In this article, we discuss our investigation of children’s imaginative sense-making and its materiality in climate change education. Drawing on a new materialist approach, our research contributes to knowledge about the material significance in children’s sense-making related to climate change. During a project called Riddle of the Spirit in a Finnish primary school, we invited children to explore the concepts of global warming and carbon dioxide through narrative, playful and multimodal activities. Inspired by postqualitative methods, our relational analysis, based on video materials, maps and examines two episodes of children’s small group inquiry. Our findings unfold the material–discursive intra-actions, through which a prop turned into a whale’s head, the Titanic film appeared, and water and carbon dioxide became important to children’s bodies. With these specific events, the study illustrates how various materials conjoined and came to matter in the children’s sense-making of the concepts.

In this paper, we employ Deleuzian philosophy to explore the complex challenges confronting teachers and education systems posed by the climate emergency and the implications of the resulting posthumanist turn. Self-identified climate-activist teachers working in schools in Aotearoa New Zealand were asked to draw Deleuzian assemblages of their educational realities and of themselves while contemplating the climate emergency. Their thought-provoking drawings were used as semiotic artefacts during unstructured Zoom interviews, leading to rich conversations. Through this process, the drawings channel affect within the research assemblage, entangling the reader actively into the research process. Insights gained from the participants problematise the perspectives of teachers in response to the climate emergency and lead us to conceptualise the potential of teachers as Deleuze’s nomadic change makers toward posthuman futures.

Anthropogenic climate change and the necessary transformation of society to mitigate its consequences constitutes an unprecedented educational challenge. Responding to the climate emergency and to society’s awakening climate activism generates a complex situation for school leadership in particular. Here, we report findings from our research with climate activist students and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We argue that school leadership plays a crucial role in enabling student and teacher agency and the development of effective Climate Change Education in schools. We utilise assemblage thinking, situating this within the new materialisms, to conceptualise schools and their leadership as dynamic assemblages, and we discuss teacher and student experiences as actors across such assemblages. We conclude that deterritorialisation and decoding of educational institutions and their leadership practices can promote and enable education to become a driver of the cultural transformation of society that the climate emergency mandates.

The relation between the understanding and belief of the site-specific dangers of climate change and the behaviour that individuals take to mitigate their impacts was assessed to investigate the psychological antecedent to pro-environmental behaviour; a necessity to mitigate anthropogenic climate change at the individual level. A quantitative cross-sectional design was employed to measure beliefs and behaviour of university students. Correlation was measured between the belief in one’s ability to affect change and pro-environmental behaviour. The hypothesis that nations facing greater climate threat would behave accordingly was tested on the two largest national representatives of the sample, China and Australia. In addition, a naïve Bayesian network, coupled with a self-organising map, was developed to explore correlations between self-efficacy and participants’ socio-demographic features. Results showed that Chinese students are more likely to have higher self-efficacy, while such trend was not noticed for Australians. Similarly, participants with higher educational qualifications, older, and with higher paid jobs also have a higher chance of presenting pro-environmental behaviour. Despite the study limitations, there seems to be evidence suggesting that educational and climate change policies have affected students’ self-efficacy and individual commitment to mitigation.

This article appreciatively reviews environmental education practice on islands through the lens of four key strands of environmental education discourse: biodiversity, conservation and science-framed education; place-based, indigenized and bioregional education; climate change and disaster risk reduction education; and education for sustainable development. Arising from these strands and their interface, six questions are asked of the examples of island practice reviewed. A final section asks what is distinctive about environmental education on islands and comes up with five principal findings. First, it is observed that environmental education initiatives on islands are markedly eclectic in their rich blending of practice from within the different strands. Second, it is noted that environmental education practice on different islands, especially in the Pacific, is marked by a return to indigenous, community-based learning. Third, the emergence of a distinctive pedagogy is remarked upon, especially the greater weighting given to relational, socio-affective and action-orientated learning. Fourth, the paucity of inter-island cosmopolitan dialogue is noted and questions are asked about how to ensure island learners steeped in learning about place can be brought to connect with the global environmental problematic. Fifth, the frequency of cross-curricular, interdisciplinary, even trans-disciplinary framing of environmental education initiatives is identified as bringing distinctiveness to island practice.

Engaging adolescents is critical to encouraging future climate change adaptation and mitigation behaviours. Adolescents are typically more receptive to climate change messages than adults, but educators and communicators need research-based strategies for optimizing engagement, including information about what factors are most influential in changing behaviours. To better understand how communication with teachers, friends and family, climate change knowledge and climate change concern predict climate change behaviour, we administered a survey to a random sample of middle school students in North Carolina, USA (n = 1371). We measured climate change behaviour with a multi-item scale asking respondents about energy conservation, alternative transportation and engagement with environmental issues. We found that climate change concern and discussing climate change with family and friends predicted climate change behaviour. We also found that students from urban, high socioeconomic status schools were more likely to engage in climate change behaviour than students in urban, low socioeconomic status schools or rural schools. These results suggest that education efforts should leverage communication with family and friends in programming designed to encourage climate change behaviour. Further, efforts to promote climate change behaviour among low socioeconomic status urban and rural adolescents may be warranted, but would benefit from further investigation into the ideological, physical and knowledge-based drivers of behaviour differences documented in this study.