Our current ecological predicament requires a shift to a post-anthropocentric educational paradigm in which we educate for and about a world that is not “for us,” but comprised of a multitude of eco-systems of which we are simply a part. To facilitate this, education should be enacted differently; we need to experience learning not as furthering entrenched nature/culture binaries, but as “worlding” processes, whereby imaginary divides between individual and environment are troubled, as humans and the material world are revealed to be relational and entangled. Posthumanism offers an affective turn towards a social and ecological justice that accounts for such entanglements; enacted through necessary processes of de-familiarisation from the dominant vision of education. In this article we firstly explore the theoretical underpinnings of critical posthumanism to critique sustainability education-as-usual and propose new modes of teaching that lean into affective processes of noticing and surrender. We then discuss a research project in which participants came together to explore what happens when we cease to privilege humans as the ultimate instructors and holders of knowledge. In doing so we disrupt normative methodologies, drawing on affect, embodiment, relationality, transdisciplinarity and an ethics of care which extend learning to more-than-human kin.

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.

This research study explored the experiences of children (aged 9–10 years), from four different primary schools, playing a hunting game in a nature reserve. Previous research shows that children’s play in green spaces can provide a number of benefits to children. However, there is a lack of research into children’s experiences of playing in bio-diverse environments. This study sought to find out how children (aged 9–10 years) “playing” the role of animals in a nature reserve could enable them to experience different ways of being and different ways of understanding their relationship with the world around them. The study employed a qualitative phenomenological design that aimed to interpret the first-person lived experiences of the children playing in the nature reserve. Four classes from four different primary schools took part in the study. Six children from each class were interviewed and analysis of their responses generated a number of different themes. The results suggest that playing the hunting game in a biodiverse environment does offer states of being and knowings that are not as accessible in schools. Playing the role of an animal had afforded the children with an accentuated, embodied experience, offering insight into the otherness of the more-than-human world.

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.

The relationship between outdoor education and environmental education in Aotearoa New Zealand has undergone many changes since formal education began in early colonial times. Discussion draws from qualitative doctoral research undertaken by the authors that investigated education for sustainability in outdoor education and how meaning is ascribed to outdoor experiences. The article describes how environmental education and outdoor education had common historical roots in nature studies that eventually were teased apart by the development of separate agendas for learning and assessment, coupled with the political context of the 1970s and 1980s. The article finds that contemporary forces relating to the economy, society and the environment are now driving a re-engagement of the two discourses in Aotearoa New Zealand at a variety of levels, from schools to national bodies, and that this re-engagement signals a positive outcome for addressing key environmental issues and engaging students in the outdoors.

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.