In this article, we collectively explore the significance of engaging with theory in environmental education research. Inspired by Jackson and Mazzei’s (2011) postqualitative research methodology, each researcher provides a short sample of engaging with his/her chosen theoretical concept for one shared data source. Through our three individual theoretical engagements with a short video, we collectively demonstrate that the data may be enacted in different ways, based on the theoretical concept that is engaged. This may potentially actualise multiple different and partial realities of the researched, and by decentring the researcher, this can also rework humanist epistemologies. We suggest that non-researcher-centred and/or non-anthropocentric actualising may contribute to more sustainable relationships in environmental education and its research, not only between the researcher and the researched, but also among the researchers.

The objectives of this study were to assess the dimensionality of the revised New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale in Serbian and Macedonian culture, and to use it to explore the environmental worldviews of young people in Serbia and the Republic of North Macedonia. A total of 850 pupils aged between 13 and 15 from 11 schools (5 elementary schools and 6 secondary schools) took part in this research. The dataset obtained from the scale was analysed via the principal component analysis factor extraction method, and a varimax rotation was applied. This study found all items load on four dimensions: Balance of Nature, Humans over Nature, Limits to Growth and Environmental Philosophy. Differences between subgroups occur in three out of four dimensions. The students’ environmental worldviews were determined by providing the frequency distribution of their responses. Both subgroups in the Republic of North Macedonia and Serbia are (slightly) environmentally conscious, with an ecological view of the environment. Macedonian school students have a slightly higher NEP score than their peers in Serbia, indicating more environmentally protective attitudes among them. The participants did not see the two paradigms as mutually exclusive, as do members of some industrialised societies. The rejection of the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) by the NEP is a phenomenon that could well only be present in Western societies, whereas in less industrialised societies, the NEP and DSP could coexist in a comprehensive environmental view. With minor alterations such as word substitutions to facilitate easy comprehension of items by the respondents, the revised NEP scale will show more universal applicability outside developed communities.

In environmental education research (EER), love is revered as a way to heal or mend the human relationship with nature. However, this interpretation of love rests in a humanist paradigm that considers nonhuman nature as external to the human being. To this end, love has generally been considered as an outward emotion, towards nature, and is less considered an inner movement, towards the human as nature. We were interested in exploring this conceptualisation of nature and love of/as nature and question: Is there potential to locate the concept of love in EER through different theoretical positions to explore the possibilities for its (re)conceptualisation? We aim to stretch academic thinking to (re)consider love through identifying where our own research in environmental education has involved love through the intersection of our journeys at the Australian Association of Environmental Education Research Symposium workshop. In response to the context of this workshop, which explored the concept of diffraction as described by Barad, we have chosen to adopt a diffractive analysis as the methodology to analyse our theoretical perspectives of love in EER. We explore the word love in this article using diffraction to understand the relationality of human and nonhuman nature through our research interests in Steiner, ecosomaesthetics and biophilia. This process cracked our theoretical silos to more openly consider: Where is the love in EER?

We acknowledge and pay respect to the people of the Yugambeh Nation on whose Land we work, meet and study. We recognise the significant role the past and future Elders play in the life of the University and the region. We are mindful that within and without the buildings, the Land always was and always will be Aboriginal Land.1

This paper introduces staying-with the traces of inter/intra-subjective experience, with and within place, in mapping-making philosophy in environmental education. Through a conceptualisation of philosophy as concepts or knots in an infinite composition of knowledge, rather than separate knowledges, we use staying-with the traces2 as method, whereby our embodied patterns of human and more than human relationality across place and time may engage with philosophy. This grounding of philosophy foregrounds the diverse onto-epistemologies of posthumanism and indigenist3 ways of knowing, acknowledging tensions and searching for the possibilities of connectivity between them. Through an embodied arts-based walking practice, our approach challenges the perpetuation of reductionist perspectives, including nature/culture binaries, within environmental education. We stay with the traces of bird, meeting, tree, watery and concrete in mutual inseparable relation and becoming.

Drawing on a posthuman lens we walk — with Deborah Bird Rose and her conceptual framing of shimmer. We explore shimmering as incorporating a sensorial richness, as beauty and grandeur, as constantly in flux, moving between past, future and back again. Shimmering has potentiality in a posthuman context in its encompassing of spiritual and ancestral energies and illumination of the human (settler) story of exceptionalism. By theorising shimmer with this posthuman lens, we acknowledge and honour the eco-ethico consciousness raised by Australian ecophilosophers and ecofeminists such as Deborah Bird Rose and Val Plumwood, and the social ecologists who have continued to walk with them. In order to disrupt anthropocentricism and present a moral wake-up call that glows from dull to brilliance in these precarious times, we bring to environmental education the potential of holding the shimmering past tracings of theory along with us on our journeys.

In Queensland, Australia, a new senior Earth and Environmental Science (EES) syllabus has been approved for first implementation in 2019. Given the natural alignment between EES and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), this study employs document analysis to investigate the extent to which the intended curriculum reflects the tenets of ESD. An exploratory content analysis examined the frequency of keywords to identify any prominent sustainability themes that might underpin the syllabus, while a curriculum key guided a deeper analysis according to four tenets of ESD: Learning content; Pedagogy and learning environments; Societal transformation; and Learning outcomes. These analyses found that the ESD tenets reflected in the syllabus is limited chiefly to sustainability learning content, while broader notions of ESD, like the promotion of transformative learning, are marginalised or absent. Instead, the syllabus reflects a technical orientation to curriculum, underpinned by a neoliberal agenda. It is argued that the Queensland EES syllabus represents a missed opportunity to engage students with ESD. In a policy climate where achievement and accountability dominate educational discourse, there is an inherent risk that ESD will fall by the wayside, given it is not prioritised in the intended curriculum. Implications for curriculum development are also discussed.

The rich and innovative ideas of quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad have much to offer environmental educators in terms of practical theories for teaching and learning. This article shares insights gained from a facilitated conversation at the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) Conference Research Symposium, and offers an introduction to Barad’s theories for environmental educators. At this time of challenging planetary imperatives, environmental education is increasingly called upon to contribute to students’ understanding of connectedness, and Barad’s theory of agential realism provides a way to think about, articulate and engage with connectedness as inherent within the world rather than something we need to create. By considering entanglement as a fundamental state, we understand that separateness is not the original state of being. This shift in perspective supports a subtle yet powerful approach to knowledge, communication and collaboration, understanding difference as integral within the world’s entangled becoming. The convened conversation sought to explore Barad’s thinking by defining and discussing the concepts of agential realism, intra-action, material-discursivity, phenomena and diffraction. Barad’s ideas were used to collectively explore what it means to be intraconnected and entangled in today’s world, and specifically how these concepts and experiences relate to our work and lives as environmental educators and researchers.

The assemblage of water/watery/watering is a lively cartography of how water may be accounted for when theorising with and through environmental education research. Challenging the universalising claims of Western technoscience and the colonial logic of extraction, the article develops an alternative theoretical mapping of environmental education through engagements with Ingold’s (2007, 2012, 2015) concepts of lines, knots, and knotting. For this article and for the Special Issue in which it is housed, the concepts of such knottings are defined as an assemblage of haecceities, lived events that are looped, tethered and entangled as material and conceptual agencies that inhere within situated encounters. Thus, this article grapples with the need to account for water differently in contemporary posthuman ecologies. To overcome anthropocentric and mastery-oriented approaches, various other ways to account for water in science or environmental education will continue to come to the surface, bubbling and rushing like a waterfall as they have done in this work. Some of these will include thinking with water, which will be central to a theoretical mapping of water that seeks embrace sticky knots. The article explores a (re)turn to artful practices and encounters as spaces in which posthumanist concepts for environmental education might be cultivated.

This study of Naessian ecocentrism and anthropocentrism in three environment club coordinators/science teachers, their colleagues and some parents at three secondary schools uses deep ecology and relational fields as primary frameworks for open-ended interviews. The findings reveal new insights into the affective, cognitive and behavioural characteristics of coordinators who enhance environmental education in their schools. The work presents preliminary data on leadership among sustainability coordinators who run environment clubs. It fills a gap in the literature by showing that in addition to environmental educators requiring knowledge and attitudes regarding sustainability practices, affective qualities like connectedness and love for the environment may be important to their success as sustainability exemplars. Teachers emerge as sustainability exemplars in a relational field to implement sustainability across the secondary curriculum, galvanise students, teachers and parents to connect to the Earth, and help students, teachers and parents move away from anthropocentrism. Findings suggest that if schools commit resources and time to the coordinator’s role, students experience significant benefits by becoming closer to the Earth and more empowered to act for the environment in ways consistent with deep ecology.

Environmental educators remain challenged by how to encourage people to make connections between environmental quality and human development in a way that is socially just and equitable for all living things. This article explores links between performance-based learning and environmental education pedagogy as one way to address this challenge. Sixteen children (8–10 years) from an Auckland primary school worked with a performance artist to present Lookout, an intimate performance by a child for an adult. Its intent was to juxtapose people’s different backgrounds, experiences and ages in a two-way communication of their view of Auckland City through an environmental lens encompassing past, present and future, while surveying the city from a vantage point. Analysis of data from focus groups with the children and interviews with their parents (also participants) showed that the Lookout process led to children developing a deeper understanding of Auckland City’s issues, a stronger sense of connection to their city, an understanding of the future, and feelings of empowerment. However, their parents’ learning was more tenuous. Three key elements to the success of Lookout for learning are identified, and it is proposed that these could be used when developing performance-based environmental education programs.

Studying humankind’s relationship to the earth involves broad and deep questions for students as today’s educators explore changing teaching methods. This article highlights benefits of a multidisciplinary approach to environmental education, drawing upon ancient natural philosophy as a coherent conceptual resource. The Greek philosopher Plotinus is introduced to show the application of ancient natural philosophy across all fields and on all levels of knowledge under a common banner. The significance of ancient natural philosophy is its conception of overall unity. This is the key. Unity is implicit in interrelationships between parts to whole on all levels of existence. From such a perspective, all life forms and other entities in the natural world can be understood as interrelated — just as James Lovelock demonstrated in describing the homeostatic state of natural processes on earth. On a similar reasoning, the diversity in people, societies and places can be appreciated physically and sociologically as belonging to one world. Several studies are cited to explore this overlap between ancient natural philosophy and honouring the connection and dependence of humanity on the fragility of the earth’s ecosystem.

Critical discourses of sustainability challenge modern rhetoric of economic growth and challenge current modes of social development. Yet sustainability discourses are shaped predominantly by the perspectives and interests of middle-class, tertiary-educated urban policy makers or environmentalists, and have insufficiently engaged people beyond these cohorts, even in the advanced capitalist societies where they have originated. This article shares findings from a study that investigated how people who are not strongly engaged with sustainability discourses understand and engage with many of the underlying concerns that animate these discourses from the context of their situated, everyday experiences. This is important information for sustainability educators, because it challenges dominant ideas of what sustainability is and offers new and alternate ways of engaging different groups of people in actions for sustainability. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capital were used to inform the research design that employed focus groups and interviews with people from a range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds and life stages in Tasmania, Australia. The findings provide insight into the ways in which people who are disengaged from discourses of sustainability may be actively engaged in practices of sustainability that may provide practical guidance for environmentalists and policy makers concerning how current discourses of sustainability reflect specific social contexts and experiences.

Drawing on posthumanist and new materialism theorising, we take the concept of resonance for an a/r/tographic ‘walk’ to know, be and do differently, to challenge human-centric separatist ways that have resulted in our current socioecological crises. Beginning with Ingold’s knotty thinking, we identify the notion of resonance as a node for exploring and thinking about interactions in the world. Guided by Barad’s proposition of entangling ethico-onto-epistemic ways, our a/r/tographic thought experiments find resonances that echo through bodies, through connections as nature, through deep-time and modern spaces to notice and attend to intraactions within the ecological collective. Through art-full, thought-full scholartistic enquiry, we explore diffractive encounters to consider resonance as a conceptual tool for tuning into and harmonising with the entanglements of body–mind–space–time–matter. We pose this exploration of resonance as the start of a knotty theory conversation for shifting into a new ‘common world’ knowing, being and doing.