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.

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.

Environmental management or stewardship is one area of environmental philosophy which has achieved a degree of acceptability in development decision-making. Its success is a product of its characteristics, e.g. that of taking a generally moderate approach to what causes an environmental problem, and of working for change through traditional channels. However, even stewardship is not without internal divisions, divisions which reflect differing views about the degree of change needed to avoid ecological disaster. Stewardship may be a useful environmental philosophy at a time when the development ethos (jobs, income, growth, productivity) predominates. But this paper poses the question, is it the best philosophy possible at this time? Finally, the impact of this philosophy on education is considered, highlighting the two aspects of what stewardship sees in environmental education and what environmental education could do about stewardship.

Environmental educators remain challenged by how to encourage people to make connections between environmental quality and human development in a way that is socially just and equitable for all living things. This article explores links between performance-based learning and environmental education pedagogy as one way to address this challenge. Sixteen children (8–10 years) from an Auckland primary school worked with a performance artist to present Lookout, an intimate performance by a child for an adult. Its intent was to juxtapose people’s different backgrounds, experiences and ages in a two-way communication of their view of Auckland City through an environmental lens encompassing past, present and future, while surveying the city from a vantage point. Analysis of data from focus groups with the children and interviews with their parents (also participants) showed that the Lookout process led to children developing a deeper understanding of Auckland City’s issues, a stronger sense of connection to their city, an understanding of the future, and feelings of empowerment. However, their parents’ learning was more tenuous. Three key elements to the success of Lookout for learning are identified, and it is proposed that these could be used when developing performance-based environmental education programs.

Environmental education across the early years has become increasingly important in Australia since the implementation of the Early Years Learning Framework and the Australian Curriculum. These documents promote a connection to nature for young children as well as environmental responsibility. In Western Australia, large areas of natural environments are bush spaces, accessible by young children, families and schools. There is no existing research investigating early childhood teacher’s knowledge of plants in these bush spaces and the utilisation of these spaces in teaching botany as part of their teaching practice. The discussion in this article examines part of a larger year-long multi-site case study of the changes in the botanical understanding of two early childhood teachers of children aged 5–8 years, in Western Australian schools both before and after the Mosaic Approach, botanical practices and Indigenous knowledges were incorporated into their teaching practice. This article focuses on the changes of botanical literacies of the early childhood teachers specifically. The findings suggest that using inquiry-based and place-based methods and including First Nations Peoples’ perspectives about plants whilst teaching in the bush can significantly increase the plant knowledge and understanding of teachers, as well their own scientific and botanical literacies.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

This research focus on the evaluation of the impact on students’ attitudes towards the environment, fostered by their involvement in an educational citizen science project related to the monitoring of physicochemical properties and the detection of (micro)plastics in Portuguese coastal waters. We developed an attitude scale, comprising four dimensions (Collective, Personal, Recycling and Reuse and Microplastics), which was applied, as a pre-test and post-test, to 574 middle school students (aged 12–14): 442 in the experimental group and 132 in the control group. Initially, based on pre-test results, both groups revealed positive attitudes. In the experimental group, the post-test results revealed that significantly positive attitude changes were promoted in all dimensions, whereas, in the control group, this occurred only in the Personal dimension. The control group also exhibited significantly negative attitude changes in the collective dimension. Students’ engagement in sustainability-related citizen science projects can enhance environmentally literate society.

This paper presents a learning journey about deepening capacity for teaching with Place through relational learning and shares three pedagogical ingredients that are integral in enacting more ethical, decolonial place pedagogies. We are three women, educators working in community and teacher education with interests in environmental education, decoloniality and indigeneity. We write from the position of people whose ancestry is not Indigenous to the places we were born, nor those where we live now. We bring diverse experiences, voices, bodies and memories of Place into productive conversations as we think and write together about how we are learning with Place, and our response-abilities for enacting regenerative place pedagogies. We situate our emergent and relational inquiry within our experiences and encounters with Place in solidarity with the call for the sharing of stories that “explore knowing and being as relational practices” (Bawaka Country et al.). Our paper is premised on the understanding that our ethical commitment to decoloniality involves learning to live and learn with and love the places we are now, and prioritising Indigenous philosophies, scholarship and ways of knowing Place throughout our education practices.

The history of environmental education in Australia is political, and fraught with power battles. Indeed, environmental education in Australia (as in many places elsewhere) has always been political. The early calls for environmental education came as a response to the perceived growing environmental crises on the 1960s. At this time, it was seen as a scientific and social priority by scientists, environmentalists and academics, but it was not seen as an educational priority by education departments. Rather, environmental educators were treated as yet another adjectival education lobby group wanting space in an already overcrowded curriculum. There was a time when most state education authorities were engaging with environmental education, but the politicisation of the placement of sustainability as (an optional) cross-curriculum priority has enabled avoidance of the politics of environmental issues and thereby a political stance that is tacitly supporting the status quo of the current neoliberal political systems. This article argues that the times have changed and so has the nature of politics and power bases, and it is time to rethink approaches to environmental education research and recognise that the politics of the past may not be the politics of the future as the generations grow different.

In this article, we collectively explore the significance of engaging with theory in environmental education research. Inspired by Jackson and Mazzei’s (2011) postqualitative research methodology, each researcher provides a short sample of engaging with his/her chosen theoretical concept for one shared data source. Through our three individual theoretical engagements with a short video, we collectively demonstrate that the data may be enacted in different ways, based on the theoretical concept that is engaged. This may potentially actualise multiple different and partial realities of the researched, and by decentring the researcher, this can also rework humanist epistemologies. We suggest that non-researcher-centred and/or non-anthropocentric actualising may contribute to more sustainable relationships in environmental education and its research, not only between the researcher and the researched, but also among the researchers.