Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) remains an urgent priority to combat the numerous social, environmental and political crises prominent in the 21st century. This article shares the experiences of teacher educators who integrated ESD into discipline-specific units of study for pre-service teachers. Using a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach, we explore how curriculum change for ESD was navigated and discuss how institutional support was essential for providing legitimacy and necessary resources. Drawing on Noddings’ approach to ethics of care, we emphasise the significance of valuing the perspectives and experiences of stakeholders involved in curriculum change and advocate for inclusive and responsive approaches that engage individuals meaningfully throughout the process.

This paper reflects on the national referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament that took place in Australia in mid-October 2023. At the time of writing, the aftershocks from the failure of the referendum to gain the necessary majorities were still being felt keenly by many of the Voice advocates and supporters. The hurt and grief of many First Nations people were shared by millions of non-Indigenous “Yes” voters, while much reckoning continued in the subsequent weeks and months. The author here explores what might have been gained if more attention had been given to what an Indigenous Voice to Parliament might “sound like,” instead of the excessive focus on, and public discourse around what it might “look like.” Resources from the philosophies and physiology of voice, communication ethics, cultural studies, critical anthropology, Australian Indigenous writing and scholarship, and psychoanalytic politics are utilised to explore the connections between the human voice, vocal expression, hearing and listening, silence and song.

Despite the growing influence of the “material” turn within childhood studies and education, scholarship related to teaching and learning within the early childhood classroom remains a largely humanistic endeavour. By applying relational and multispecies onto-epistomologies to both children’s classroom relations and our own teacher subjectivities, this work aims to highlight what other possibilities emerge when the dominant hierarchies of teacher-researcher-child-non-human are destabilised. Taking the idea of destabilisation literally, we diffractively map our own experiences as teacher-researchers within early years educational contexts, utilising diffractive methods to narrow-in on the mutually constituted conditions of movement. These more-than-human movements emerged during improvised classroom encounters between young children, animals and plants and varied in intensity and duration, as these constructed cuts and data (re)presentations continue to “move” us years later. Building upon research that explores the relationalities of children and non-human others, as well as “how movement does relationships’’ in early childhood educational contexts (Riley & Proctor, 2023, p. 663), we argue that a complex meta/physics of more-than-human movement affords literal and conceptual turning, enmeshing, decentering, connecting and rupturing, producing a less certain but more attuned early years teacher.

In this paper, we offer a commentary on the climate change content in Ghana’s primary and junior high school science curriculum. Since 2019, the government of Ghana has mandated climate change education at multiple levels of the school system. However, there is very little analysis of these curricula. This paper fills an important gap by critically reviewing the climate change content in the science curriculum in a country with a complex and tenuous past regarding capitalist and colonialist expansion and exploitation. We note that while the curriculum attends to technical details of greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts, it elides the larger global context that has led to the rise in carbon emissions and anthropogenic climate change. We make the case for a climate change curriculum that integrates culture, language and histories, and tackles the complexities of globalisation.

The Kigali Amendment introduced a new family of chemical compounds, which do not contribute to stratospheric ozone depletion but present a high global warming potential, under the watch of the Montreal Protocol in 2016. Earlier this year, a press note from the World Meteorological Organization entitled “Ozone layer recovery is on track, helping avoid global warming by 0.5°C” caught our attention because of the wrong conclusions that can be potentially drawn by laypersons due to an apparent linkage of ozone depletion and global warming problems. Public communication of the Montreal Protocol since the Kigali Amendment should be more careful than ever to avoid lessening the social perception of the threat of climate change, particularly considering that society already has a distorted representation of these problems, assuming causal relations between ozone depletion and climate change, that could lead to unfounded optimism towards the climate crisis.

Energy literacy can empower individuals to make informed decisions about energy use. However, the level of public interest in learning about energy-related topics remains uncertain, and there is a dearth of research exploring energy literacy-related knowledge gaps. This mixed-methods study aimed to address those issues. A survey of 3,843 citizens from four European countries revealed that most citizens have only a moderate interest in learning about energy. Age, gender, educational level, income level, living situation and environmental attitudes appear to have a significant effect on individuals’ interests. The study identified key knowledge demand areas regarding saving energy and reducing costs, becoming self-sufficient in energy production and cooperating with others for more efficient energy use. The findings indicate that engagement with energy-related topics could be improved by considering affective factors such as individual interest. The study also reveals a need for greater interdisciplinarity in energy research.

How does Australia’s latest Indigenous defeat relate to Environmental Education? The answer is direct complicity. This paper begins with the premise that the failure of Australia’s 2023 referendum on “The Voice to Parliament” is directly connected with education. The chapter builds on the proposition that local and Indigenous public knowledge could — and should — be the heart of environmental education. We apply a post-qualitative practice that is underpinned by innovative feminisms and the post-qualitative methods within a Multispecies Collaboratory, an experimental way of transforming our learning by attending to the responsive, relational world of all beings. We use this practice to think with while exploring socio-ecological relations, especially our own. Collaboratory colleagues include rivers with their kincentric ecologies, urban park ecosystems and backyard kin or families. Journaling, creative writing and photography record our learning journeys. The article concludes that continuing colonisation, epistemic violence and a culture of denial reinforce the dominant paradigm of silencing Indigenous voices. We argue that an Indigenous-informed onto-epistemology of living place can — and should — inform the heart and practice of environmental education, and an Indigenous-informed Multispecies Collaboratory is one way to deepen the multispecies engagement that underpins environmental education.

In this article, we adopt assemblage as methodology and as a way to foreground the vitality and relational agency of other species as they encounter humans. Research as assemblage is a process of becoming with others, and we experienced that ontological process during three environmental excursions as we became entangled in multispecies assemblages with children, the Crow, the Sea Eagle and the Bee. The production of the three assemblages and the rhizomic networks that formed materially and discursively across time occurred within an affective milieu characterised by sensory attentiveness and attunement to the affective power of coincidence. Analysing the formation and reformation of the assemblages enabled us to identify the phenomenon of “ontological flickering” where the ontological foundation of experience shifted moment by moment and remained playfully unresolved. We also consider how multispecies encounters relate to wildness, understood in Thoreau’s terms as unsettling encounters with otherness. In concluding, we recognise our incomplete becoming with others as co-authors and acknowledge the Crow the Sea Eagle and the Bee as powerful teachers.

Settler-colonial futurity and colonial onto-epistemology are embedded across mainstream Australian public education institutions and schooling. While Country is central to Indigenous being, knowledges and pedagogy, Australian public and school education and curricula regularly fail to engage with Country and place in its historical, political, institutional, more-than-human, and relational dimensions. This paper investigates how colonial discourse and narratives permeate public and schooling education resources about mining and the Australian gold rush, including those presented in local Victorian gold rush museums. These support an influential story of Australia’s past/present that erases First Nations1 custodial relations with Country, strengthens settler-colonial futurity and celebrates and legitimises its colonising and extractive relations between people, Country, and ecologies. The paper presents an argument for attending to critical, relational geopolitics in education and environmental education to destabilise and shift these ways of understanding. It considers opportunities and challenges presented by Australian curricula in terms of their capacity to develop geopolitical understandings of past/present/future social and ecological in/justice, and to support new political understandings and sense of connection and belonging with Country.

This qualitative research study investigates the effectiveness of gamified handicrafts as an inspiration for teenagers to practice recycling and upcycling. The study utilises focus group interviews and thematic analysis to explore the perceptions and experiences of 15 teenagers who participated in an educational programme called Edcraft, which combines gamification and handicrafts to promote sustainable practices among youth. The findings reveal that Edcraft successfully motivates teenagers to engage in recycling and upcycling activities through its gamified approach, which includes challenges, rewards and social interaction. Themes such as ‘social connections are vital’, ‘convenience and rewards are significant motivators’, ‘gamified activities help attract and engage teens’ and ‘environmental knowledge is crucial to prolonging recycling’ emerged from the thematic analysis. The results also highlight the positive impact of Edcraft on teenagers’ attitudes towards the environment and their willingness to adopt sustainable behaviours beyond the programme. The implications of these findings for promoting environmental education and sustainability among teenagers are discussed, and recommendations for future research and practice are provided.

Though there has been a marked increase in research driven by posthumanist theory and inspired by the common worlds research approach, practical approaches to conducting this type of research have not been well documented and shared within the literature. This article explores the process of navigating the planning and conducting of research that aims to think with more-than-human worlds. Three research methods that were applied in a study involving young children in a forest school program are described: (1) non-participant observation, (2) observing the park through “sit spots,” and (3) the use of wearable cameras to film a different perspective. I explore each of these as a way to guide other researchers grappling with the tensions and challenges of conducting posthumanist research. Any combination of these methods could be considered within research that aims to disrupt the dominant anthropocentric lens in early childhood education for sustainability and beyond.

In this article, we discuss our investigation of children’s imaginative sense-making and its materiality in climate change education. Drawing on a new materialist approach, our research contributes to knowledge about the material significance in children’s sense-making related to climate change. During a project called Riddle of the Spirit in a Finnish primary school, we invited children to explore the concepts of global warming and carbon dioxide through narrative, playful and multimodal activities. Inspired by postqualitative methods, our relational analysis, based on video materials, maps and examines two episodes of children’s small group inquiry. Our findings unfold the material–discursive intra-actions, through which a prop turned into a whale’s head, the Titanic film appeared, and water and carbon dioxide became important to children’s bodies. With these specific events, the study illustrates how various materials conjoined and came to matter in the children’s sense-making of the concepts.

More-than-human refusal, as an expression of agency, plays an active role in constructing boundaries. In this article, I address what kind of environmental education is made possible by the productive constraints of respecting more-than-human boundaries and refusal. This is intertwined with how humans can practice being attentive to the intra-actions of more-than-humans when they are not physically present, are only speculated to be present or are present through artifacts. I rhizomatically analyse my relationship with a leafcutter bee (Megachile spp.) nest as a situated example of practicing a relational ethic of care. Through queering the boundary between myself and the leafcutter bee, nature becomes not something that I (human) experience, but as something we (bougainvillea-leafcutter bee-nest-human assemblage) produce through our human-and-more-than-human relationality. Rather than seeing limited proximity as prohibitive, environmental education can use this productive constraint to know-with more-than-human others in a way that disrupts the nature/culture binary — to blur the boundaries between humans and more-than-humans without violating the agency asserted by more-than-humans.

This study critically examines the implications of integrating Indigenous relational worldviews into the water governance framework of the Saskatchewan River Delta. Using a relational theoretical framework and community-based participatory research methodology, both Indigenous community members and non-Indigenous researchers collectively examine the negative impacts of Western water governance policies and practices on the Métis community residing in Cumberland House, located in northeast Saskatchewan, Canada. Through Indigenous traditional water story-sharing methods with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, our focus centres on Indigenous interpretations and ways of knowing the Delta. The community highlighted the pervasive influence of power dynamics and political agendas in the governance of the Delta. As such, we emphasise the necessity of challenging settler colonial systems and structures and reinvigorating Indigenous worldviews for water governance. By doing so, we advocate for the advancement of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in their relationship with land and water, thereby promoting the meaningful implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action.

Anthropogenic climate change is a significant driver of disasters, such as tropical storms, floods, drought and loss of biodiversity, amplifying their frequency and severity worldwide. The annual incidence of extreme weather-related events increases with growing human exposure to risks. The Sendai Framework and its associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise the interlinkages between disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and sustainable development. However, despite the best intentions of disaster planners, the current efforts are suboptimal in promoting implementation. Education is a critical goal to achieve sustainable development. Environmental Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) seeks to equip students with the knowledge, skills, values and agency necessary to address the complex challenges of climate change and global warming. One example of such an educational programme is the “Speak to Me in Numbers” programme. This interdisciplinary ESD programme educates 9th graders in SDG-related scientific content through scientific data analysis. It strives to inspire students to develop their agency and become responsible future citizens by taking local climate action to bring about sustainable development in their communities. Empowered young people who become agents that bring about global changes are crucial in the context of the climate crisis. However, such efforts should be undertaken cautiously to avoid doing more harm than good by evoking climate anxiety. These implications are discussed.

Population size is a significant variable that can be addressed to help combat climate change. If global fertility rates dropped by only 0.5 births per woman, almost a third of the emissions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change could be saved. This is equivalent to the annual emissions that would be saved from doubling the fuel efficiency of cars, increasing wind energy 50-fold or improving nuclear energy three times over. It accounts for over half of the Earth’s yearly emissions. Yet, is there a way to address population size without violating human rights? To what extent should individual reproductive practices change? These are live questions. However, various philosophers claim that procreators should limit themselves to having no more than one child. Doing so, they say, strikes the most appropriate balance between protecting reproductive justice for people who want to have children and achieving a sustainable future.

This paper pushes back on this claim. There are plausibly too many sexist, racist, classist and eugenic outcomes in demanding people limit their procreation to one child. Therefore, philosophers should relax their messaging about permissibility limits and be more concerned with helping people cultivate the right character to think through procreation and overpopulation.

This paper explores the potential for extending relational ontologies to include a specific focus on human-plant relations. We theorise the emergence of a vegetal ontology, as a novel way of working and remaking theories around human-plant relations that can be applied to the field of environmental education. A vegetal ontological approach, as applied in the environmental education research project that informs this article, abandons hierarchical comparisons of plants, which are often historically positioned as “lesser species,” mere “objects” and “resources” even. We start our paper with a modest review of key theoretical approaches informing past and recent environmental education studies on child-plant relations. We then return to the discussion started within the introduction to the paper on how we have theorised a vegetal ontology as a mode of a relational ontology focussing particularly on human-plant relations and drawing on posthumanist, new materialist and Indigenous approaches. To conclude the paper, we then put this newly named vegetal ontology to work. We apply it to a recent study on childhood-plant encounters where researchers engaged with young children and their families in a botanical garden setting and a group of environmental education elders reflected on the significance of plant relations in their childhoods.