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.

Researchers across outdoor and environmental education (OEE) are drawing on relational ontologies to break down dualisms, human-centric thinking and challenge neoliberal education that focusses on outcomes and achievements. Digital technology has been seen as problematic in OEE because of its distracting qualities within notions of authentic outdoor experiences. Re-conceptualising digital technology as something learners are entangled with — rejecting a dualistic position — offers a nuanced way of understanding how digital technology could be harnessed for OEE. This research presents speculative findings from a new materialist inspired project on how teachers considered video-making and the more-than-human in OEE. Working with assemblage theory and attention to affect, we portray ways assemblages of video-making and the more-than-human can shape OEE in new ways. Implications for educators in how they might assemble OEE with technology are suggested.

Teachers are grappling with increased pressure and expectations to facilitate transformative education experiences, the kinds of experiences that cultivate dispositions and skillsets essential for young peoples’ preparedness to imagine and create sustainable futures. As expectations for teachers grow, so too do initiatives intended to assist their efforts, such as the advent of classroom-ready education resources. The rise of educational resources gives cause for closer examination of how they are developed, particularly with respect to the ways they situate content in the deployment of curricular, methodological and pedagogical concepts. This article presents a practice and process of education resource creation using multi-modal content that entangles global education and conservation agendas. Through the mediating lens of UNESCO’s pillars of education, a critical discussion of the utility of these for enabling and inhibiting the articulation of a professional practice for education resource creation is offered. With the imperative for sustainability-focused education and prevalence of education resources being produced to support this, we scrutinise the importance of demystifying the professional practice of education resource creation. In doing so, we point to insights that become available when the curricular, pedagogical and methodological concepts informing education resource creation are made transparent and accessible.

The need for more radical forms of learning-centred transformation is increasingly recognised in transformations to sustainability. Yet these approaches to learning remain under-developed and undertheorised especially from a politics and environmental education research perspective. This paper offers a review of an emerging politics of transgression in environmental education research, as developed through an extensive T-learning (transgressive learning in times of climate change) knowledge co-production research programme, spanning eight years, and continuing. The ongoing problem that the research programme seeks to address is how to do transgressive learning in/as environmental education research in times where the fall out of coloniality and fossil capital collide in an increasingly regressive political landscape which Akomolafe and Ladha (2017, pg. 820) describe as “the deadening ideology of late-stage capitalism and its corollaries of patriarchy, rationalism, white supremacy and anthropocentrism.” Through the paper, I seek to highlight a “low theory” (Wark, 2021) of transgressive politics in environmental education research, embodied in practices of transgressive politics as movement in co-engaged T-learning research, which I illuminate through a meta-reflective curational process from the ‘archive’ or T-learning knowledge commons collection.

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.

This article surveys critical scholarship that links the literature on sustainable business education and education for sustainable development goals (ESDG). It is assumed that ESDG is desirable in the business curriculum. However, it is argued here that ESDG erroneously fosters the illusion of successfully combining economic growth, social justice, and environmental protection, foregrounding “sustained and inclusive economic growth”, which is often dependent on the increased consumption of natural resources. ESDG rarely addresses industrial expansion that jeopardizes the opportunity for the resolution of environmental crises, ignoring the intrinsic value of nonhuman species and ecosystems and masking the root causes of unsustainability. ESDG places heavy emphasis on economic and social aspects of sustainability, at the cost of the environment. By contrast, some earlier forms of environmental education recognize the limits to growth and emphasize environmental integrity as a foundation for both social and economic activity. This article emphasizes the need to re-orientate ESDG towards genuine sustainability of ecopedagogy in the context of business education, emphasizing transformative business models based on degrowth, circular economy, and steady-state economy. It is argued that a more explicit pedagogical re-orientation towards the recognition of planetary boundaries, as well as toward a less anthropocentric focus is needed.

We are the living. We find ourselves in a mess that is sometimes called the ‘Anthropocene’. This is a mess that has been hidden, ignored, neglected through a narrative of progress, consumption, linearity, categorisation, control, prosperity, rationality. To respond to this narrative, we employ ‘mess-making’ as a force for resistance. We rethink our more-than-human relations by concepting with mess to invigorate, agitate and provoke. Employing Haraway’s (2008) ‘messmates’, we conceptualise how ‘we’ as ecosystems of thriving life forms are constantly living, learning and dying together and need to find new ways to co-research with/in/for more-than-human methodologies. These, we suggest, are inherently messy. The paper is organised in a nonconventional way in that it is mostly created by more-than-human narratives gathered from two doctoral post-qualitative inquiries exploring play in an urban forest school in London and animal-child relations in a wall-less school in Bali. We explore how mess-making is both generative and challenging as data emerge in dynamic and exciting ways. With this messy turn, we illuminate potential for educational futures that support multispecies flourishing.

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.

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.

In the state of Queensland, volunteers perform much of the work needed to prevent the extinction of threatened species who are native and unique to this continent. Acting from an understanding of interspecies justice, caring people rescue and rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of wild animals every year. Many of these same people conduct informal environmental education to bring to community attention the problematics of extinction by seeking the material expression of an ethics of conviviality. Using a document case study approach, this paper narrates aspects of the kindship work of a network of carers and educators of flying foxes who undertake informal environmental education as part of their care practices. Volunteering to care and educate for Australian flying mammals is a form of activism in a nation with a mammalian extinction crisis that still fails to meet its obligations under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15. This paper describes how volunteer run informal environmental education in far north Queensland is driven by a strong sense of multispecies care.

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.

Based on the critique of education for sustainable development (ESD) as a socio-political control element of ecological modernisation, we discuss the prefigurative potential of participatory photovoice research in schools in light of social-ecological transformation. We argue that engaging students in prefigurative practices of change in which (sustainable) counter-futures are explored in the (unsustainable) present can help to re-politicise ESD, and we view photovoice as a way to guide this transformative process. Drawing on examples from a participatory research project on the transformation of local food systems in Graz, Austria, we critically explored photovoice as a method of transformative education that creates power-critical spaces of possible futures in which (un)sustainable hegemony and collectively internalised patterns of thought and action can be questioned to envision and negotiate liveable futures for all.