The School Strike 4 Climate New Zealand (SS4CNZ) movement have organised and led four strikes between 2019 and 2021. With each successive strike, adult support for students’ demands increased. Their most notable achievement was garnering sufficient support to pass Aotearoa New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Bill into legislation. However, tensions with SS4CNZ led to the Auckland Chapter announcing its disbandment in 2021. There were mixed responses to their decision. In this reflective essay I argue that this disbandment was a positive move forward because these youth were showing their willingness to re-build relationships with their Māori and Pacific Island activist peers. By disbanding, not only were these young leaders enabling their Māori and Pacific Island peers to lead future actions, they were acknowledging the connections between racism, colonialism and climate justice; responding to our relational crisis by demonstrating the importance of re-building robust and reciprocal relationships between humans and more-than-humans when advocating for ways to navigate towards a climate-just society.

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.

Environmental education across the early years has become increasingly important in Australia since the implementation of the Early Years Learning Framework and the Australian Curriculum. These documents promote a connection to nature for young children as well as environmental responsibility. In Western Australia, large areas of natural environments are bush spaces, accessible by young children, families and schools. There is no existing research investigating early childhood teacher’s knowledge of plants in these bush spaces and the utilisation of these spaces in teaching botany as part of their teaching practice. The discussion in this article examines part of a larger year-long multi-site case study of the changes in the botanical understanding of two early childhood teachers of children aged 5–8 years, in Western Australian schools both before and after the Mosaic Approach, botanical practices and Indigenous knowledges were incorporated into their teaching practice. This article focuses on the changes of botanical literacies of the early childhood teachers specifically. The findings suggest that using inquiry-based and place-based methods and including First Nations Peoples’ perspectives about plants whilst teaching in the bush can significantly increase the plant knowledge and understanding of teachers, as well their own scientific and botanical literacies.

Debates about teaching reading have long been a part of educational vernacular, frequently reduced to polarised views about phonics. This attention can unnecessarily divert from the cumulative skills required for learning to read and comprehensive research, which indicates the positive influence of systematic phonics instruction on students’ reading outcomes. Australian education has recently moved beyond these reading wars to include explicit phonics instruction in a reformed national English Curriculum. This provides an opportune time to engage preservice teachers entering the workforce with strategies that explicitly teach these skills while nurturing young people’s ecological consciousness through positive nature connections. With this focus in mind, a participatory action research project involving preservice teachers was undertaken, from which an Eco-Conceptual Framework ensued. The project put immersive activities in place, promoting transdisciplinary ways to develop learners’ connections with nature using images collected from participants’ real world when learning to read. Results indicate that action research energised preservice teachers’ perceived knowledge, self-efficacy about teaching early reading utilising place and skills in designing visual resources. It brings attention to the critical influence of preservice teachers’ dispositions and preferred natural spaces on what images are collected and offered when designing early reading activities utilising the natural world.

This study explored the relationship between scientific context (SC), scientific reasoning (SR), and scientific behaviour (SB) across the environmental principles to show their significance as essential scientific competencies in the development of environmental programmes in the Philippine K-12 curriculum in a process where environmental education has a key role to play. One hundred and seventy-seven high school students from Bongabong, Oriental Mindoro in the Philippines were selected through the cluster purposive probabilistic sampling method. A descriptive normative survey method of research was employed in this study. The students’ SC had a high relationship with their SR, which is a direct indicator of SB. This was a sign that SC, SR, and SB all work together in a continuous way. Findings of this study will serve as baseline information for the framework of environmental education programmes through science, in the K-12 Philippine Science curriculum. So, when students learn things in the real world, they gain environmental effect, which is thought to be a key reason why people act in ways that are good for the environment and an important goal of environmental education.

Widespread tropical deforestation and biodiversity loss in Southeast Asia due to the oil palm industry can be addressed by encouraging consumers to purchase sustainable palm oil (SPO). An online experiment was conducted to assess whether addressing barriers relating to education, motivation and product availability would increase purchasing of SPO. Australian adults (n = 628) were randomly assigned to either: (1) a newly developed interactive educational website on palm oil and SPO; (2) an existing educational video on SPO; or (3) an interactive website on differentiating between real and fake news (an attentional control condition). All participants completed pre-intervention and immediate post-intervention measures. Most participants (n = 403) completed follow-up measures two weeks later. Multivariate analysis revealed that the interactive website and educational video increased both knowledge and the intention to purchase SPO (compared to the attentional control), but neither significantly impacted follow-up self-reported SPO purchasing behaviour. Low perceived product availability might help explain the intention–behaviour gap. Our results suggest that, in addition to increasing consumer knowledge and motivation, promoting sustainable consumption requires creating opportunities for people to engage in the desired behaviour.

The purpose of this communication is to explore possibilities for children’s literature to enable futures learning. It introduces the ways in which two different frameworks might be used to analyse children’s literature. The first framework draws upon the Earth Charter Principles (ECP) (Auld et al., 2021). The second framework brings together the pillars of sustainability with the principles of Education for Sustainability (EfS) in a framework for ecological sustainability of children’s literature (White et al., 2020). The communication starts by introducing a text – a recent example of ‘awarded’ and therefore high-quality children’s literature. We then outline the two frameworks and explore the possibilities of applying these frames for analysing this text. We conclude that the sustainability frameworks are useful tools and resources for analysing children’s literature to determine the quality of the text and how the experience of reading the text may impact children, their learning and their environmental consciousness and practices.

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.