The subject of environmental science (ES) was introduced into Bhutanese schools to educate students about sustainable environmental conservation. This study aims to answer the research question: What are the impacts of studying ES on Bhutanese students for environmental sustainability? The study employed mixed methods to draw data from interviews with six principals, 14 teachers and 189 students, and surveys with 14 teachers and 563 students from six secondary schools. Participants indicated the development of students’ Gross National Happiness value of sustainable environmental and socioeconomic development. However, an anthropocentric perspective appeared to be dominant among participants, suggesting a need to develop ecocentric worldviews to support sustainability. Most students noted their changed behaviours, development of optimism, stewardship and agency towards ecological sustainability from studying ES. To prepare students to take action to address sustainability issues, teachers could leverage students’ optimism, agency and stewardship through action-oriented approaches to teaching ES.

The School Strike 4 Climate New Zealand (SS4CNZ) movement have organised and led four strikes between 2019 and 2021. With each successive strike, adult support for students’ demands increased. Their most notable achievement was garnering sufficient support to pass Aotearoa New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Bill into legislation. However, tensions with SS4CNZ led to the Auckland Chapter announcing its disbandment in 2021. There were mixed responses to their decision. In this reflective essay I argue that this disbandment was a positive move forward because these youth were showing their willingness to re-build relationships with their Māori and Pacific Island activist peers. By disbanding, not only were these young leaders enabling their Māori and Pacific Island peers to lead future actions, they were acknowledging the connections between racism, colonialism and climate justice; responding to our relational crisis by demonstrating the importance of re-building robust and reciprocal relationships between humans and more-than-humans when advocating for ways to navigate towards a climate-just society.

This paper is authored by Bawaka Country, acknowledging Country’s ability to teach and share. Country is homeland and place. Country is everything and the relationships that bring everything to life. Country is knowledge. This paper is shaped and enabled by songspirals. Songspirals are sung and cried by Yolŋu people in north east Arnhem Land, Australia, to awaken Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place.

The Goŋ-gurtha songspiral leads this paper, showing us how a Yolŋu Country-led pedagogy centres Country’s active agency by learning through, with, and as Country. This pedagogy shares with us the ongoing connections within and between generations to ensure that knowledge remains strong and that sharing is done the right way, according to Yolŋu Rom, Law/Lore. This learning is predicated on relationality and responsibility. It is a more-than-human learning in which human knowing is decentred and Country is knowledgeable. It is a learning which recognises and respects its limits and it is a learning in which the ongoing sovereignty of Yolŋu people is front and centre.

The aim of the research is to examine the environmental awareness and attitudes towards the environment of 5–6-year-old children attending nature-centred private kindergartens and public kindergartens. The study group of the descriptive research that used a screening model consists of 48 children from nature-centred Private Maki Kindergartens and 48 children from public kindergartens in the province of Balikesir in the 2020–2021 academic year. A Personal Information Form and Environmental Awareness and Attitude Scale for Preschool Children, developed by Soydan and Samur (International Electronic Journal of Environmental Education, 7(1), 78–97, 2017) for 60–72 months old children, were used in the study. The scale consists of two sub-dimensions as Attitude Towards Environment (15 items) and Environmental Awareness (11 Items) and 26 pictures. The Cronbach α coefficients of the Environmental Awareness (.74) and Attitude (.78) Scale for Preschool Children and the overall scale (.82) were calculated. The data were collected by the researcher through one-on-one meetings with each child. The mean, mode, median, skewness and kurtosis values of the variables in the study were calculated. To determine whether the environmental awareness and environmental attitudes of the study group differ according to the school they attend, independent samples t-test was conducted. According to the results of the research, a significant difference was found in environmental attitudes and environmental awareness of children in nature-centred kindergartens compared to children in public kindergartens. Children attending public schools are less exposed to the environment. Preparing the Pre-School Education Program in an environment-friendly manner to increase the environmental awareness of children attending public schools will be effective in terms of making a difference in their attitudes towards the environment.

What would it be like to learn to live in and experience a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How can we learn to awarely participate in a world of communication and interaction, in which trees, crows and rivers may grace us with a response to our attention and our call? How do we learn not just to know this intellectually but ‘proved upon our pulses’, as John Keats put it. As artist and writer, we reflect on the contribution our practices can have to the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on living cosmos panpsychism and examples from our practice.

This study investigates nature connection practices in a nonformal place-responsive programme for primary school-aged children in Brisbane, Australia. The practices are explored in terms of their role in making visible the interconnectedness of humans, place and the more-than-human, drawing on posthuman educational theories and practice, in particular common worlds approaches, as well as place pedagogies. The project explores the practices of sit spot, solo wander, journalling, gathering, story-sharing and nature names with a group of children participating in an outdoor homeschool programme. Children’s representations of their experiences in place through story, writing, drawing and the collection of items from nature are analysed to create narrative summaries, which are reflected on and presented with some of the children’s journal entries. The study finds that when integrated together, the nature connection practices: foster embodied and generative place encounters; enable relationships with place and the more-than-human to emerge; cultivate learning with place and (re)story place relations. The paper recommends the use of these nature connection practices in programmes that focus on or integrate outdoor learning in order to generate new understandings about place that recognise the entanglement of humans, place and the more-than-human world.

In this paper, we employ Deleuzian philosophy to explore the complex challenges confronting teachers and education systems posed by the climate emergency and the implications of the resulting posthumanist turn. Self-identified climate-activist teachers working in schools in Aotearoa New Zealand were asked to draw Deleuzian assemblages of their educational realities and of themselves while contemplating the climate emergency. Their thought-provoking drawings were used as semiotic artefacts during unstructured Zoom interviews, leading to rich conversations. Through this process, the drawings channel affect within the research assemblage, entangling the reader actively into the research process. Insights gained from the participants problematise the perspectives of teachers in response to the climate emergency and lead us to conceptualise the potential of teachers as Deleuze’s nomadic change makers toward posthuman futures.

Anthropogenic climate change and the necessary transformation of society to mitigate its consequences constitutes an unprecedented educational challenge. Responding to the climate emergency and to society’s awakening climate activism generates a complex situation for school leadership in particular. Here, we report findings from our research with climate activist students and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that school leadership plays a crucial role in enabling student and teacher agency and the development of effective Climate Change Education in schools. We utilise assemblage thinking, situating this within the new materialisms, to conceptualise schools and their leadership as dynamic assemblages, and we discuss teacher and student experiences as actors across such assemblages. We conclude that deterritorialisation and decoding of educational institutions and their leadership practices can promote and enable education to become a driver of the cultural transformation of society that the climate emergency mandates.

As scientific literacy plays a contributing role in identifying, analysing, and solving environmental matters that our world is facing, there is growing consensus to mandate environmental matters in science classrooms following five decades of efforts in promoting environmental education. However, much remains unknown about the relationship between students’ awareness of environmental matters and their science literacy scores on standardised test. Using data drawn from the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) science performance assessment, this study investigates the relationship between students’ awareness of environmental matters and their science literacy scores in the context of established predictors for science learning. In all the regions’ multilevel models ranging from medium to large effect sizes, a significant and positive relationship emerges between students’ awareness of environmental matters and science literacy scores. Among the well-known predictors for science learning, student science self-efficacy associates positively with student science literacy scores across the regions. In contrast, inquiry-based science instruction associates negatively with the scores. Except for these two well-known predictors, variations exist in the relationships between other variables among the regions. Given all the regions’ evidence showing the positive linkage between students’ awareness of environmental matters and science literacy scores, the present study signifies the importance of integrating environmental issues into traditional science classrooms, suggesting that there should be systematic supports that enable both environmental and science educators to collaborate towards the development of an interdisciplinary environmental science curriculum.

With water shortage and increasing demand for water, education may have an important role in promoting the sustainable management of water resources. Educational curricula are the key resources used by teachers for studentsʼ teaching and training purposes. This study assessed water culture and water education-related criteria and standards in programmes and school curricula for Primary, Middle and upper Secondary school education in Morocco. It also investigated teachers for suggestions and views regarding methods for water-related topics and concepts implementation. The main tools used consisted of a content analysis grid for programmes and educational guidelines. A questionnaire and interviews were administered to 95 teachers of different subject areas, belonging to the three investigated school levels. Findings showed that the occurrence of water education criteria and standards is weak in school curricula of the investigated school levels. They were explicitly or implicitly addressed depending on the subject areas. The main topics consisted of water cycle definition, water as a vital source, water pollution sources, water economy interest. However, no reference has been made to water law, its accessibility, aesthetics and water-related professions.

Art is as old as human culture. For most of the time, art was part of an exchange between humans and the cosmic order. Art was meant as a gift to nourish the fecundity of life. Art was communication with ancestral creational powers — the invocation of a poetic space from which creation entered the material realm. This paper explores art as a way of tapping into the invisible forces of reality. I argue that humans can experience these forces as aliveness (joy/desire to give) and can transmit them by poetic creation. Through art, humans have a capacity to nourish life, in parallel to how natural productivity unfolds from the unseen into the embodied domain. This capacity is a source of artistic creation. It is a crucial means to participate in a life-giving cosmos. Although the Western understanding of art is far from this attitude, art has remained the domain where aliveness is accommodated not with empirical, but with imaginational means. In the current global crisis of life, it is crucial to remember the potential of art not only to relate but to contribute to aliveness. Programs in environmental education should build on the direct perception and expressive imagination of aliveness.

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.

Debates about teaching reading have long been a part of educational vernacular, frequently reduced to polarised views about phonics. This attention can unnecessarily divert from the cumulative skills required for learning to read and comprehensive research, which indicates the positive influence of systematic phonics instruction on students’ reading outcomes. Australian education has recently moved beyond these reading wars to include explicit phonics instruction in a reformed national English Curriculum. This provides an opportune time to engage preservice teachers entering the workforce with strategies that explicitly teach these skills while nurturing young people’s ecological consciousness through positive nature connections. With this focus in mind, a participatory action research project involving preservice teachers was undertaken, from which an Eco-Conceptual Framework ensued. The project put immersive activities in place, promoting transdisciplinary ways to develop learners’ connections with nature using images collected from participants’ real world when learning to read. Results indicate that action research energised preservice teachers’ perceived knowledge, self-efficacy about teaching early reading utilising place and skills in designing visual resources. It brings attention to the critical influence of preservice teachers’ dispositions and preferred natural spaces on what images are collected and offered when designing early reading activities utilising the natural world.

Education for Sustainability (EfS) is crucial for changes in environmental behaviour (EB), and little is known about the EB of primary school teachers tasked with teaching EfS. This study sought to better understand the EB of pre-service primary science teachers. EB was qualitatively evaluated, characterising teachers’ personal environmental activism and commitment to implement EfS among pupils and their families. Data was collected via two open questionnaires based on the Johari Window (JW) and the Authentic Inner Compass (AIC) models. Both questionnaires referred to EB twice: after exposure to the JW model and via statements from the AIC model, and again after 3 months. Findings show that the JW can reveal EB, while the AIC allowed participants to enrich their descriptions of their values, needs and commitment to EB. All participants agreed it was their duty to address EfS in class, but less than half mentioned this when describing actual behaviour. This study enables in-depth understanding of participants’ EB, including their actions, barriers and concerns, which might precede planning programmes on EfS implementation. As tomorrow educators, PSTs should be the focus of such programmes, which should be part of teacher education curricula.

The past two decades have seen a proliferation of Indigenous philosophy in environmental education. Much of this anti and decolonial work has made significant advances in deconstructing western modernist subjectivities; re-embedding and re-situating Indigenous and western relational epistemologies into human-earth relationality, including critical inquiry into questions of positionality, power-knowledge and human and more-than-human agency. Less articulated, however is the potential of these practices to address large scale and interrelated global challenges associated with climate and cultural-ecological crisis which coincide with the intensification of late capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacism. Relatedly, at global levels human rights approaches to planetary wellbeing continue to predominate and prominent international agreements such as UNDRIP, SDG, IPCCC and the Global Compact for Migration remain siloed from one another. Providing a broad sketch of these themes I then propose a whakapapa or kinship-based approach to life as laying the conceptual foundation for three regenerative place-based strategies which I subsequently introduce. Each strategy treats contemporary global challenges as interconnected and positions Indigenous knowledges and lifeways as playing a crucial role in addressing these. Moving from Indigenous philosophy in environmental education to broad intersectoral action, these strategies also make the interconnections between individual, collectivist, and structural approaches to Indigenous-led intergenerational resilience as one means to support our collective action toward healing human-environmental relations.

Today’s youth will inherit the brunt of climate change. Science literacy plays a critical role in raising future adults who commit to climate change mitigation by reducing daily household energy use. The objective of this study was to examine the mediating role of climate change knowledge efficacy on the positive influence of science literacy on engagement in energy conservation at home among Filipino adolescents. Data from the Program for International Student Assessment 2018 which included 7233 15-year-old high school students from 187 schools across 17 regions in the Philippines was used to address the study’s objective. Results showed that climate change knowledge efficacy fully mediated the positive association between science literacy and household energy conservation among Filipino adolescents. The study discussed the importance of emphasizing environmentalism in science education, parenting, and community programs as a viable and long-term climate change mitigation response.