This paper examines the notion of wilding pedagogy and its potential for comprehensive transformation through educational policy. This paper argues that given current unsustainable human practices, significant changes can be achieved by aligning education and policy. This paper begins by defining wilding pedagogies and providing an overview of Botswana’s background and prospects. It contends that Botswana has the potential to enhance the quality of education by promoting active and transformative learning experiences. Furthermore, this policy can lead to improved academic performance by acknowledging cultural linkages, honouring land, returning to a holistic approach aligned with the principles of the wild in education.

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.

This article was prompted by a Ministerial veto (2021) of the Australian Research Council’s decision to fund a research project by the authors to explore the student-led climate movement in Australia. It was also prompted by criticism of the veto which accused the Minister of bringing “politics” into what was represented as a scholarly matter. It addresses two questions: How should we understand this idea of “politics” in the context of Australian climate politics since the 1990s? Secondly it considers dominant ways of thinking about “the political” devised by ancient Greek writers and politicians which still inform the European liberal tradition. We question how fit for purpose this approach is in the Anthropocene? Our key argument is that the western tradition of thinking about “the political” is deeply anthropocentric. Historical traditions have encouraged inegalitarian and anti-democratic accounts of who can be political by excluding different kinds of people from political life. The Anthropocene requires a new, critically reflexive account of “the political” that is inclusive of people currently marginalized and excluded as well as nonhumans and nonliving components of ecosystems on which we all depend. This extends the idea of democracy beyond the human and points to a politics of climate justice.

Based on an ethnographic study in a Finnish primary school, we explored lingering as both a pedagogical approach and a methodological concept for multispecies education research and practice. Through this conceptual thinking, we “re-turned” to the multiplicities that unfolded from noticing rhythms, enterings and different lifeworlds to show how children’s lingering encounters developed into speculative inquiries about how invertebrates and amphibians generate polyphonous affects and temporalities. In our study, children’s “attuning-with” clay, waste materials, photographs, and stop-motion animation opened up the unfamiliar worlds and temporalities of invertebrates and amphibians, involving active silences, slow rhythms, and awkward becomings. Overall, the study highlights that children’s attuning-with the uncertainties of today’s socioecological world create new avenues for thinking about multispecies relationalities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Emerging evidence suggests that business schools in Africa are lagging behind in promoting sustainability education. Grand challenges that point to a limited focus on transformative sustainability education such as environmental pollution, conflicts, inequalities and unemployment still persist in African economies, with the profit motive remaining central to businesses’ operating philosophy. Informed by the clarion call for business schools to be key drivers of sustainability education, this study reviews the African master of business administration (MBA) curricula with the objective of assessing the status of sustainability management education. The content of the MBA curricula of 42 African business schools accredited with the Association of African Business Schools was analysed using a web-based research approach. The findings indicate that the concept of sustainability has not been sufficiently embedded into the African MBA curricula. The values and mission statements of the majority of business schools were found not to be aligned with the principles of sustainability education. It was also found that shareholder value oriented modules constitute the core curriculum of the majority of MBA programmes reviewed. An incremental elective approach was found to be the most dominant strategy used by African business schools to incorporate sustainability education in the MBA curricula. An integrative approach of embedding sustainability education focusing on re-orientation of the business schools’ values, mission, curriculum, systems, operations and governance is recommended. The increased use of experiential learning is also recommended as an effective teaching pedagogy for equipping MBA students with practical aspects of sustainability education.

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.

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.

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.

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.