistic thinking regarding the Anthropocene. At its simplest it questions the trend toward mysticism and obfuscation in environmental education and demands a response to the environmental crisis precisely through reason and rationality. How shall this be undertaken? On one level, the hauntings of 妖怪 (Yōkai) and 幽霊 (Yūrei) in Japanese folklore shall act as a prism through which to understand the impact of the fantastical on the contemporary imagination, and on another level, I shall critique the fantastical as such to question the so-called inaccessibility of the hyperobject (Morton, 2014), which in the end leaves us despairingly passive and without the possibility of response. It is in the work of the Japanese philosopher 井上円了 (Inoue Enryō) and especially his defence of Western Enlightenment beliefs during Japan’s modernisation period (1868–1912) that a curious method and heuristic tool is found that may be used to address not only the problem of mystification in Japanese philosophy but also the obfuscation of the ecological object of recent Western thought. Seemingly sacrilegiously, it is through reason and at the limits of the rational that one may approach the hyperobject-in-itself, which is to say, the unfathomable as such.

Economic development and environmental development have been long-lasting debates between capitalists and environmentalists. It is also seen as a debate around modernization with globalization at one end and environmental justice at the other end. Our society today is moving rapidly toward development and increased industrial revolutions and globalization. Indigenous communities in Ogoniland are also experiencing such development due to multinationals’ exploration of crude oil in their communities. The exploration of oil has caused environmental, socioeconomic, health and political problems in indigenous communities in Ogoniland. These issues require a depth of understanding from all sectors (public, government and corporate sectors) to address them. Hence, through textual analysis and interviews from the government and environmental social movement organizations, this paper presents the types of environmental educatiSon programs carried out in indigenous communities in Ogoniland to address environmental issues and other socioeconomic issues due to oil exploration. These environmental education programs in indigenous communities contribute to environmental policy creation, the development of environmental curricula and pragmatic actions toward mitigating environmental degradation and socioeconomic issues in indigenous communities. Thus, revealing the significance of indigenous knowledge and practices in addressing contemporary environmental issues.

Throughout Australia there has been a substantial interest in enviromental education for more than a decade. Much human and financial effort has gone into curriculum development at the school level and into support for implementation via inservice education, conferences, workshops, etc. Relatively little systematic evaluation of these efforts has been undertaken at the level of what students are learning.

Most definitions of enviromental education internationally and in Australia emphasise the importance of affective learning concerning the environment alongside more usual cognitive knowledge and skills. Accordingly any evaluation should recognise this somewhat unusual balance among the intended learnings compared with most other subject areas.

Recent research in several areas of school learning has brought out the importance of starting with an explicit recognition of the perceptions and understandings students already hold about topics. Teaching and learning of the topic then ought to be processes that enable the learners to generate or construct from these starting points, new understandings and perceptions. There has, however, been almost no research, apart from a comparative study by Schaeffer and his co-workers of West German and Phillippino secondary school students' associations with the word, ENVIRONMENT. (Schaeffer, 1979; Hernandez, 1981; Villavicencio, 1981). This paper reports an attempt in Victoria to begin to fill these gaps.

Professional teaching associations in Australia and abroad have been developing teacher and/or teaching standards and associated professional learning and assessment models in the key discipline areas since the 1990s. In Australia, a specific intent of this approach is to capture and recognise the depth and range of accomplished educators' teaching. Despite the increasing work in this area, there has been a dearth of discussion about teacher standards in environmental education and no previous attempt to research and/or develop professional teacher standards for environmental education in Australia. This paper discusses the history of teacher standards in Australia, and considers the implications for the development of teacher standards in environmental education. In doing so, we present a research-practice model that is currently being piloted in Victoria for developing accomplished professional teacher standards and learning in environmental education with and for accomplished Australian primary and secondary teachers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, recognised as a seminal German polymath, developed a unique approach for investigating nature, termed “delicate empiricism”. Goethe's approach uses empathy, imagination and intuition to promote a participatory engagement with the world. It goes beyond the dualistic-rationalism that defines “conventional” ecological research and can lead to novel insights. “Delicate empiricism” was applied in an ecologically-degraded agricultural landscape in the Brigalow Belt, Queensland, Australia, and its potential for increasing landscape understanding and providing a basis for land-use design was assessed. It was found that Goethe's approach led to holistic, qualitative landscape awareness, not ordinarily accessible via “conventional science”. Application of “delicate empiricism” also gave rise to a land-use design that refected the Australian-ness of the Brigalow Belt landscape, particularly the potential for recovery of native biodiversity values through retention of regrowth vegetation. Overall, the study suggested that there is merit in educating Australian ecologists about “delicate empiricism” to encourage more creative and sensitive landscape management, that is in sync with the environment.

Historically the values of schools and colleges have mirrored those of the larger society. Not only has education uncritically accepted the association of progress and the unfettered growth economy, it has trained engineers and managers, performed the research and developed the technologies which in aggregate have had such a devastating impact on the environment. A fundamental reorientation now needs to occur with the development of new assumptions undergirding education which treat the interaction of ecological processes, market forces, cultural values, equitable decision making, government actions, and environmental impacts of human activities in a holistic, interdependent manner (Berberet in Fien, 1993).

This paper considers experiences of speculative immersion as artists and children map the multilayered sonic ecology of Birrarung Marr, a traditional meeting place for Aboriginal language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We explore how speculative practices of immersion shaped the mapping of precolonial, contemporary, and future soundscapes of Birrarung Marr, and the ceremonial burial of these sonic cartographies for future listeners. Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts of immersion in mutually respectful and purposeful conversation, we work to re-theorise immersive experience as a process of ecological multiplicity and affective resonance, rather than one of phenomenological containment. By approaching immersion as both a concept and a sensation that ruptures the boundary between body and environment, we follow how immersion ‘drifts’ across porous thresholds of sensing, thinking, dreaming, making, and knowing in situated environmental education contexts. In doing so, the paper stresses the importance of speculative immersive experience in cultivating liveable urban futures under conditions of climate change, and responds to the need for new understandings of immersion that take more-than-human ecologies of experience into account.

By simply modifying management decisions towards an environmentally friendly approach, organisations can minimise their negative operational impacts on the environment. A key question is whether a manager’s pro-environmental decision-making behaviour can be determined by their personal characteristics. Our study hypothesised that three core attributes (personal values, attitudes, and subjective norms) of a person can predict their future pro-environmental behavioural intention — the closest proxy of actual pro-environmental behaviour. Using the theoretical lenses of Value-Attitude-Behaviour theory (VAB) and Value-Belief-Norm theory (VBN), we examined the roles of three core attributes of future business leaders (MBA students) on their intention to behave pro-environmentally. The results of structural equation modelling indicate that future managers’ environmental values, attitudes, and subjective norms are positively associated with their intentions related to pro-environmental behaviour. Mediation test of the structural model further indicates that environmental attitudes mediate the link between personal values and intention; however, subjective norms does not. Our results imply that effective recruitment and selection mechanisms may incorporate these attributes to assist organisations in the identification of environmentally responsible business leaders. By hiring environmentally responsible managers, organisations will be able to better fulfil their commitment towards sustainability outcomes.

Physical education (PE) is a site that brings categories of difference under erasure, presenting a wicked problem for how a sense of belonging is cultivated for all learners to foster physical activity, health and wellbeing across the lifespan. This article explores how, we, as two teachers of PE, turned to postqualitative and ‘new’ materialist inquiry to generate a sense of belonging within a PE/environmental education nexus. Taking up Karen Barad’s agential realism and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, we conceptualise this PE/environmental education nexus as a transdisciplinary approach to curriculum that enacts a knowing/being/thinking/doing between, and across, borders, boundaries, categories, fields and practices. We then show how this nexus was actualised in our teaching practices through two vignettes. As transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum are grounded in the lived, embodied and embedded (micro) politics of location, individuals are imbued with affective obligation to enact affirmative patterns of relating moment-to-moment. This means that a sense of belonging is always imminent, invented and co-created, bringing attention to situated obligations to enact good relations with ourselves, each other and wider planetary systems.

Environmental work deals in the most depressing of statistics — measures of damage to our planet and measures of apparent incapacity to change them. Years working to bring about changes in the way people deal with their environment can be very frustrating and ultimately debilitating. Some aspects of personal frustration and the despair it leads to are examined. The most advanced tools used by environmental scientists such as systems theory are themselves shown to be a source of frustration. A principal source of despair is shown to be frustrated expectations based on faulty world views.

Suggestions toward resolving this outcome of concern are made. They involve personal work toward changing the expectations we have of our tools and the way we deal with reality. Evidence for the efficacy of such suggestions is taken from General System Theory itself. Deep Ecology and interpretations of twentieth century physics.