The study explored physical education teacher educators’ (PETE educators) perspectives on integrating sustainable development (SD) imperatives within PETE courses. Nine PETE educators participated in a nine-month professional learning project featuring six workshops and seminars promoting reflection, peer discussion and dialogic encounters. The PETE educators designed pedagogical interventions based on their teaching practices, selecting teaching units where SD perspectives could be integrated. Data included intervention papers, audio-recorded sessions and logbooks, analysed descriptively and thematically. The proposed interventions focused on inclusion, equality and lifelong physical activity, and typically included lectures, seminars, student-centred teaching, reflections and assignments. Challenges included contextualising SD in PETE, framing SD goals, integrating SD content and addressing its normative nature. The study offers insights into the potential of integrating SD perspectives in PETE, highlights associated challenges, and calls for further research to bridge theory and practice.

Critical Forest Studies is a rapidly growing field that takes multispecies relationships with/in forests as the starting point for critical and creative inquiry. Shaped by the contested political ecologies that emerge where different forest cosmologies, languages, histories, and ecologies meet, the field builds on related developments in the environmental humanities which explore multispecies relations through artistic, historical, philosophical, poetic, literary, and performative approaches. As the first special issue dedicated to Critical Forest Studies, this collection brings the field into direct dialogue with the theories, methodologies, and practices of environmental education. Environmental education has a rich and generative history of relational engagement with forests — from place-based and outdoor learning traditions to more-than-human and posthumanist approaches — and this collection builds on and extends that history. Indigenous and place-based perspectives are foregrounded throughout, bringing together diverse interdisciplinary understandings across four key areas: forest sentience, forest imaginaries, forest regeneration, and forest pedagogies. The collection bridges conceptual, artistic, empirical, methodological, and educational practices across these four themes, opening new possibilities for how environmental education might think, feel, and act with forests in times of ecological urgency.

The special issue, “Meeting Global Challenges through Families and Community Environmental and Sustainability Education: Generating Action Competence” aims to discover and address ways of meeting global educational and political challenges of sustainable futures from the perspective of families and community involvement. With contributions from multiple disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields it is organised around four thematic areas. Namely, Education for Empowering Communities for Change through Climate and Cultural Heritage; Families and Communities Educating for Sustainable Futures; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Education for Building Resilience in the face of Environmental Complexity and Uncertainty; and Integrating Methodologies for Researching and Developing Action Competence for Environmental and Community Sustainability through Education.

This article explores young children’s relations with soil, drawing on research that positioned soil as animate, lively and interconnected. The paper investigates how animist approaches offered a mode of encounter for children and their teachers, encouraging them to see themselves as part of a larger ecological community. The research began with a “soil biome immersion” experience where teachers engaged with soil through sensory and arts-based experiences. These initial encounters led to further exploration of child-soil relations through experiential learning and storytelling. Children, as active meaning-makers, co-constructed the inquiry through imaginative and sensory engagements. Findings suggest animism cultivates soil relations, challenging traditional notions of soil as inert and promoting a dynamic understanding of soil ecosystems. Through practices such as storying, drawing and listening, educators supported children’s animist perspectives, deepening their attunement to the more-than-human world. This article contributes to environmental education by demonstrating how animism can enrich children’s ecological awareness and their sense of connectedness to the world.

This study conducts a historical analysis tracing the evolution of climate change narratives from the late 1960s to the present. The analysis produces a comprehensive map of these narratives and identifies three key shortcomings that still need to be addressed in academic literature. First, there are inherent limitations to each narrative, which operate within the confines of their respective theoretical frameworks, shaped by their unique perspectives. Second, climate narratives are not isolated but interconnected; new narratives often emerge from earlier ones, forming a continuum that evolves over time. This dynamic corresponds closely to the three structural dimensions of narrative analysis. Third, existing climate narratives insufficiently incorporate perspectives from territories and cultural contexts beyond dominant Western geographies, thereby marginalising non-Western voices and experiences. As a result, many cultural and political factors that influence responses to climate change remain underrepresented, narrowing how we understand this global issue.

Socio-environmental challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss necessitate political action and transformative educational responses. Education for Environmental Citizenship (EEC) offers a promising framework for addressing these issues in school settings. However, there is a lack of reported structured teacher professional development (TPD) programmes that support EEC. This study presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of empirical studies and supranational frameworks, synthesising the results into a model for in-service TPD in EEC. The analysis identified core competencies such as critical thinking, systems thinking and global citizenship alongside with dimensions including socio-emotional and cultural-territorial competencies, which address context-specific educational needs. These are mapped to pedagogical strategies such as outdoor learning, reflective practice and community-based learning. The resulting model seeks to align global sustainability goals with local realities. This research lays the groundwork for fostering EEC by providing educators with the competencies and strategies essential to drive social and environmental change.

This paper uses karlup bidi (pathway home) as a metaphor to show and explain the cultural landscape of a significant central Perth locality: Kaart Gennunginyup Bo, or Karrgatup, or Kaarta Koomba, also known as King’s Park. Drawing on oral histories, cultural narratives and contemporary reflections, the study uses Noongar understandings of Country, family, time and relationship to challenge and decolonise Western paradigms of land use and identity. The intent is to narrate Noongar Boodja (Country) as it was, remains and always will be – as Noongar heartland. Central to this paper is the trilogy of boodja, moort, kaartdijin (Country, family, knowledge), a framework for relating with Noongar boodja in caring, animate, thriving and responsive ways.

This study examines the role of families in preserving cultural identity and moral values amid globalisation, employing a mixed-methods approach, the research highlights how cultural identity and moral values can instil environmental responsibility and help generations to embrace the principle of sustainability. A survey with 208 respondents and 13 in-depth interviews were conducted in the community of the UAE Higher Education, in the United Arab Emirates. The key findings reveal that families remain the cornerstone of preserving values and cultural identity by promoting environmental responsibility. However, globalisation, particularly through social media and globalised education, threatens familial cohesion. Furthermore, the study highlights the duality of globalisation as both a disruptor and a potential enabler of hybrid cultural frameworks, calling for policy interventions to regulate digital content and promote sustainability, environmental responsibility and cultural awareness, while emphasising collaborative efforts across families, educators and policymakers. Through bridging the empirical gaps, this research offers actionable insights for sustaining cultural resilience in an interconnected world.

This article examines the growing importance of cultural studies in supporting the increasing development of socio-cultural awareness among students in the higher education sector in the United Arab Emirates. It adopts a descriptive quantitative methodology, which involves conducting two questionnaires. They involved 11 instructors teaching cultural studies and 85 students attending their curricula. A random sampling technique was used in this study, where all instructors and students participated equally. Main findings indicated that 85% of instructors agreed that cultural studies play a significant role in promoting socio-cultural awareness among students. Additionally, the students’ questionnaire highlighted how they perceive cultural studies depending on their ability to foster, appreciate, and understand the value of coexistence, and the role of cultural studies in shaping their communicative and life skills. Finally, the study concludes that the need for the development of cultural studies courses is essential, aiming at adopting more effective strategies that promote students’ awareness in relation to future challenges.

To understand the challenges of climate change in a specific setting, it is essential to examine the social, cultural, environmental, economic and other national contexts. This paper provides an overview of Bhutan, highlighting the current climate change trends and their potential impacts on both the environment and society. Special attention is given to the impending implications for Bhutan’s education system, particularly how changing climatic conditions may affect learners’ well-being, learning and education. Additionally, the paper discusses the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) — the national development philosophy of Bhutan — and how climate change may challenge this aspiration while also presenting opportunities to advance sustainability. Finally, the prospects for further exploration and the role school communities may have in climate actions are underlined.

Low-carbon behaviour is a crucial pathway to addressing current climate change and promoting sustainable economic and social development. The importance of environmental education has become a widely recognised consensus among higher education institutions. However, the mechanisms through which environmental education influences the low-carbon behaviour of the new generation of college students remain insufficiently explored. This study introduces environmental attitude and green perceived value as mediators, while prosocial behaviour is a moderator. A moderated chain mediation model is developed from new perspectives of psychological, social and environmental values, and this theoretical model is empirically tested using 759 college students in China surveyed by a questionnaire. The findings reveal that environmental education positively drives college students’ low-carbon behaviour, with environmental attitude and green perceived value playing a partial chain mediation role between environmental education and low-carbon behaviour. Additionally, prosocial behaviour positively moderates the relationships between environmental attitude, green perceived value and college students’ low-carbon behaviour, significantly moderating the mediating effect of green perceived value.

In Northern Finland, including sparsely populated Finnish Lapland and the small city of Rovaniemi, the widespread clearing of old trees has degraded the boreal environment. Disrupting the diverse relationships between people and trees, climate change will continue to alter the country’s northernmost forests, as is widely known. In this urgent context, we propose that the collaborative project Gifts from the Sentient Forest (GSF) has developed new modes of interacting with Northern Finland’s trees and appreciating their biocultural legacies. At the project’s core is arboreal sentience, a concept illuminating the capacities of trees to sense, communicate, behave, learn and remember. In the project, other-than-human sentience provides a basis for cultivating tree-human communication while expanding Lapland residents’ awareness of sylvan communities through painting, photography, film, music, poetry and performance. In this article, we present an account of three methods leveraged in the GSF programme to facilitate experiences of tree sentience in Northern Finland: sensing, interviewing (speaking) and remembering.

For many First Peoples, language is indissociable from living relationships within interspecies communities where humans are not the only ones who feel, think, listen and speak. Words not only carry meanings attributable to human language but also carry the spirit of a place, as both a material and metaphysical transmission of sentience across species and generations. This article draws on ecolinguistic research into the Indigenous language of the Dayak Ngaju people and its role in regenerating peatland forests in Central Kalimantan. The study employs an Indigenous research methodology led by the first author, who is a PhD student and member of the Dayak Ngaju community. This methodology situates Dayak Ngaju language within an animistic reality inclusive of nonhuman creatures, objects and spiritual beings. Attending to the complexities of Indigenous PhD studies, the article proposes the cultivation of “new animisms,” which recognise the future-making pedagogies of Indigenous ontologies and ecolinguistic systems.

Ecological awareness is a global priority, and Green School initiatives seek to embed environmental education in everyday school practice. This study examines how the “Green School” is discursively constructed by interpreting visual materials from Indonesian schools designated as Adiwiyata (Green) Schools. Guided by social semiotic theory, we conducted a phenomenological interpretative analysis. The analytical framework follows three metafunctions: Ideational, interpersonal, and textual. We analysed images, icons, and posters associated with two recurring activity domains: (1) greening the school environment and (2) promoting environmentally friendly behaviour. The findings indicate that Adiwiyata discourse foregrounds ecological awareness, normalises pro-environmental practices, and positions students and teachers as key agents of environmental preservation.

This paper employs autoethnography and poetic inquiry to examine how childhood experiences along the west coast of India were entangled with early understandings of environmental education. Drawing on memories of growing up in a rural region, it traces everyday intra-actions with land, sea, plants and community practices to illustrate how environmental awareness emerges through relational, place-based learning/unlearning rather than through universalized frameworks. By weaving poetic inquiry and becoming-with literature, the article disrupts linear and Western epistemologies of research and learning. The article unfolds through two interwoven processes: first, a reflexive re-turn to childhood memories through poems that foreground relational encounters with landscapes and more-than-human beings; and second, becoming-with literature by attending to scholarship on local grassroots mo(v)ements in the Vasai–Virar region. Drawing on Barad’s (2006) notion of diffraction, the paper attends to how experiences, memories and texts intra-act to produce complex, entangled sticky webs of relations. This article argues that environmental education can benefit from recognizing situated, relational and place-based ways of knowing. In doing so, it contributes to conversations on decolonizing research practices and (re)thinking how environmental education is understood, narrated and enacted within educational contexts.

Despite its rich biodiversity, India faces severe environmental challenges due to human activities prioritising immediate gratification over long-term sustainability. Recognising the power of education to address environmental crises, Environmental Education (EE) emerged as a field of study to foster environmental consciousness. Hence, equipping teachers with the knowledge, skills and attitudes to effectively integrate environmental education into their pedagogy is crucial for cultivating sustainable behaviour in students. However, research indicated a significant gap in teacher preparedness to effectively address environmental issues, leaving them ill-equipped to implement related activities and tasks in their classrooms. Using qualitative content analysis, the EE-related courses were analysed to study their status, orientation and responsiveness within three pre-service teacher education programmes. The results of the study showed that most environment-related courses are not compulsory and largely have an anthropocentric orientation with a limited socio-scientific approach. The courses are required to be made responsive toward the contemporary issues and concerns related to Education for Sustainable Development.

This study investigates how rural women’s leadership, grounded in traditional knowledge and daily ecological practices, contributes to environmental education and strengthens both family and community sustainability within the emerging model of rural tourism in Morocco. The research is framed by international environmental commitments, notably the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which emphasise the value of local communities in preserving natural resources and transmitting ecological knowledge. The central question examines the extent to which rural women, through their leadership and embodied knowledge, foster environmental learning and reinforce the socio-ecological resilience of households and communities. The study mobilises theoretical approaches from environmental education, experiential and social learning and socio-ecological systems theory to analyse the interplay between knowledge transfer, community engagement and biodiversity protection. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative design based on semi-structured interviews, participant observation and thematic analysis supported by NVivo software. Conducted in the Taounate region, the study targets women participating in rural ecotourism initiatives. Findings reveal that women act as key agents of informal environmental education, ensuring the transmission of traditional knowledge, promoting sustainable practices and enhancing collective ecological awareness. Their leadership reinforces natural resource conservation and contributes to the long-term sustainability of families and local communities while aligning local practices with global environmental commitments positioning them as essential actors in bridging local practices with global environmental sustainability agendas.

This essay will describe the critical importance of developing a posthuman aesthetic pedagogy capable of integrating what Eduardo Kohn (2013) has described as multinatural perspectivalism in How Forests Think. Multinatural perspectivalism describes the multiplicity of beyond-human perspectives staked on an event. An aesthetic system capable of integrating this beyond-human multiplicity poses the problem of forms of signification and semiosis which transcend the socialised register constructed by anthropocentric experience and should define signs which can be meaningful across the diverse levels of consciousness associated with more-than-human subjectivity. In this essay, I will describe this as a lucky aesthetic, capable of producing lucky signs. I will associate lucky signs with ecological practices oriented around stewardship such as regenerative farming and forestry, whereby the steward is tasked to identify and interpret lucky signs expressive of beyond-human experience. I argue this postulates an aesthetic pedagogy derived from our relationship with nature and is modelled by animist ritual practices like Capoeira Angola. I thereby conclude by arguing that animist ritual models forms of environmental education expressive of a beyond-human view of art practice.

The study investigates the interplay between personal values and attitudes toward environmental responsibility (ER) among MBA students from two distinct cultural contexts: Australia (individualist) and India (collectivist). Drawing on survey responses from the University of Newcastle, Australia and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Kolkata, the study employs factor analysis and Multivariate Least Squares (MLS) to test whether cultural orientation moderates the predictive relationship between value priorities and ER attitudes. Findings reveal significant cross-cultural contrasts: Australian respondents prioritise security, conformity and power, whereas Indian respondents emphasise achievement, benevolence and universalism. Contrary to theoretical expectations, self-transcendence (benevolence, universalism) and self-enhancement (achievement, power) values exert a stronger influence among Indian participants. These results challenge universalist assumptions in sustainability education. The study offers actionable implications for corporate recruitment, climate policy and MBA curriculum design, highlighting how cultural value systems shape managerial attitudes toward ER.

Grey-headed flying-foxes, frequently-spotted residents of the greater Sydney region, Australia, play a key role in native ecosystems. Knowledge of local wildlife may increase interest in conserving and protecting wildlife. We assessed baseline knowledge in a year 3 class regarding common features and habits of grey-headed flying-foxes, and feasibility and impact of a classmate-peer-developed educational intervention. Pre- and post-intervention paper questionnaires were administered to a single class in a single school. The focussed educational intervention comprised an interactive presentation with slide-show, developed by a classmate-peer with stakeholder consultation. Simple descriptive and comparative statistical analyses were applied.

The same 29 students participated in both pre- and post-intervention questionnaires. The intervention proved feasible in a classroom setting. The pre-intervention survey indicated suboptimal knowledge regarding grey-headed flying-foxes in relation to categorisation, appearance, habitat, activity, diet and travel patterns. Post-intervention knowledge had generally improved.

This pilot study indicated that a simple peer-developed educational intervention was feasible and improved knowledge gaps, at least in the short term. Future research might assess the potential for initiatives like this to improve young people’s knowledge at a wider level, and explore the relationship between improvements in knowledge and efforts to conserve vulnerable species such as the grey-headed flying-fox.