Cultures that recognise the many forces and memories held in landscape can make important contributions to climate emergency. We argue there is another group which has knowledge to call upon; young people growing up in post-industrial places. In this paper, we draw on over 10 years of research with young people to speculate about the potential of outsider knowledge as the basis for emplaced activism as an original and significantly new approach to environmental education. The first part of the paper presents the argument, concepts and methodology for thinking about environments as lived experience. Next we introduce the place where capitalist and industrial forces are knotted with the distinctive histories of post-industrial communities. Place is explored through stories of the geological and historical legacies of south Wale’s valleys in sections titled: Earth Matters; Industrial Matters; Affective Matters and Matters of Decline. Next, three lines of flight that took off in creative workshops with young people: Troubled Landscapes, Embodied Landscape and Activist Landscapes are presented. Finally, we set out a new approach to environmental education and research by asking what if environmental activism starts from young people’s troubled experiences of living in marginal and forgotten places?

In the first part of the paper some features of the international 0ECD/CERI Project “Environment and School Initiatives” are described. The central idea of the project is to support teachers in educational activities that connect the promotion of dynamic qualities (such as initiative and self-confidence) with the promotion of environmental awareness. In the second part the project's philosophy and its educational implications are discussed: The main idea is that the increase in human-produced complexity has created a qualitatively new situation, in which local initiatives, long-term value-orientations and the wide-spread ability to reflect on one's own actions become a matter of survival. For the educational system this means a redefinition of its tasks to include reflective action on their environment by students and teachers and an appreciation of the value complexity of environmental problems.

The author's experience of the day-to-day issues faced as an educator in an Aboriginal school are recounted, along with perspectives gained as part of a research project. The proposition is argued that an Education for Sustainability approach, where learning is structured around a negotiated environmental issue within local community, represents a cultural accommodation or halfway point between mainstream formal schooling and the needs of Indigenous learners. This article contends that such an educative approach meets Indigenous learners ‘halfway’, through compatibility with Indigenous values frameworks and employing culturally appropriate pedagogical methods. The argument is made that by demonstrating a willingness to negotiate worthwhile environmentally based projects that address community ecological concerns, EfS may be able to improve community support and mitigate impediments to the engagement of Indigenous learners with formal education. A critical pedagogy of place (Grunewald, 2003) is discussed as a theoretical framework that combines place-based pedagogy with empowering educational theory. Indigenous learners’ connection with place is recognised in this approach and ascribed a positive rather than negative value.

The aim of this article is to show how water emerged as a research method nearby and within a small stream during a 9-month fieldwork carried out with preschool children. The fieldwork was informed and shaped by the preschool children’s and researcher’s situated knowledges and their questions about environmental issues concerning water, absence of water, pollution and ethics. The empirical material consists of films and photos, drawings and field notes, produced together by the preschool children and the researcher during the research. The analysis draws on relational ontology and the writings of Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway. The article concludes with a discussion about what can be learnt from the study and its contribution to research within the fields of Early Childhood Education and Environmental Education.

Sense of place describes both affective and cognitive — emotional and intellectual — connections to place. Affective outcomes, tied to arts and humanities education, can facilitate these connections. But little research explores environmental science, arts and humanities (eSAH) curricula on place relationships. Additionally, most research on the sense of place focuses on repeated visits to a place over time, rather than short-term experiences like a field trip. Finally, digital technology is a growing trend across science education, but little research investigates its use in field-based contexts. Our research begins to address these gaps. This article describes an eSAH field trip for middle and high school learners. Using a conventional content analysis, we present pilot data from two high school field trips. Our findings illuminate a framework for understanding active and passive place relationships in the context of short-term interdisciplinary field learning experiences.

The subject of environmental science (ES) was introduced into Bhutanese schools to educate students about sustainable environmental conservation. This study aims to answer the research question: What are the impacts of studying ES on Bhutanese students for environmental sustainability? The study employed mixed methods to draw data from interviews with six principals, 14 teachers and 189 students, and surveys with 14 teachers and 563 students from six secondary schools. Participants indicated the development of students’ Gross National Happiness value of sustainable environmental and socioeconomic development. However, an anthropocentric perspective appeared to be dominant among participants, suggesting a need to develop ecocentric worldviews to support sustainability. Most students noted their changed behaviours, development of optimism, stewardship and agency towards ecological sustainability from studying ES. To prepare students to take action to address sustainability issues, teachers could leverage students’ optimism, agency and stewardship through action-oriented approaches to teaching ES.

This paper reports on an investigation of the status of pre-school environmental education in Hong Kong through both a questionnaire survey and case studies. The study looked in particular at the environmental education activities organised, difficulties encountered in the implementation of environmental education and teachers' attitudes towards environmental education and teaching approaches. The findings indicated that pre-school environmental education tended to focus more on education about the environment than education in and for the environment. The results also revealed that the teachers' perceived barriers were mainly logistical, such as lack of time and resources, and educational in the sense that they felt that they lacked knowledge about environmental education. The implications for future development of environmental education are discussed.

The children we teach in school now will spend most of their lives in the 21st century. Those leaving school in the 1990s will become the parents, voters, workers, business people and visionaries of tomorrow. If all education is for the future, where is the future in education? How are we preparing the students for those responsibilities? How are we helping them to think more critically and creatively about the future?

My argument is that as educators, and particularly as environmental educators, we need to engage in the task of ‘reclaiming the future’. I will illustrate this with reference to: i) the approaching millenium; ii) the need to educate more explicitly for the future; iii) the importance of being able to envision more just and sustainable futures; and iv) some thoughts on moving forwards.

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.

For white settler researchers aiming to contribute to the work of decolonising education, actively seeking ways to disturb and destabilise long-held onto-epistemological assumptions associated with colonial modernity is important. In this article I investigate how these disturbances might occur in a diffractive and decolonising reading methodology. I outline two prior diffractive reading experiences that drew on decolonial theory and Barad’s diffraction theory: A situated inquiry of the Great Barrier Reef as a pedagogical agent; and a reading of Australian teacher education policy through military imaginaries. In this article I read these prior diffractive reading experiences through one another, attending to further methodological patterns. I identify two connected methods of defamiliarisation that are generative for destabilising colonising ways of knowing, norms and thinking in education. These are: Bringing ostensibly different phenomena together in diffractive relations with one another; and reading difference in the spirit of companionship, that is, in an orientation to learning from difference rather than to master difference. I suggest that if education continues to rely on and wield the same modern critical tools that support colonial-capitalist systems it will be unable to recognise, address and reimagine the continued violence of these systems.

With water shortage and increasing demand for water, education may have an important role in promoting the sustainable management of water resources. Educational curricula are the key resources used by teachers for studentsʼ teaching and training purposes. This study assessed water culture and water education-related criteria and standards in programmes and school curricula for Primary, Middle and upper Secondary school education in Morocco. It also investigated teachers for suggestions and views regarding methods for water-related topics and concepts implementation. The main tools used consisted of a content analysis grid for programmes and educational guidelines. A questionnaire and interviews were administered to 95 teachers of different subject areas, belonging to the three investigated school levels. Findings showed that the occurrence of water education criteria and standards is weak in school curricula of the investigated school levels. They were explicitly or implicitly addressed depending on the subject areas. The main topics consisted of water cycle definition, water as a vital source, water pollution sources, water economy interest. However, no reference has been made to water law, its accessibility, aesthetics and water-related professions.

In this essay, we argue that postqualitative inquiry is not a useful descriptor for environmental education research and that it is time to consider what comes after the posts. We argue that thinking with theory as a process methodology in the onto-epistemological framings of our research is more generative and opens up opportunities for this research being interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary/cross-disciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist/more-than-humanist, indigenous, participatory, experimental and transgressive.

At the beginning of the last decade, Silver (1980, p.7) was able to write with assurance that ‘Behind our political and ideological disagreements…lies a crucial, common confidence in the educational process’, a confidence based on education's ability both to maintain the social, political and economic status quo and to change it. Over a decade later, and with our awareness of global environmental crises that those years have brought, the authors have become increasingly convinced of the practical fact that formal education in our society has functioned predominantly to maintain the social, political and economic conditions that have produced environmental crisis and is thereby severely hampered in its ability to make the changes necessary to stop the degradation of our planet, let alone improve its health.

Although we do not propose that the deteriorating state of the planet can be attributed to any single underlying cause, we would suggest that a generic term for many of these causes is the ‘culture of positivism’ (Giroux 1981, p.38) which, in Giroux's words, has a ‘limited focus on objectivity, efficiency, and technique …’. Gough too (1987, p.54) argues that Western industrial society's systems of education rest on ‘an epistemological paradigm’, a particular set of theories about how human beings gain knowledge of themselves and their world as well as the kinds of knowledge that are valued. According to Gough (1987, p.54), the kinds of knowledge which have dominated Western industrial education are those which have been structured by Western society's dominant form of theorising, namely: positivist, empirical science. The idea of a culture which is mechanistic and reductionist, which encourages human beings to dominate and control ‘nature’, and which looks for ever more sophisticated ‘technical fixes’ to overcome the tragic results of its own logic is reflected also throughout the ‘green’ literature. See, for instance, Bookchin (1986 and 1990), Fox (1990), Passmore (1980) and Young (1991). Ways in which this dominant culture adversely affects our relationship with our environment are documented in the same literature.

The rationale for including sustainability in Higher Education curriculum has been made clear, yet how to facilitate effective learning in this field has received less research attention. This article focuses on approaches to the ‘framing’ of sustainability in curriculum design as a tool for educators to contextualise sustainability concepts and practices to engage learners within traditional disciplines where sustainability studies are still relatively novel, and therefore, not embedded within existing disciplinary ‘frames’. The article draws together findings from a qualitative study of four undergraduate sustainability courses to provide initial insight into different framings of sustainability and student experiences within the courses. Drawing on an analysis of empirical data and theory, this article argues that the way sustainability is framed may assist in addressing barriers in the uptake of sustainability by teachers and students in Higher Education. Framing has the potential to support student engagement with sustainability courses and the integration of sustainability within degree programs and professional practices. The findings also indicate that framing, and its effect on learning, are shaped by both the presentation of content and also, more importantly for transformative learning, the pedagogy underpinning the curriculum design.

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?

There are many examples of environmental courses in tertiary institutions, but the integration of environmental education across the range of courses has generally not occurred. The paper describes a process and strategy to establish environmental literacy in tertiary courses. This strategy was developed from a project to introduce waste minimisation education into four disciplinary based courses. Since waste minimisation was introduced in the context of ecological sustainability, the project provided a framework for the broad principles of environmental literacy. The project began with the assumption that adequate materials were already available, but what was needed was a process that would guide academics in the revision of their course content, and would support them in making changes. The paper reports on the conduct of the project and, based on our experiences, presents a strategy for developing curriculum change. This strategy has been developed to recognise the contexts associated with environmental understanding and tertiary institutions, and the processes needed to facilitate the change.

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.

Domestic and international tourists have major impacts on Aotearoa/New Zealand, both positive and negative. In 2010, tourism was the biggest export earner and continues to grow. Environmental consequences of tourism are also growing. Ways of addressing the environmental impacts caused by a mobile society continue to be debated from a variety of practical and theoretical positions. Place-based approaches are a logical discussion focus in addressing these types of social and environmental problems but may be associated with environmental myopia. Tourism, mobility and the principles of environmental education programs such as Leave No Trace are all contested topics within the place-based discourse. This article discusses these tensions and proposes an expansion of place-based and cosmopolitan approaches, with the Leave No Trace Aotearoa/New Zealand campaign presented as an example. The article concludes with possible implications of a more bifocal approach for environmental educators.