In 2007 Professor Frank Fisher was named Australia's inaugural Environmental Educator of the Year (by the Australian Association for Environmental Education). Frank lived a life driven by a determination to engage fully with the world around him. As a young electrical engineer, Frank became convinced of the need for education and research about how we shape the world around us, and contributed to the establishment of the first Australian Masters of Sustainability program at Monash University in 1973. Typified by exercises such as taking students to sit in the middle of major roads, Frank's teaching approach aimed to help students understand the social systems that shape our understanding of and impact on the world around us.

Despite the importance of teachers to the school garden movement, we still know very little about what drives particular teachers to incorporate a school garden into their pedagogy. In response, this article reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the internal processes and products involved in rationalising and sustaining teachers’ use. Analysis of interviews with three primary teachers — Laura, Meredith, and Clare — indicate that a powerful rationale is formed when teachers read their childhood memories, often idealised, against their observations of children today. This rationale is strengthened by opportunities afforded by the garden itself, which allows teachers to enact their deepest beliefs about teaching and learning and resist external controls. This study also provides evidence that a school garden can easily evoke nostalgia. The article ends by re-theorising this nostalgia as part of the ‘cultural logic’ (Enfield, 2000) of school gardens, while suggesting nostalgia's productive uses.

This article reports on an inquiry into ecological understanding and the professional practice of a selection of teachers in alternative and/or independent non-systemic schools in Australia, Canada and the United States. Through a reflective, participatory framework, based on the premise that it is one thing to observe ‘an ecology’, another to understand one's self as part of it, as actively involved in ‘bringing forth our world’, the project sought to understand if and how teachers employ systemic, ecological insights in their teaching. The project looked at the underlying ecological principle of ‘connection’ and how teachers work with this, through teacher education and options for further education in ecological understanding, at the responsibilities schools hold for ecological understanding, and at ways in which individual teachers have worked with this form of knowledge. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with small numbers of teachers in five schools. The philosophical underpinnings of these schools were considered in relation to the teachers’ capacities to facilitate ecological understanding and the organisational setting in which these schools operate. Teacher perspectives are reported and discussed through a structured presentation of selected responses to a series of questions on the overlapping themes of ecological insight and formal and informal learning processes.

Education for Sustainability (EfS) has been prioritised in the School of Education at James Cook University (JCU), Townsville, Australia. This article presents a case study that explores the ways in which teacher educators integrate EfS in their teaching in the Bachelor of Education (BEd) (Primary) at JCU, and their perceptions of enablers and constraints. Two key findings arose from the analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with four subject coordinators, and their subject outlines: (1) teacher educators at JCU integrate EfS in different ways through their choice of assessment, content and/or pedagogy; and (2) constraints operating at the school level, namely teacher educators’ perceptions and understanding of EfS, were perceived to be salient challenges to the integration of EfS in the program. Vision, leadership and funding at the university level were also identified as enabling factors that warrant further investigation. Findings contribute to existing literature regarding the integration of EfS in preservice teacher education, and serve to inform practice at JCU and universities more broadly.

A major challenge for researchers and urban planning practitioners is how to obtain meaningful and influential contributions on urban and environmental planning activities from children and young people within the constraints of adult policy and practice. The key elements of this challenge concern traditional methods of communication between ‘experts’ and children and young people in rationalist planning settings, versus emerging research in relation to children's and young people's views and agency around civic participation. This article will address the work of a number of researchers and practitioners who have grappled with the inherent tenions of making planning practice and urban design more inclusionary, while facilitating and respecting children and young people's civic participation. This article also advocates the advantages and strengths of their participation in planning and urban design processes.With a focus on two exploratory programs developed by the authors in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria, this article will demonstrate how the sharing of knowledge and skills between planning and design professionals and children and young people can lead to more meaningful and influential contributions from them. The programs examined were informed by leading practice both in Australia and internationally, and have assisted to develop children and young people's sense of spatial competence, and their confidence and efficacy in their local environment, contributing ultimately to their wellbeing. They have also supported the establishment of youth leadership groups with the confidence and skills to contribute to ongoing local government urban and environmental planning activities.

This article showcases a creative approach to early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS). It reports on the author's doctoral research program, which examined the effectiveness of arts-based pedagogies for exploring and understanding the natural world in an early childhood education program. Motivated by their existing commitment to education for sustainability (EfS), the participating educators used the arts for further exploration and understanding of the natural world in teaching and learning. They explored the role of the arts in knowledge production and embodied experience, and reinterpreted and built on their own funds of knowledge about their environment. The result was meaningful curriculum steeped in content about the natural environments that were local to the children and their educators. The findings further signify the challenges educators needed to overcome in order to intensify their connection with their own local environments, and the effect that this enhanced connection had on their capacity to reflect local natural environments in their programs with the children.

As social, economic and environmental issues have become more prominent in the 21st century, there has been increased critical scrutiny into the ways that outdoor learning interacts with sustainability issues and concepts. As a result, a number of discourses have emerged which interrogate human/nature relationships in traditional outdoor education and propose greater engagement with place-responsive or sustainable approaches. Drawing on research with teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand, this article explores possible intersections between sustainability education outdoor learning. Accordingly, this article focuses on two key ideas: First, the nexus of experience and place offers significant promise for educational endeavours that seek to educate for a sustainable future. Second, traditional conceptions of wilderness as a pedagogical site, can be problematic for outdoor education programs which seek to claim the ground of sustainability. While there is much that can be gained from journeys in remote pristine environments, not all of these experiences necessarily lead to the development of attitudes, understandings, skills, and motivation to live more sustainably. Furthermore, approaches to outdoor learning that seek to develop connection to and care for remote, pristine places, at the same time ignoring more local or impacted places, could present a dichotomous view of ‘nature’ to students, thereby disrupting efforts to educate for sustainability.

Engaging and exciting students about the environment remains a challenge in contemporary society, even while objective measures show the rapid state of the world's environment declining. To illuminate the integration of drama and environmental education as a means of engaging students in environmental issues, the work of performance companies Evergreen Theatre, Leapfish and Eaton Gorge Theatre Company, the ecological oratorio Plague and the Moonflower, and a school-based trial of play-building were examined through survey data and participant observations. These case studies employed drama in different ways — theatre-in-education, play-building, and large-scale performance event. The four case studies provide quantitative and qualitative evidence for drama-based activities leading to an improvement in knowledge about the environment and understandings about the consequences of one's actions. In observing and participating in these case studies, we reflect that drama is a means of synthesising and presenting scientific research in ways that are creative and multi-layered, and which excite students, helping maintain their attention and facilitating their engagement.

Education for Sustainability (EfS) has an intimate relationship with professional employment as we seek to develop graduates who will take EfS values and understanding into their workplaces to build a sustainable future. The connection is through the capabilities that employers are wanting in the people they employ, and they are the outcomes of the educational experiences that we educators provide for the graduates. This article discusses the role of capabilities and their articulation in universities, particularly the types of capabilities sought by employers, both in Australia and more generally. We discuss similarities and differences articulated by academics and industry, and the implications for curriculum design and outcomes. In parallel, we note the discussion of capabilities associated with EfS and identify similarities with more broadly defined graduate capabilities. Research associated with the exploration of the breadth of the environment profession provides examples of the connections. These insights combine to highlight tension between what is sought by industry and what is needed to embed sustainable development actions into industry through the change agents graduated from our universities.

This article reports the findings of a pilot Education for Sustainability (EfS) program implemented in 2011 for international students in a multi-campus distributed learning environment at an Australian university. It outlines the context of the pilot EfS program and reports survey findings of the environmental attitudes and sustainability worldviews of international students. The pilot EfS program entailed in-class presentations to students in a variety of Business and IT programs at diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Students were introduced to sustainability concepts and the role of graduate skills in their future professional practice. Students were also encouraged to adopt personal sustainability behaviours and assisted to connect their individual courses/programs to sustainability outcomes. Surveys consisting of open-ended questions and the Revised NEP (New Environmental Paradigm) questionnaire were conducted in a range of settings in order to develop an understanding of the sustainability attitudes and knowledge of international students. These were conducted in participating and non-participating EfS classes and also in classes with and without sustainability topics in the curriculum. The findings report the impact of these sustainability interventions on students’ environmental views and attitudes. Finally, these findings are contextualised in suggested routes for scaffolding the learning journey of international students towards sustainability.

This article presents an evaluation of a new upper secondary Earth and Environmental Science (EES) course in Western Australia. Twenty-seven EES teachers were interviewed and 243 students were surveyed about the degree of difficulty, relevance and interest of EES topics in the course. The impact of the course on students’ views about EES topics was also explored. It was found that more than two thirds of the students chose to study EES because of personal interest. However, students perceived that some Earth science topics were difficult, boring or irrelevant. A lack of content knowledge from lower secondary science contributed to these perceptions. Nevertheless, teachers and students perceived that their understanding and attitudes towards environmental science topics such as climate change was improved. With the advent of a new Australian senior secondary science curriculum that includes EES, the implications of the findings for curriculum development and teacher professional development are discussed.

Higher education institutions are considered by many to be pivotal in shaping the next generation of thinkers and practitioners required to further work towards addressing the sustainability challenges faced by contemporary societies. The extent to which higher education has embraced this responsibility is debateable. Notwithstanding, this article reports upon our experience as three students employed as tutors in teaching sustainability to our undergraduate counterparts. Drawing upon our collective experience as both students and tutors within The Fenner School of Environment and Society of the Australian National University, we explore what makes student-facilitators part of an effective approach for sustainability education. Through this process, we describe some key practices that student-facilitators apply and which contribute to students’ understandings of sustainability. These key practices are: conceptualising what a tutorial should be; taking the position as a facilitator of discussion; using game-based activities; and the role that student-facilitators play in a community of social learning at the Fenner School. We conclude that the incorporation of student-facilitators in the teaching and learning of sustainability play a unique and significant role that should be valued, fostered and supported in higher education.

Developing an understanding of the importance of a sustainable future is vital in helping children to become ‘global citizens’. Global citizens are those willing to take responsibility for their own actions, respect and value diversity and see themselves as contributors to a more peaceful and sustainable world. Children's literature — picture and story books in particular — can be used as a powerful tool to help even the youngest citizens become aware of the need to assume responsibility for creating and enjoying a sustainable future through global citizenship. Children's literature can be utilised to help children examine and change personal lifestyles to secure a sustainable future; to identify, investigate, evaluate and undertake appropriate action to maintain, protect and enhance local and global environments; to challenge preconceived ideas, accept change and acknowledge uncertainty and to work cooperatively and in partnerships with others. This article explores and examines ways in which some examples of Australasian children's literature, specifically Storm Boy (Thiele, 1963), Lester and Clyde (Reece, 1991), The Waterhole (Base, 2001), Window (Baker, 1991) and Belonging (Baker, 2004), have been used in a literacy focused preservice teacher education course to assist preservice teachers entering their internship school placements to develop children's understandings of an ecologically sustainable future. It provides further insight into methods for embedding teaching for a sustainable future into pre-service teacher education.

The expectation is that higher education curricula which purports to incorporate education for sustainable development (ESD) supports university graduates in becoming more sustainable. It would then follow that if academics are to offer such curricula they need to be adequately equipped with the motivations, knowledge and skills to teach it. However, the extent to which ESD has resulted in genuine higher education curriculum change, and academic readiness for it, is debatable. As such, this article presents the academic experiences of three of the authors involved in a curriculum change process to embed ESD within a Bachelor of Arts (Textile Design) degree program. Individual post-project narratives of our experiences are summarised and thematically analysed. The analysis reveals these experiences as disorienting, yet subsequently transformative. The findings suggest promoting academics’ transformative learning should be a focus of ESD curriculum change efforts. The findings support commitment to long-term, facilitated professional development to achieve transformative change; an often espoused, yet under-reported initiative.

Environmental, economic, and social trends suggest the need for more sustainable ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour. Such a shift would require humanity to function at high levels of ecological literacy, which relies on a certain amount of scientific literacy. However, troubling evidence indicates an international pattern of student disengagement with science at the secondary level. Evidence also suggests that it is difficult to integrate environmental or sustainability education at this level, both within New Zealand and elsewhere. This research was aimed at examining the use of a novel approach, using permaculture, in junior secondary science (Years 9 and 10) to enhance students’ ecological and scientific literacy, as well as their attitudes toward studying science in school.

Permaculture is an ecological design system based on science and ethics. A permaculture approach to science education involves eco-design thinking, as well as the use of local permaculture properties and practitioners, and the science behind common permaculture practices. The approach is also meant to be relevant and engaging, and to promote systems thinking. This study involved the design and delivery of an intervention based on permaculture principles to one Year 10 science class in New Zealand.

Research took the form of a naturalistic, interpretive, mixed methods case study, which included the use of questionnaires, interviews, and observations. Data collection focused on the impacts of a permaculture approach on the teaching and learning of science, on students’ ecological literacy, and on students’ attitudes toward learning science in school. Pre- and post-intervention questionnaires probed students’ opinions on the environment, science, and learning science in school, and tested their sustainable thinking and systems thinking with concept mapping and SOLO Taxonomy exercises. Classroom observations took place over the course of 12 weeks, on average 3 days per week, totalling 31 days. Before and after some classroom visits, I had informal conversations with the teacher, along with three formal interviews before, during and after the intervention. Three focus groups of students were interviewed immediately following the intervention.

Findings show that a permaculture approach to junior secondary science can impact positively on students’ understanding of science and sustainability, and may impact on their attitudes toward studying science in school. It also appeared to impact positively on the science teacher's

attitude toward including sustainability in his teaching practice, and on his own sustainability learning. Regarding both students and teachers, a permaculture approach appears to have been effective to cultivate attitudes and trellis learning.

The teacher and the students responded favourably to many aspects of the intervention, including the overall focus on the environment, the field trips, and some classroom learning activities. The teacher reported appreciating the way the intervention contextualised science with real world examples. Most students reported appreciating the experiential aspects of the intervention, as well as the relevance that a permaculture approach to science education provided. Findings indicate that advances in ecological and scientific literacy varied among students. Some students appeared to: improve their use of science and sustainability vocabulary; become more aware of select socio-scientific issues; better recognise scientific and ecological limits and possibilities. Some students also showed advances in sustainable thinking and systems thinking. Although many students expressed concern about issues such as pollution, wildlife, and genetic engineering — and prioritised protecting the environment over making money — there appeared to be a disconnect between these feelings and a sense of personal responsibility to act. Most students reported enjoying learning science with a focus on the environment, with one cohort indicating much greater enjoyment of the permaculture approach than their usual level of enjoyment of learning science in school.

Trends in environmental degradation, population growth, energy inflation, and economic stagnation — especially pronounced since the beginning of this inquiry in 2008 — indicate that the world of the future will require ecologically literate citizens who can design and create truly sustainable systems for all human endeavors. Cultivating such citizens, and trellising their science and sustainability learning has implications for science education. This thesis identifies an innovative approach for junior secondary science in New Zealand that provides a way towards a more sustainable future.