The 19th Biennial Conference for the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) was a wonderful milestone for any national organisation. Our South Australian hosts were very excited to see us all descend on Adelaide in September 2016 to take up their offer of ‘Tomorrow Making’. ‘Our Present to the Future’ was four days filled with considering what we were working on and what we are working towards, both individually and collectively. Youth presentations, collegial collaborations, and sharing of goodwill and thought resulted in a generative conference, just like we have come to expect from environmental educators. Sally and I are pleased to maintain the tradition of guest editing the AJEE Special Issue, showcasing six papers as a representation of the knowledge shared, considered, adapted, and devised at the conference.

Arts education has been part of the United States K-12 educational system for over a century. However, recent administrative policy decisions addressed the economic bottom line and the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, and complied with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). These decisions resulted in standardisation of both core curricula and testing, leaving arts programs to function in a diminished capacity, curtailing both individuality and creative thinking. This study unpacks the role of the arts as change agents with the ability to: address current discourse; question ideologies and culture; convey complex problems in artistic form; engage the viewer in aesthetics; provide a perspective not found in regimented thinking; and empower creative problem solvers. This work also highlights the role of eco-art as a medium for addressing complex environmental challenges. The study also empirically examines, through a self-report survey, K-12 arts educators’ perceptions of integrating eco-arts into curricula. Findings revealed respondents’ desire to integrate eco-arts into the arts curricula and identified the most significantly perceived barriers to integration, as well as the role of policy on practicality. The authors also identify the study's limitations and recommend areas for future research.

WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) is an increasingly popular form of ecotourism in Australia. An ethnographic study of 10 young adult international tourists was conducted at five rural Victorian WWOOF sites. The objective was to examine the participants’ nature experience. As part of the ethnographic study, this article selectively reports on the ecopedagogy at the WWOOF sites, focusing on the potential linking of spatio-sensory ‘doing’ in the environment and conceptual ‘learning’ about (including from, for, and with) the environment. The WWOOF environment is designed physically, materially, and naturally. These dimensions can be interpreted in overlapping spatial levels. Each spatial level partially correlates with the dominant bodily senses. By analysing the participants’ reflexive accounts of their WWOOF nature experience, this article suggests that their spatio-sensory ‘doing’ contributed to their environmental ‘learning’, which is categorised into three heuristic types. These are called symbolic, transpositional, and transformative. This study empirically and conceptually adds to the literature on experiential environmental learning with a possible ecopedagogical model of incorporating spatialised bodily senses in curriculum design.

Having participated in both the New Zealand Association for Environmental Education (NZAEE) and Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) Research Symposia of 2016, the authors provide a critical analysis of the opportunities provided during these symposia for researchers to position themselves within the environmental education field. Each symposium is analysed in terms of its purpose and program structure, and the opportunities for researchers to communicate and share their ideas, build their research community, and frame their field. It was found that there were spaces for researchers to reinscribe the structures and practices of the environmental education field, but less space for its disruption. Furthermore, it seemed that there were some voices from the edge who were unintentionally silenced to some degree; for example, emerging researchers, women, and Indigenous people. It is recommended that symposia organisers and delegates give careful consideration to these spaces for disruption and to inclusivity when planning and attending future symposia.

Clean Up Australia Day is the country's largest community-based environmental annual event when participants work in teams to remove rubbish from their local environment. This article describes an interpretive study in which a sample of preservice primary teachers’ (n = 30) responses to questions about their involvement in the event were evaluated to determine their developing knowledge and understanding about environmental and sustainability issues. The study evaluated a university assessment task for its ability to identify and challenge preservice primary teachers’ views as consumers of manufactured products, environmental citizens, and future teachers. The data were drawn from students’ written work that formed part of the assessment task. Results indicate that students found participation in this community event to be a significant, valuable part of their learning about the environment that contributed to their understanding about sustainability and highlighted the power of positive community participation as a force for good.

Global initiatives and a rapidly expanding academic literature identify the responsibility that universities have to incorporate sustainability education into their curricula. This study had two aims: first, to investigate the extent to which Australian undergraduate management curricula explicitly identified a focus on sustainability and, second, to examine the changes that had occurred between 2009 and 2014. A web-based content analysis was undertaken to gain a snapshot view of the emphasis placed on sustainability in all 40 Australian universities’ business/management courses. Our findings showed that in 2014, three-quarters of the courses identified failed to include even one subject that all students must study that mentioned sustainability. This finding was only marginally different from the 2009 findings, suggesting that there is a long way to go before sustainability education in Australian universities’ undergraduate management curricula could be claimed to be fulfilling the needs of students, businesses, and the broader society.

Within higher education there is widespread support for developing students’ interdisciplinary skills. Despite this, evidence for, and practice of, cross-faculty interdisciplinary sustainability learning remains in its infancy. Recent articles have shown that Australia is no exception. This article provides a case study of interdisciplinary learning and teaching within a cross-faculty Education for Sustainability (EfS) undergraduate subject involving science, arts, business, and health students at an Australian university. A description of the subject and its theoretical context provides a platform for presenting the findings of a mixed method enquiry into how pedagogy supports interdisciplinary sustainability learning. The sequential explanatory research design involved a post-subject quantitative survey analysed using SPSS, augmented by qualitative student journal data (n = 67) using phenomenological analysis within NVivo. The study found that students, regardless of discipline background, valued the processes and pedagogy used to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and awareness. The experience left students feeling more skilled and confident of their ability to contribute to future interdisciplinary sustainability collaboration. This case study, replete with a subject description, theoretical context for an innovative pedagogical approach and study results, provides higher education professionals with a template for deliberative curriculum and pedagogy that promote interdisciplinary knowledge, skills and confidence that may contribute to transformative learning that supports EfS goals. The article presents a strong case for future EfS curriculum frameworks and strategic education policy to include deliberative interdisciplinary pedagogy. It also challenges higher education institutions to create flexible systems that facilitate cross-faculty interdisciplinary learning that is necessary for preparing students for the future.

This article presents the findings of a research study with young adults who explored the connections between their early childhood experiences in nature and their attitudes and actions towards the environment in adulthood. Drawing on E. Wilson's (1984) work, environmental or ecological consciousness is theorised to connect to ecological identity and relates to an individual's deep reflection on, connection to, and engagement with the natural environment. The study's survey tool invited young adults to select various options that described their experiences in nature as children and their views of, and actions towards, the environment in the present. The findings illustrated connections between childhood experiences in nature and later views of, and actions towards, the environment. The correlations between expressed views about caring for the environment and environmentally friendly actions were surprising, however, as actions did not necessarily align with beliefs. The article concludes with recommendations based on the findings, outlining how positive attitudes and actions towards the environment may be fostered in childhood.

Graduate students are often plagued by stress and anxiety in their journeys of becoming researchers. Concerned by the prevalence of poor graduate student wellbeing in Australia, we share our experiences of kin-making and collaboration within #aaeeer (Australasian Association for Environmental Education Emerging Researchers), a collective of graduate students and early career researchers formed in response to the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) conference in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2014. In this article, we begin to address the shortage of research into graduate student wellbeing, led by graduate students. Inspired by Donna Haraway's work on making kin in the Chthulucene, we present an exploration that draws together stories from the authors about the positive experiences our kin-making collective enables, and how it has supported our wellbeing and allowed us to work collaboratively. Specifically, we find that #aaeeer offers us a form of refuge from academic stressors, creating spaces for ‘composting together’ through processes of ‘decomposing’ and ‘recomposing’. Our rejection of neoliberal norms has gifted us experiences of joyful collective pleasures. We share our experiences here in the hope of supporting and inspiring other emerging and established researchers to ‘make kin’ and challenge the potentially isolating processes of becoming researchers.

This is a researched account of an offshore coral reef education partnership formed during a time of rapid environmental change (the coral bleaching events in the years 2015 to 2017). The aim of the partnership is to encourage a learning connection with Sea Country. Framed as civic environmentalism, this article explores the dimensions of practice between a reef tourism provider, local schools, a local university, and local Indigenous rangers that enables primary, secondary and university students, rangers, and educators to travel together on day trips to the outer Great Barrier Reef and islands and have immersive and sharing educational experiences. Offshore environmental education and higher quality marine education is increasingly important in the Anthropocene, when Australian reefs are subject to the pressures of climate change and other impacts other impacts that diminish their resilience.

Despite school-community partnerships having much potential to provide educational organisations with authentic teaching and learning opportunities through community-based action projects, they remain under-utilised largely due to the structural constraints and pressures faced by teachers. This study helps fill a gap in scholarly discourse about the specific ways in which school-community partnerships can effectively be developed by providing an in-depth account of an 18-month pilot project with the aim to develop a conservation education program (Kids Greening Taupō) through a partnership structure in Aotearoa New Zealand. An evaluation of the pilot project was conducted using an ethnographic approach, which sought stakeholder perspectives about the program's developmental process through an interpretive lens. Qualitative data were collected through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, and then thematically analysed. The findings provided in this article illuminate stakeholder insights and perspectives about the structures established and processes utilised over the three broad stages of program planning, implementation and maintenance, and the resultant environmental initiatives and programs. Through this study, a Collaborative Community Education Model has emerged that may serve as a potential framework or starting point for those interested in creating a new school-community partnership or to modify an existing one.

Sustainability is a Cross-Curriculum Priority (SCCP) in the Australian Curriculum and is intended to be integrated into teaching and learning where deemed appropriate by teachers. This article explores teachers’ knowledge, understanding, and beliefs about curriculum priorities and the situational context of teaching and learning in Queensland schools. In this article we discuss the ways in which teachers describe their relationship with sustainability education and the SCCP. Data were collected from interviews with 26 Queensland teachers, teaching across all year levels from early childhood to Year 12, as part of two different PhD research projects. Queensland teachers participating in both studies indicated strong support for the inclusion of sustainability within formal curriculum; however, this strong support did not translate into practice in most cases. As a result of curriculum and policy pressures, teachers indicated that despite their belief that Education for Sustainability (EfS) is important, few believe they have the time or support for teaching EfS. The current educational context teachers have described offers limited opportunity for teachers to integrate sustainability in ways that are meaningful and relevant to their students. The SCCP did not influence planning or teaching decisions, and many teachers were unaware of its existence. Data from both studies question the adequacy of current educational policy and curriculum documents for supporting teachers to engage with sustainability education.