Land management is often a three-way partnership between management agencies, scientists and community members. Co-operation between these three sectors in working for better environmental outcomes has a long history in Victoria, and nature conservation has often previously been achieved through successful adult environmental education. The recent development of an ecology course on the Box and Ironbark forests continues this tradition. It was organised by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DNRE) for community interest groups and was taught by scientists.

This article presents the results of qualitative research into some participants' view of their learning on the course. It suggests significant directions for adult learning in environmental education. An intensive experience of field-based scientific inquiry appeared to prompt not only ecological learning but also development of aesthetic, moral and action dimensions for the interviewees. The article suggests that environmental education needs to embrace fruitful elements of various learning methods for adults, including scientific learning about ecology. The process of enabling people to extend their knowledge of natural settings and processes can also enhance their relationship with and commitment to these places.

Within the North American public education system, institutionalised structures of schooling often prevent teachers from aligning their values with their practice when it comes to environmental education (Bowers, 1997; Weston, 2004). In response to this, this article will outline our lived experiences, as teachers and researcher, in disrupting the traditional school system as we work toward building a new culture in schooling through nature-based education. Acts of disruption that we will speak to include: going outside for learning on a regular basis, teaching for empowerment, involving families in the education, attempts to play with structural confines of schooling, and finding ways to stay empowered ourselves. Through this work, we have found that there is a rippling effect to the disruption that requires courage, grit, and resilience such that we do not slide back into conventional approaches. We have also become empowered in our practices through implementing these changes, watching our students become active stewards within their communities and beyond. We are learning deeply about the work of structural change within a public school district and offer words here as inspiration and support for others wishing to make changes within their own context.

This article will investigate the philosophy of science of Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) as a coherent basis for environmental education. The work of Bhaskar serves as an in-depth approach to understanding how to apply critical realism (the critical and the realist) to matters such as environmental education, because he concretely theorises the connections between science, social change and metaphysics. By mobilising key Bhaskarian motifs — that is, the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the laminated system as a means to understand reality, the ways in which inquiry may be organised through the real, actual and the empirical, and the positive application of dialectics — this article constructs a new approach to environmental education and positions it in the field of environmental education by comparing it to posthumanism and the new materialisms. This article contains inquiry-based study outlines for enhanced thinking around: (1) climate change and social justice; (2) movements towards a carbon-free economy; (3) water, food and population; and (4) the future of human habitation.

In this paper we explore what decentring the child in posthumanism does to our research practices, to our conceptualisations of and relationalities to the child. Crucially, we explore the imperative for other ways to encounter the child – that pursue a decolonising and de/recentralising agenda. We pursue tentacular lines of enquiry through a series of interwoven stories – some more familiar than others. It is by queering old narratives that new and unexpected stories concerning pedagogical documentation, sustainability and environmental education, and the child’s contaminated connection to ‘nature’ begin to emerge. This paper attempts to mobilise ‘the posthuman child’ as feral, an uncomfortable in-between that invites us to grapple with the disease of life on a damaged planet. Central to our storytelling is recycled, ‘natural’ materials found in a Reggio Emilia kindergarten in Norway. Specifically, cork has guided us; insisting that we take the non-innocence of matter to the heart of enquiries. We do this to illustrate the potential of feminist new materialism to respond with situated, embodied, affective insights and provocations that might offer ways to consume, cohabit and wrestle in more care-full ways with the Anthropocene ecologies that we are intricately and endlessly enmeshed in.

Despite the importance of teachers to the school garden movement, we still know very little about what drives particular teachers to incorporate a school garden into their pedagogy. In response, this article reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the internal processes and products involved in rationalising and sustaining teachers’ use. Analysis of interviews with three primary teachers — Laura, Meredith, and Clare — indicate that a powerful rationale is formed when teachers read their childhood memories, often idealised, against their observations of children today. This rationale is strengthened by opportunities afforded by the garden itself, which allows teachers to enact their deepest beliefs about teaching and learning and resist external controls. This study also provides evidence that a school garden can easily evoke nostalgia. The article ends by re-theorising this nostalgia as part of the ‘cultural logic’ (Enfield, 2000) of school gardens, while suggesting nostalgia's productive uses.

Early childhood is an important time for building children’s affinity with nature and the environment. Early childhood professionals play a crucial role in developing young children’s understanding of the natural world. Over the past 50 years, there has been a movement in early childhood education and care contexts to provide young children with the opportunity to learn in natural surroundings such as forest schools and nature kindergartens. This research, occurred in four bush kinders, an Australian example of nature-based, early years education influenced by the forest school approach to education. In this paper we interrogate key ideas concerning environmental education, drawing on seminal empirical research, guiding curriculum documents such as Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework and government policy documents to build understandings of how children’s play can be observed by educators who can then support the children to develop their understandings of the natural world around them. Through ethnography, a methodology that uses both participation and observation of research participants, it became apparent that young children’s play-based learning offers opportunities for development of understandings of the environment. Applying a recent definition of environmental education from the US Environmental Protection Authority (2022), we analysed four vignettes which provide examples of educators and children’s interactions supporting children to build an affinity with nature observed during the research. This research’s implications are novel when considering the relatively new bush kinder approach to early childhood education as the findings remind us of the benefits of bush kinders in generating opportunities for young children’s environmental education.

In the relatively new discipline of design education we have the opportunity to frame the way that design education is formulated. The relative lack of theorists in the field of design education studies leaves unquestioned the relevance of conventional practices of design education that are premised on only tangentially relevant Art, Science and Information Technology models. There is a gap in design education development regarding how to mediate ecological concerns with techno-scientific imperatives. Environmental education researchers can influence this new field by challenging existing approaches to design education with particular attention to the ways design either contributes to or hinders the development of a sustainable society. In order to enter this discussion with environmental education researchers we identify three ecological issues faced by designers and design educators, here we pay particular attention to Industrial Design. The question for this paper is, can environmental education researchers offer advice to the design education area that may help us develop ecologically sustainable design-based programs. The newness of ecological concerns in the design research and design education areas means that we have a great deal to learn. If environmental education researchers are able to assist us with our reflections on designing curricula that in turn encourages a more ecologically aware design profession then this would be a worthwhile contribution to design practice in Australia, and indeed the world.

Using hermeneutic phenomenology to aid the reader ‘experience’ the data collected, this study reports on 18 college students, 4 staff members and the author's trip to a remote island on the Great Barrier Reef. It is a story of the (re)discovery of the social and natural ecologies that bind us together, and of how explicit teaching and learning about these ecologies can make a difference to young people's abilities to consciously be part of, contribute to, and sustain these ecologies. A grounded theory of five dimensions of giving (to self, others, communities, environment, and the whole) is offered as a beginning framework from which to imbue teaching and learning with meaning and social concern.

Three themes are set out in this paper. The first is that learning about ecologically sensitive living–and putting that living into practice–are central to Aboriginal indigenous education. Second, Australia's first peoples were and are deprived of landscapes providing the base to their spirituality; continuing processes maintain that loss of independence. The third is that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians need to address quickly courses of action which provide for a reinvigoration of that landscape connection and independence. This need has points of significance for environmental educators, several of which are presented.

Programs designed to promote the use of natural environments for leisure purposes need to be based on a sound and justifiable environmental ethic. This paper attempts to develop such an ethic. The general and basic ecological attitude, arguments relating to the need for human survival, other arguments which relate to human interests such as the need for beauty, recreation and scientific endeavours and utilitarian arguments relating to the needs of future generations are examined and are seen as being morally and practically inadequate.

The only justifiable environmental ethic is seen as one which has. as its central concept, the interdependent natural community in which the interests of all individual members of the community (including the interests of human beings) are regarded as secondary to the good of the total community. In the ethic, humans protect the natural environment because the entities of nature are “fellow-travellers”, members of the same moral community.

Despite the bad press surrounding the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), the outcomes of the event confirm that WSSD served to reinvigorate global commitments and actions to sustainable development.

The Summit, which took place from 26 August - 4 September 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, aimed to review progress made towards Sustainable Development over the past 10 years and to work towards commitments to action (UN General Assembly Resolution 55/199). It saw the largest ever gathering of world leaders and over 21,000 participants from 191 government, intergovernmental and non-government organisations, the private sector, academia and the scientific community (IISD, 2002). The mere presence of these stakeholders, willing to engage in the negotiation process, demonstrates that sustainable development is very much alive and relevant.

President Thabo Mbeki opened by characterising the growing gap between North and South as “global apartheid” and highlighting the crises of poverty and ecological degradation. It was clear then that the outcomes of the Summit had to go beyond the Rio 1992 commitments which focused on environmental actions. He called for a practicable and meaningful Johannesburg Plan of Implementation to fulfil the framework of Agenda 21 within the Summit theme of “People, Planet and Prosperity”.

This article presents an analysis of three uniquely situated garden-based research studies. As colleagues intrigued by the rich, intricate, learning dynamics playing out within the garden spaces, our collaboration explored the broader meaning and potential for garden-based programming. As we discussed the three garden studies, two themes emerged as valuable for analysis: relationality and decolonisation. We understand the themes in relation to Gregory Cajete’s (2005) conceptualisation of coming to resonance within oneself, one’s community, and the surrounding ecosystem as being integral aspects of a holistic learning program. In addition, centring learning around relationality with place requires, as Delores Calderon (2014) asserts, a critique of colonisation that has shaped place over time. In our collaboration on the three studies and reading of current developments in the literature, it became clear that garden- and place-based education must grapple with the troubled histories of place and work towards decolonisation. Each garden project provided unique insight, but our collective analysis elicited an examination of assumptions about pedagogy and potential for decolonisation of land, body, and minds.

In this article, I call for a cripping of environmental education as a necessary move in shifting away from the field’s current conceptions of disability as defect and deficiency, and towards disrupting the structures and processes that operate as normalizing technologies within ableism/sanism. Through an examination of the ways that the field of environmental education has/has not engaged critical disability politics, I illuminate how disability is not often included within environmental education literature. When it is, it is often through the use of disability as metaphor or through recommendations for best practices in accommodating disabilities. More often though within environmental education, disability has operated as a hidden curriculum, underpinning much of the field’s curricular, pedagogical, and even philosophical foundations. Through a cripping of the field these compulsory able-bodied/able-minded assumptions are made apparent. I suggest that by centering crip bodies and minds through cripistemologies, we might enable new ways of knowing, being in, connecting to, and understanding the natural world.

When considering a topic as broad as research in environmental education it seems worthwhile, at the outset, to make some basic distinctions. First, establishing research priorities is not simply an empirical question. While it is undoubtedly useful to try to establish perceived needs and interests, and to consider them when establishing research priorities, this can only describe part of the task at hand. There are surely some logical requirements as well.

Second, a much more challenging task, it seems to me, is to more clearly understand the nature of the questions to which we seek answers. We must seek to distinguish between those research techniques which are more or less consistent with the nature of our task. Unfortunately, research in education generally, and in environmental education, in particular, has been hindered by a failure on the part of the research community to recognize the need for a more complete range of research perspectives than those customarily found, and by a failure to recognize the occasional and inevitable misapplications of technique which can occur when appropriate methodologies do not seem available.

With some misgivings about the scope of research in environmental education in mind, I am led to my concern: How do we go about furthering our understanding of concepts central to our field of study? In exploring this question I propose that conceptual analysis is an important research area. Further, I also argue that it is not simply an option, but rather a logical necessity if we are to establish greater coherence within environmental education and avoid unnecessary confusion (see for example: Barrow & Milburn, 1986; Scheffler, 1960; Soltis, 1978; and Wilson, 1969). Further, it is in the nature of this question that we find appeal for this particular approach to research.

The ethical dimensions of environmental study are considered with particular reference to environmental education. It is argued that moral considerations and value judgements are an inevitable component of any form of environmental investigation or education and the nature of environmental ethics is explored in this context. Methods for transmitting environmental ethics are considered critically and the article concludes by suggesting some alternative approaches to exploring environmental ethics in education.

In this article, I draw on interviews with graduates from an Outdoor and Environmental Education course to explore the ways in which their environmental ethics changed since leaving university. I do this in relation to the graduates' personal and professional experiences, particularly in the context of teaching Outdoor Education and Physical Education in secondary schools. By offering two alternative readings of graduates' experiences, this research contributes to existing education literature about the ‘wash-out effect’ of teacher education courses once beginning teachers become immersed in schools. In the first reading I find evidence of regulatory and normalising strategies of society and school communities and a ‘plateauing’ of graduates' engagement with environmental practices. In a second reading, framed by Foucault's theory of power and ethics, I discern acts of ‘tactical’ resistance. This reading foregrounds strategies graduates use to negotiate the constraining spaces of schools.

This article examines learning design in a postgraduate preservice teacher setting. The overarching aim was to embed environmentally responsive approaches throughout two companion units for diverse student cohorts. This article reports on a teacher educator self-study in a regional university with extensive online delivery for large units (300–800 students) in a 1-year course. The author examines how assessment tasks in literacy- and numeracy-oriented units are designed to meaningfully integrate environmental sustainability using contextual cues, collaborative learning, complex tasks, and reflexivity. The author argues for the use of these four key guidelines of environmentally responsive pedagogies alongside environmental education programs to emphasise messages of sustainability even in units that are not traditionally environmentally oriented. Challenges include problematising the nature of effective teaching and dealing with the complexities of purposeful learning. Innovative unit learning design alone, however, is inadequate if the surrounding systems are fragmented and seen as separate to learning about sustainability.