Following inter-/transdisciplinary ideas, environmental education inherently collaborates with other subjects, including physical education. As the work with other subjects might be jeopardised by differing worldviews and paradigms, it is worth illuminating compatible and incompatible positions for inter-/transdisciplinary work. In physical education, the concept of physical literacy (PL) has recently gained considerable attention and adopts a student-centred perspective on human existence and learning. Therefore, the goal of the present narrative integrative review was to review the existing literature at the nexus between physical education and environmental education through a PL lens (five pre-defined concept assumptions). After screening for eligibility, a total of 129 articles were assigned to five different thematic categories: (a) conceptual discussion/argumentative patterns, (b) curricular discussion and international comparisons, (c) programming/intervention content, (d) teacher and enabler perspectives and (e) student outcomes/perspectives. The synthesis revealed that PL can harmonise with the educative work when respecting the disciplinary interests of both physical education and environmental education. However, few intervention studies translate the holistic PL claims into interventions. Accordingly, evaluations with teachers or students less frequently integrated holistic learning experiences in line with PL. In summary, previous research at the nexus has not yet exhausted its full inter-/transdisciplinary potential.

In this communication, the Australian authors – two Indigenous women and one woman with Anglo-Celtic ancestry – take us into Western Australian Indigenous language and worldviews, to help us reach toward a regenerative worldview. Indigenous words such as rinyi, pirlirr, and liyan are explored to point us in a direction unfamiliar to many English speakers, to Land and Country as living and responsive. The authors notice that it is very difficult to describe these terms in English, because English language does not seem sufficiently capacious to describe the depth of relational being-with Country that Indigenous languages portray. This may be changing, as various Indigenous and place-based groups publish their messages to the world. Within a methodology that is poetic and ontological, a storying method is used to illustrate elements of an Indigenous regenerative worldview that highlights the lyrics of life, for hope. It is for change agents who want to be transformative of the ways they participate with Country; and enable children to learn.

This paper shares a heuristic to support thinking about meaningful transformative education within the context of the contemporary environmental and social crisis. We describe the context of this work and explore the epistemological foundations for this model, which has been evolving and guiding our research and teaching and which underpins the six qualities of meaningful transformative education. The qualities are being open to alternative visions of the future and alternative approaches to education, accepting and embracing complexity, incorporating multiple types of knowledge, reorienting towards justice, developing ecological worldviews and supporting students to bring about systemic change. We also present a series of illustrative vignettes, informed by real-world practices of schools in England, which bring these qualities to life. The vignettes and subsequent discussion highlight possibilities and challenges for enacting a meaningful transformative education in schools.

Este artículo analiza la importancia de los movimientos sociales rurales en los procesos de transición de la agricultura convencional hacia prácticas agro-sostenibles. A la luz del concepto de decrecimiento, a través de un análisis comparativo entre cuatro unidades rurales (campamento/asentamientos) con y sin presencia del Movimiento de los Trabajadores Rurales Sin Tierra (MST) en el Gran São Paulo, la investigación reflexiona sobre la presencia de elementos esenciales para los procesos de transición agroecológica en estas comunidades, explorando los datos históricos y constitutivos de las prácticas sociales agrícolas que allí se implementan. Identificando la importancia de los procesos de formación política y técnica, como base para las acciones emprendidas por el MST en el campo de la sostenibilidad, este trabajo analiza la experiencia de los campamentos del Movimiento como loci que forman los sujetos sin tierra, capaces de emprender acciones agro-sostenibles. El presente artículo concluye con reflexiones sobre la relevancia de las teorías del decrecimiento para analizar los procesos de transición agroecológica, así como sobre las medidas educativas ambientales como elementos fundamentales de las políticas públicas destinadas a la construcción de sociedades más igualitarias, autónomas, inclusivas y sostenibles.

The research field of physical education and health (PEH) holds a great potential for exploring environmental issues, but the interest has been scarce. In this paper, we aim to trouble the separation of humans and nature, which has long been reproduced in PEH research and practice. To frame the problem, we turn to environmental education (EE) research, where scholars have argued that the human/nature divide serves as a foundation for environmental degradation. Drawing on Karen Barad’s posthumanist framework of agential realism, we explore the emerging conceptualisations of humans and nature when Swedish PEH policy documents are diffractively read through previous research, the concept of agential cuts and our own historicities. The analysis is presented through three diffraction patterns emerging around movement, health and indoors/outdoors, phenomena which are central not only to PEH but also to EE. We conclude that thinking with diffraction can open spaces within PEH educational policy for reimagining existing binaries between humans and nature. In this way, PEH practice might contribute to troubling the foundations for environmental injustices and issues of unsustainability.

I am a cinematic being of the Anthropocene. As a concerned citizen and environmental educator, I immerse myself in film. Gummo is a 1997 film by Harmony Korine that deeply resonates with me as a testament to the capacity and desire for humanity to realise the potential to rise from the epochal fall of the Anthropocene. I propose that my relationship with Gummo as arche-cinema is not just a process of watching and interpreting Korine’s cinematic world, but also (re)projecting my dreams of a new reality for the whole-Earth ecosystem onto the world-out-there. I suggest that my entanglement with Gummo exemplifies my climating and becoming-climate as film in our current human-induced climate crises, and in this way, I argue that I am learning to live-with climate change through film.

This paper explores educational fallout from the realisation that the world system has planetary boundaries as limits that are real and that require different thinking and governance concerning how human beings ought to inhabit the planet. It will be difficult to have billions of people think about global concerns when they are focused on their own well-being. And so it comes to governance, locally, with bigger things in mind. Environmental education rhetoric has already begun to expand thinking to engage world systems as groundings for the politics that underpins decision-making above and beyond levels of theory/praxis. The educational challenge will be to lay out background theory and guidelines as we find ways to engage politically the problems amidst the power and control of the people that we elect as “leaders” at each level of educational and political systems. However, the challenge has been taken up and environmental education has created openings for exploring complexities of political ecology within environmental education.

This article is an exploratory analysis of the use of humour in Environmental Education, from the perspective of 10 Spanish specialists and educators. Research is carried out using a qualitative methodology through semistructured interviews and a focus group of specialists. The results point to a positive perception of the use of humour and the need for flexibility on the part of the educator to adapt to the particularities of the group and the topics addressed. The differences of opinion lie in the limitations in the use of humour as well as in the recommendations made by the specialists participating in the study, which, given their background, can be considered relevant to the use of humour for environmental education in the Spanish context.

The development of environmental education (EE) goals has rarely been problematised. To shed light on this process, we focused on EE in the Czech Republic. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) play a key role there, facilitating the process in coordination with government institutions, schools and for-profit companies. Drawing on three theoretical perspectives that explain the formation of organisational goals (consensus building, community of discourse and practice and governmentality), we examined how different stakeholders contribute to the definition of common goals for EE. Through ethnographic research in an NGO and at EE events, complemented by interviews with lecturers and leaders, our research revealed that despite the high diversity of stakeholder positions and interests, the organisational field of EE is highly inclusive and shows few internal conflicts. Using chosen theoretical perspectives, we explain how vaguely defined common goals and weak manifestations of conflict contribute to the sharing of knowledge, practices and ethical responsibilities in the EE field.

Environmental education (EE) can never be separated from politics and the relationship between the two is complex, has changed over time, and is understood and experienced differently. The field’s relationship with politics is both internal (its own politics) and external (political forces outside the field) to it. In this article, I narrate my story of engaging with EE, politics and the relationship between the two. I refer to my story as an autocartophilosography because it has been significantly influenced by my engagement with philosophy and by my movement in space and over time. My most recent engagement has been with scholars’ theorising in the posthuman condition, and I suggest that this present condition requires a different politics, an affirmative politics. I generate seven propositions towards an affirmative politics for EE: making kin, transversal subjectivity, new alliances, dis/identification, embracing slowness, ethical and intellectual stamina; experimental energy.

This essay explores ways in which environmental educators might break with their existing traditions of research and pedagogy by critically appraising climate histories and anticipated futures depicted by SF (science/speculative fiction) in print and audio-visual media. SF has engaged the politics of climate change for at least two centuries and, as a form of public pedagogy accessible to all generations, provides alternative visualisations of the problems arising from humanity’s destructive transformations of Earth’s climate and possible ways of ameliorating them.

The Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) works with countries worldwide to implement testing in the areas of science, mathematics and reading through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) every three years, and this process is recognised to influence education systems through areas such as curriculum. Over the past decade, the OECD increasingly has acknowledged the need to include a greater emphasis on environmental issues, including developing student competencies specifically in this area. For the 2025 PISA round, we were invited as environmental science education experts to contribute to the Science Framework, which underpins the science assessment. This paper explains how we responded to that invitation, including foregrounding the urgent need to understand the competencies of 15 year-olds to address critical socio-ecological challenges such as climate change. We argue that this provides environmental education practitioners and scholars with a powerful opportunity to gain world-scale data for research and advocacy, which could enhance the visibility and leverage for our field in curriculum, whilst also recognising the political process within which we were engaged.

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.

The case has been made — many of the approaches humans employ to address environmental collapse are founded on the very (White, Western, colonial, positivist, capitalist, human supremacist) thinking that advanced planetary degradation in the first place. We know how this story ends. If we continue perpetuating narratives of management, mastery and (White) human supremacy through environmental education (EE) and confront environmental issues accordingly, we will only advance Earth’s demise. Only by countering narratives of human exceptionalism and acknowledging the entangled and deeply relational nature of our existence can we begin to envision worlds of care for all. Reconceptualising EE as a polyphonic storying of relations with the more-than-human “keeps the way open” for humans to reassess our role in the world.

While Indigenous knowledges have long recognised forests as sentient and caring societies, western sciences have only acknowledged that trees communicate, learn and care for one another in recent years. These different ways of coming to know and engage with trees as sentient agents are further complicated by the introduction of digital technologies and automated decision-making into forest ecosystems. This article considers this confluence of forest sentience and digital technologies through a pedagogy and ethic of immanent care as a relational framework for analysis and praxis in environmental education. The authors apply this framework to three key examples along Birrarung Marr, an ancient gathering place and urban parklands in the city of Naarm (Melbourne). These include an immersive theatre-making project exploring forest communication networks with young children; the Melbourne Urban Forest data set, which hosts digital profiles for over 70,000 trees; and the Greenline masterplan which aims to revitalise the north bank of the Birrarung over the next five years. Exploring the ethical and pedagogical contours of these examples leads to propositions for rethinking the role of environmental education in navigating the current confluence of animal, vegetal, fungal and digital life.

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 recent years, China’s strong commitment to the political agenda of ecological civilisation has increased the presence of environmental education (EE) in the policy arena. Using the waste classification policy as an example, this research explores the implementation of EE policy in two Chinese primary schools. Through the use of a policy enactment framework, the findings reveal that contextual factors such as school enrolment, infrastructure and external influences from the District Bureau greatly influence the schools’ policy capacity. By exploring the internal policy flow and school artefacts, it was found that although the waste classification policy was enacted similarly in the selected primary schools, the outcomes differed significantly. These variations highlight the complexities and challenges of implementing an EE policy under ecological civilisation and contribute to the understanding of the tension between localised adaptations and the nationally politicised EE policy mandates.

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.

Broad and complex ideas about sustainability can be communicated through the Arts. Australian curriculum documents support the integration of Arts education with education for sustainability. Responding to artworks as a viewer is a key aspect of Arts education in Australian schools. Chris Jordan is a US artist whose online media galleries communicate ideas about environmental and social justice themes. This paper reports interview data from a larger project exploring children’s responses to Chris Jordan’s artworks. Conversations were held with 28 children aged between 4 and 12 as they navigated Jordan’s website to explore the images they encountered. Data relating to SDG14: Life below water were selected for the specific focus of this paper. Thematic analysis of the data revealed five themes: connections to prior experience and knowledge, links with local contexts and places, emotional engagement with the images, solutions and action-taking and ideas related to post-humanism and the human-nature binary. These findings endorse the power of Arts-based experiences for enhancing education for sustainability in primary schools and early childhood contexts.