Common notions around the concept of sustainability tend to be framed within the values and principles that the world's natural environments need to be used and managed in such a way as to make them available for future generations. Consequently, pedagogical approaches in environmental education that follow this intellectual thread tend to adopt a standard scientific approach to inquiry-based learning. This article argues that the features of a geographical approach to inquiry, particularly in its wider conceptualisation of fieldwork, provides a much more effective means of developing an environmental education that is more cogniscent of the deeper aspects of sustainability. While the importance of the natural systems components of sustainability cannot be ignored, they tend to displace other inherent facets within the sustainability concept and, in particular, the reality that any discussion as to the sustainable use of natural environments must incorporate knowledge and understanding of the way people interact with these environments. We contend that sustainability, when taught in schools, has tended to be environmentally and scientifically based, diminishing the role of humans. In an example of how this deficit might be overcome, the Australian Curriculum incorporates sustainability as one of the three mandatory cross-curriculum priorities; that is, one of the avenues for encouraging complementary learning and teaching across different disciplines. Within this curriculum framework, the concept is expanded to not only include a consideration of the mutual interdependence of the environmental spheres (Systems), but also World View and Futures — thus including the human component. However, using the notion of the fieldwork imperative (Casinader & Kidman, 2017), which distinguishes between the reasons why we do fieldwork and the reasons why we should do fieldwork, we argue that sustainability education would be placed more effectively within the disciplinary domain of Geography, rather than as part of an integrated curriculum approach or in Science.

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.

Over the last decade there has been a discernable global upsurge of nature kindergartens, forest schools, bush schools and nature-based primary schools; all with varying degrees of intent focused on (re)connecting children and young people in/with/as nature. Yet, not all of these educational endeavours are the same. The understanding of the role the natural world might play in pedagogy varies, the desire to work within the system or radically change it shifts according to commitments and philosophies, and the perceived divide, or lack thereof, between child and nature also has significant effects on curriculum and content. Still, there is a shared commitment among these educational movements to change existing relationships with nature and education. There is a desire and much work being done to ecologise education. In this Special Issue, with its primary focus on the west coast of Canada, we offer a pause to story, philosophise, expand, and disrupt as this ‘type’ of education presents a significant shift and fundamentally questions what school is and what education is for.

This article presents findings from a study that evaluated the impact of an Australian sustainability initiative, with a view to unravelling the realities of teachers’ implementation approaches. The paper outlines a study that reviews a government initiative in early years, primary and secondary educational settings that uses the Data Collection, Storage and Visualisations System (DCSVS) aimed at enhancing sustainability awareness and embedding sustainability as part of everyday practice in schools and early childhood services. It was also intended to offer school leaders, teachers and students avenues to engage with their consumption of natural resources. This in turn was anticipated to increase awareness about conservation, with the long-term aim to engage with the broader themes of sustainability. This article focuses on the role of teachers’ identities in enacting these policy initiatives. It highlights teachers’ enactment of the policies, the crucial role of school leaders in the process, as well as the deeper connections between curriculum and pedagogy.

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.

Despite the essentiality of freshwater to all life on the planet, the populous has inadequate understandings of water. Formal education plays a key role in shaping how individuals and communities make sense of water, its accessibility, management, consumption, and hazards. This article seeks to bring attention to the influence of cultural framings of freshwater and extreme freshwater events (such as flood and drought) in government-mandated school curricula in two water-vulnerable geographical regions of Australia and Canada. We seek to identify and respond to hegemonic social constructions that become naturalised if left unexamined. By examining the agendas and language around freshwater and extreme freshwater events in formal educational curricula, we gain a better understanding of the perceptions and assumptions made about freshwater. The results highlight that freshwater and extreme freshwater events are minimally conceptualised within these curricula as ‘nature-based’, rather than being part of a dialectical relationship with societal agendas and practices. This article discusses the implications of this framing and the psychological barriers that may affect the acknowledgment and investigation of extreme freshwater events. We conclude by offering curricular suggestions that invite community-based understandings of the dialectic relationship freshwater has with communities and regional ecosystems.

Underwater photo-elicitation is a novel experiential marine education technique that combines direct experience in the marine environment with the use of digital underwater cameras. A program called Show Us Your Ocean! (SUYO!) was created, utilising a mixed methodology (qualitative and quantitative methods) to test the efficacy of this technique. Participants (adults and high school students) snorkelled, explored the ocean, and captured images both in and out of the water. Underwater photo-elicitation was proven effective at increasing awareness, eliciting emotional reactions, and fostering a sense of connection to the ocean. However, it was not necessarily effective for raising awareness of environmental issues nor for motivating pro-environmental behaviour. Interestingly, while some attitudes about and behaviours toward the ocean did become more environmentally sensitive, others appeared to shift unexpectedly away from environmental concern. This result was perhaps due to the lack in the program of an ecological knowledge-based component. Participants enjoying the beauty of the ocean did not realise the threats facing it or what to do about these. If the goal is to achieve significant attitude change and cultivate pro-environmental behaviour, this new approach should be supplemented with critical thinking/action competence and ecological/ocean literacy.

Growing a nature kindergarten that can flourish takes a community, careful planning, and sustained support. In 2011, the Sooke School District in British Columbia, Canada undertook the project of creating a nature kindergarten when outdoor programs of this kind did not exist in the Canadian public school system. Inspired by the well-established forest school and nature preschool models in northern Europe, a program to take 22 kindergarten students outside into nature every morning, regardless of the weather, was developed. This article explores how a unique framework and set of guiding principles were co-created by a diverse advisory committee. It also describes how the hiring, education, and ongoing support of the program's two educators — a kindergarten teacher and an early childhood educator — became critical to its success. The article offers an overview on steps taken, including how the idea was born, working within the public school system, building a framework and principles, hiring and education, preparing the educators, learning from our first year, ongoing support, and remaining questions. The authors’ intention is not to articulate best practices, but to share key aspects of the program's development and implementation phases that allowed the nature kindergarten to thrive over the last 5 years.

This research was commissioned by the (then) Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) to provide recommendations on how to best support Western Australian (WA) secondary schools to engage in education for sustainability (EfS). The research aims were to identify barriers and benefits to being involved in EfS, the support systems required for schools to participate in EfS at secondary school level, and the difficulties that secondary schools experience when implementing EfS programs. A variety of research methods were utilised: semi-structured interviews with non-teaching stakeholders; online questionnaires for teachers, school administrators and students; focus groups and semi-structured interviews with teachers and school administrators; and an expert panel workshop to discuss data and recommendations prior to completion of a final report. Data were collected from 29 schools, 45 teachers and school administrators, 186 students, and various EfS external providers and stakeholders across metropolitan and regional WA. This article focuses on three issues identified in the data that we consider important and under-represented in discourses of EfS in Australia: lack of understanding about what EfS means among educators; lack of meaningful student involvement in EfS in secondary schools; and differing quality in EfS programs offered by external providers. We conclude this article by offering ways to improve EfS in WA secondary schools.

Using the perspectives, behaviours, and environmental values, beliefs, and norms of a school's staff, we investigated the features of a long-term environmental education program. This case study answers the following questions: How has the Lesser Kestrel environmental education program survived for almost two decades and become institutionalised into the school culture? What are the features of the environmental education program at Falcon School that allowed it to endure despite clear obstacles? We inductively analysed documents, focus group transcriptions, and individual interviews. Our findings indicate the goals of the Lesser Kestrel environmental education program and principles of values-beliefs-norms theory were strongly aligned along five main features: leadership and vision, human and economic resources, nature connectedness and conservation, community engagement, and tradition (which united the first four features). We conclude that these features work collectively to integrate the surrounding community into Falcon School's culture and long-term environmental education program.

We tell the story of an experience Kate Dawson, her students, and three eagles had at an outdoor preschool. The experience profoundly affected Kate, and prompted us to ask the following questions: What made this experience feel so magical, and what caused it to happen? Why are these magical moments valuable, and how might they impact our pedagogical practices? We posit that magical moments in outdoor early childhood education depend upon relational and pathic knowledge, and understanding of place, rather than intellectual or cognitive knowledge about place. We suggest conditions and practices educators may employ to foster magical moments, including slow ecopedagogy and embodied, sensory, and spiritual attunement to place. We consider our role as educators in the educator-students-place system, particularly when acknowledging that place is agentic, and acts as learner, knower and teacher. To understand place pedagogically, we must think of ourselves as learners and as the objects of learning, as much as thinking of ourselves as knowers. This requires a pedagogy of embodied responsiveness and a surrender to place as teacher. Far from simplifying the work of the educator, living within a relationship of educator-students-place complexifies the practice of teaching.

While there are many environmental education programs for children, few studies have used an appropriately developed scale for evaluating how such education might have on impact on children's environmental orientations. The research presented in this article adapted the NEP (New Ecological Paradigm) for Children scale to develop a new instrument for measuring children's environmental attitudes: the NEP (Children@School). The NEP (Children@School) has been developed by analysing the impact of the design of physical learning spaces on children's environmental attitudes. Factor analysis indicated that NEP (Children@School) has three dimensions: Children's Environmental Attitudes towards Human Intervention, Children's Environmental Attitudes via ESD at School, and Children's Environmental Attitudes towards Eco-Rights. We argue that NEP (Children@School) can meaningfully measure the impact of learning spaces on children's environmental attitudes. While the instrument was developed for use in Australia, it has been designed for global applicability.

This article uses an unconventional format to explore the role of parent and nature and the development of a young child's ecological identity. It follows journal entries from a mother observing her young son, Julian, as he explores, interacts with, and learns from the Stawamus River on the west coast of British Columbia. By creating questions, discussing and analysing these written observations, we explore the role of parenting and nature and the implications this might have for environmental education. Some of the ideas explored in this article include early ecological identity, empathy, relational existence, experiential learning, and affordances in the natural world. We further suggest that nature and parent working together might become key educators for a child.

This article is a small piece of a much larger and still evolving project. Herein we focus on six touchstones for wild pedagogies. The article begins with a short orientation to the larger ideas behind the project and then focuses on exploring six current touchstones with a view towards early childhood environmental educators. The six explored here are: (1) agency and the role of nature as co-teacher; (2) wildness and challenging ideas of control; (3) complexity, the unknown, and spontaneity; (4) locating the wild; (5) time and practice; and (6) cultural change.

The co-authors, collaborators in garden-based teacher education, question the hegemony of grids in Western time, space and relationship structures in education, while also delving into our own complicity and entanglement with these grids. We ask: (1) Can we reject the grid in environmental education and in garden-based learning when it is an intimate part of our way of being in the world? (2) Can we be teachers who are at once within and not-within the regime of the Western Enlightenment/Modernist grid? (3) How can we take a ludic approach to the grid? Can we ‘swing’ and ‘parkour’ the strict grid of schooling? Pleasures and failures of the grid and experiences of alternatives to the grid are documented and exemplified through stories from garden-based teacher education. Considering parallels with principles of the alter-global movement and with the performative, embodied practices of swing dance, parkour and clowning, we meditate on becoming ecological teachers together beside the grid — neither within nor without it, but with a deep awareness of its presence and structure. In uncertain, unchanging times, we want to take a playful, artistic approach to the old certainties and structures, swinging and parkouring from them rather than accepting or rejecting binary formulations.