Conference Agenda

Provocations from: Aravella Zacchariou, Arjen Wals, Nicola Walshe, Sobhi Tawil, Kate Greer, and Keri Facer Facilitators: Elsa Lee, Ole Andreas Kvamme, Stefan Bengtsson Presentations will provide concrete examples of policy frameworks that have implications for ESE research and practice across Europe and beyond. The frameworks include UNECE, ACE from UNFCCC, and the UNESCO Futures of Education report. Some of the presentations will be live and streamed, while others will be provided as video materials a week before the event. On the day, the workshop will open with four 10 minute presentations, followed by some questions to the panel and then a whole group discussion, using padlet to feedback ideas for a plenary.
This is a hybrid event and we encourage online participation from the whole network very much including people who are not attending the conference this year in person. You do not need to have paid the conference fee to join us! The online conversation will be managed through breakout rooms. Here are some questions to think about to frame those conversations: What has been your own experience in your own settings with what policy? What does thinking about policy reveal, and what does it occlude? What is made visible and what is made invisible when we think though the implications of policy. NOTE: there may be some slight changes to the panel

Considering the current state of our planet, the need for a vibrant environmental and sustainability education (ESE) is arguably more pressing than ever. However, education at large has also become increasingly characterized by accountability, measurements, and high-stakes testing. Consequently, ESE presently finds itself caught in a tension between two competing educational logics, namely an existential one and an instrumental one.

There is undoubtedly a deeply existential dimension to ESE as the content of its educational practices have profound implications for continued human (and non-human) existence (Affifi & Christie, 2019; Vandenplas et al., 2023; Verlie, 2019). ESE involves issues about severe threats to our planet and the extinction of numerous species as well as vast global economic and social inequalities. As such, sustainability issues touch upon the very nerve of what it means to grow up in a society where dreadful visions of the future seem to be closing in. Such visions can spark strong moral emotions in students as well as ignite intense political discussions about the development of society (Sund & Öhman, 2014; Van Poeck et al., 2019). In short, the educational content of ESE carries profound existential implications for both teachers and students that need to be carefully handled in the classroom (Vandenplas et al., 2023).

At the same time, sustainable development is being taught within a broader system of schooling characterized by instrumentalism rather than devotion to existential concerns. Many European educational systems have moved in a direction of increased teacher accountability and a stronger focus on test results and measurable outcomes (Grek, 2020). Taken together, the changing institutional condition of schooling means that teachers and students today face a harsh educational reality where didactical autonomy is being reduced and knowledge requirements are to be met. This means that there is a risk that schoolwork is being presented to students in instrumental terms that encourages them to pursue good grades for the sake of personal benefit rather than a sincere commitment to the survival of life on earth. Put succinctly, teachers and students engaged in ESE are today caught in a tension between two fundamentally different logics – an existential and an instrumental – that pose a serious pedagogical challenge.

The aim of this paper is to theoretically specify the relation between the existential and the instrumental logic in ESE.

Climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time, requiring significant responses from all aspects of society, including education. The prevailing responses to climate change tend towards treating the crisis as a predominantly scientific and managerial issue that requires technological solutions or behaviour changes. Correspondingly, climate change education (CCE) tends towards teaching climate science and (predominantly individual) behaviour change. Recently, socio-political competencies and climate justice have been advanced, which, while crucial, still do not adequately address the question of how we got here in the first place. What is needed, we argue, is greater attention to how climate change is one of multiple, intersecting sustainability crises (e.g. biodiversity loss, chemical and plastic pollution) rooted in a widespread anthropocentric, extractionist, and instrumental mentality.

Both Sterling (2016) and Bonnett (2021) advocate for a twofold strategy to environmental and sustainability education (ESE): on the one hand, a short-term pragmatic agenda of ‘damage limitation’ that cautiously uses science and technology to lessen environmental damage and social injustice as much as possible; and on the other hand, a long-term agenda to shift the human–more-than-human relationship to one that reflects our interconnectedness with the natural world, which must occur simultaneously, and increasingly inform the short-term strategy.

We suggest posthumanism, with its focus on both decentring the human and simultaneously actively exploring from multiple and supra-disciplinary perspectives, a human self-understanding based on relationality, continuity with the natural world, and the animality and materiality of human beings, could provide the roots and shoots for the long-term shift.

In this paper, we engage with posthuman research, which has had a recent resurgence of interest, including within ESE (Clarke & Mcphie, 2020). We align ourselves with the view of ‘posthumanism’ as a simultaneously critical and creative endeavour that involves interrogating the ‘self-representations and conventional understandings of being human, which “we” have inherited from the past’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 41) while engaging in the on-going task of learning to think differently about ourselves.

We make the case for why a posthumanist, rather than a critical humanist (Lindgren & Öhman, 2019) approach is needed, by revisiting and challenging some of humanism’s central claims. It should be one of the fundamental concerns of education to challenge human-centredness but not abandon our distinctive human subjectivity entirely. We find Kretz’s (2009) concept of ‘open continuity’ helpful: human identity or self-concept remains very much intact but humans are also considered as ‘situated in ecologically relevant wholes of which [they] are a part’ (2009, p. 131), there is ‘a merging between (what is normally construed as a) self and other’ (2009, p. 123). Such a shift in human self-understanding has far-reaching consequences for the education of current and future generations (Herbrechter, 2018).

We then address the question of how posthumanism might influence ESE/CCE. In particular we examine and contribute to the knowledge on how posthumanism might alter existing frameworks such as UNESCO’s (2017) key competencies for sustainability.

Abstract

This paper explores Australian primary school years teachers’ perceptions of nature and how this informs pedagogy through a posthuman theoretical framework that is informed by and an entanglement of three posthuman concepts: material-discursive practices (Barad, 2007), affective atmospheres (Ash & Anderson, 2015) and childhoodnature (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020). This theoretical entanglement purposefully disrupts dichotomies and rejects abuse to marginalised others such as First Nations Peoples, children and nonhuman nature. Such disruptions challenge conventional ways of knowing and being and offer opportunities and possibilities for the reconceptualisation of future learning in environmental education and education more broadly. Moreover, this study adopted a creative methodological approach; a diffractive-ethnographic approach to transqualitative inquiry, that is generative and not reductive, to extend thinking and knowledge in innovative and transformative ways.

Research question

What are Australian primary school classroom teachers’ perceptions of nature and how do they inform pedagogy?

Objectives or purposes

• To investigate teachers’ perceptions of nature and how this informs their pedagogical practice from a posthuman perspective.
• To implement creative and innovative approaches to methodological practices.
• To explore the possibilities for environmental education inclusion in the primary classroom

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

Doing theory requires being open to the world’s aliveness, allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder. Theories are not mere metaphysical pronouncements on the world from some presumed position of exteriority. Theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world. The world theorizes as well as experiments with itself. Figuring, reconfiguring. (Barad, 2012, p.2)

The posthuman theoretical perspective underpinning this research is inspired by the work of quantum physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad (2007). As Barad (2012) states in the opening vignette, theories are alive, dynamic and invite people and the world to be involved. Barad puts this to practice in their rich and complex theories; one of which – material-discursive practices (Barad, 2007) – is adopted in the theoretical framework of this study. The other two concepts that inform the overarching posthuman theoretical framework are affective atmospheres (Ash & Anderson, 2015) and childhoodnature (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020). Together, these three concepts enable future thinking of human/nonhuman relationality, which moves beyond conventional separatist notions and dualistic paradigms of nature/culture, teacher/student, adult/child, black/white.

In line with Sustainable Development Goals (number 4: quality education), this paper is founded on thinking that accepts inclusivity as a natural state despite the tendency of social and cultural systems to perpetuate binary thinking and practice. This framing encourages educators and educational researchers to detach from developmental theories in understanding the child and embrace perspectives that may best inform, challenge and position children and young people for their future lives (Murris, 2016; Taylor et al., 2013). The future scape has never been more uncertain and providing children and young people with authentic opportunities to voice their concerns in messy and non-judgemental ways has never been more critical, or urgent.

Each one of the concepts are theoretically robust each in their own right in disrupting traditional binary-making practices, questioning human exceptionalism, and bringing attention to the mattering of every-thing particularly the agency of human/nonhuman nature, equally so. Together, their conceptual alignment in these matters, provides a fierce theoretical frame to materialise the presentation of the findings as a series of data entanglements.

This paper addresses the imminent challenges of childhood obesity, childhood food poverty, food system induced biodiversity loss, and climate change through an examination of the integration of meals and food education provision in schools. School meals are one of the largest social safety nets in the world (Alderman & Bundy, 2012) yet school meal service has been characterised with the predominance of ultra-processed food (Parnham et al., 2022), due to the reliance on a small number of large multinational wholesale corporations (Sabet, 2022). This results in children experiencing the same narrow variety of food on the plate every day. Furthermore, despite the statutory requirement for food education since 2014, significant enhancements in provision have not materialised (Ballam, 2018). Guided by the research question on how integrated 'food experiences' during meals and education provision can serve as a transformative mechanism to alleviate health inequalities in school food, this study builds on the findings of a realist evaluation on a sustainable school food intervention in three schools in England. The study presents a new integrative approach to school food while highlighting its potential in addressing health inequalities in schools.

This study is founded on the concept of ‘sustainable school food’, which refers to a complex system that integrates the dimensions of nutrition, and environmental sustainability associated with meal provision, with food education in schools (Jones et al., 2012). Against the backdrop of a diminishing positive human connection to nature, particularly among disadvantaged populations, leading to a phenomenon which has been referred to as the ‘extinction of experience’ (Pyle, 1978). This study draws on John Dewey's philosophy of experiential learning (1932) to formulate a conceptual understanding of school food experiences which integrates meals and education provision in schools. Experiential learning theory posits that effective learning occurs through direct experience of doing and reflection, which is particularly pertinent to food education in schools. Emphasising experiential learning, the study explores how the amalgamation of meals and education facilitates transformational learning opportunities for pupils. On the one hand portraying sustainable school meals as a pedagogical tool to enhance culinary capital (Kamphuis et al., 2015), and on the other utilising food education to provide authentic learning opportunities such as cooking and farm visits (Smeds et al, 2015).

Utilising school meals as a learning opportunity is often founded in communal food sharing (Andersen et al., 2015), and social interactions (Lalli, 2022),, reflecting the principle of authenticity and relevance (Smeds, 2015). Such understanding of school food practice is founded on Dewey’s perception of learning needs and the urgency for education to meet those within the pupil’s immediate surrounding (Dewey, 1932; Smeds, 2015). Therefore, school meals can be employed as a pedagogical tool which reinforces pupils' learning on food through relevant and meaningful practice (Osowski et al., 2013).

This study posits a conceptual understanding of experiential food education, emphasising practical and relevant learning as a core component. The study explores how the meals and education provision in schools converge offering transformational learning opportunities for pupils. Such integration presents school meals as a pedagogical tool which aims to expose children to a wide variety of sustainable food, and enrich their culinary capital. On the other hand, food education embodies authentic experiences with authentic actors in authentic settings. Examples from the study included cooking school meals, with kitchen and teaching staff, in the school kitchen and engaging in food growing activities with small farmers in local farms during farm visits.

Global sustainability crises and accelerating societal and technological development are posing new demands for education at all levels. A lack of stable future horizons can lead young people to regard the future with hopelessness, to take directionless actions and to exhibit inabilities to project themselves into the future (Cook, 2016; Rosa, 2013; Rubin, 2013). Meanwhile, the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 program calls for societal transformations that cannot be achieved without transgenerational thinking, responsibility and transformative abilities of the young (Unesco, 2017).

These emerging goals of education connect to agency, the capacity for autonomous social action during which people intentionally transform their social and material worlds (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011). Policy documents worldwide promote agency as an educational objective in order to enhance responsible participation in the complex and uncertain world (e.g. OECD, 2018).

This paper addresses one of the “leverage points” to fostering students’ agency: by analyzing and broadening the ways in which they think about the future. Indeed, agency is intertwined with futures thinking since “agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation” (Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016). Also according to the seminal work on agency by Emirbayer and Mische (1998), an individual’s capacity for action, imagination and making change in relation to structural contexts is profoundly dependent on how they perceive their own relationship to the past, future and present in different situations and moments of time.

Our take on the concepts of “future” and “futures thinking” draws on the research field futures studies (e.g. Bishop, Hines & Collins, 2007; Börjeson et al., 2006; Kousa, 2011). The basics of futures-thinking in that field involve, e.g., understanding the plurality of futures, disengaging from deterministic future views, identifying and questioning assumptions to develop alternative scenarios, and understanding that small changes can become major changes over time. Research in the field has shown that positive images of the future have positive effects on an individual’s life (Bell, 1997; Rubin, 2013). Focusing on threats as well as not questioning ’automatic’ future-thinking patterns narrow down thinking and thereby limit the possibilities (Hutchinson, 1996), while the perspective of hope encourages to see alternatives and opportunities (Lombardo & Cornish, 2010).

A typical approach to analyze futures thinking in the field of futures studies is that scenarios, or images of the future, can be created from various orientations (see e.g. Bishop et al., 2007; Börjeson et al., 2006; Hicks & Holden, 1995; Voros, 2003). The first type of orientation discusses what the future is likely to be (probable futures), while the two other types of futures thinking concern what the future could be (possible futures), and what it should be (preferable futures) (e.g. Börjeson et al., 2006). The study reported here employed these orientations to analyze students’ writings on the future and agency-related views in them.

The study examined the following three research questions:

1. How do the different types of futures thinking manifest in students’ essays on the future?

2. What is the prevalence of different types of futures thinking in students’ essays on the future?

3. How do the types of futures thinking connect to the temporal dimensions of agency?

The Anthropocene is an era characterized by existential ruptures to life as we know it, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and breached planetary boundaries. The important role of education in meeting these challenges has been highlighted by scholars (White et al., 2022), and it is argued that we need to rethink education for a sustainable future.

In Science education, several scholars argue for new visions of scientific literacy, such as scientific literacy for change-making and transformative action (Mueller et al., 2022; Tasquier et al., 2022). When students are learning to read, write, and talk science, they are also learning to think in a scientific way; they are being encultured into the culture of science (Knain, 2014). This is because the scientific language has evolved to structure texts documenting the scientist's worldview (Halliday, 2003). The scientific language is characterized by high lexical density, use of passive voice, high use of technical and academic language, and the use of nominalizations (Osborne, 2023). This contributes to making the language effective and packed with information. However, this language can also contribute to obscure agency, such as when the process of cutting down trees is described as deforestation (Osborne, 2023). Another example of how scientific language can obscure agency was given in Knain’s (2001a) analysis of the Norwegian curriculum decades ago. Here, he showed how the description of the environmental destruction resulting from the use of DDT was described in a way that DDT, and not humans, was presented as the actor who harmed life: DDT, which killed pests and limited diseases, accumulated in the food chain and harmed life at many levels unintentionally. Knain (2001a) argues that the discourse appears to have a preserving effect. Ecolinguistics is a field that uses linguistic analysis to reveal the underlying stories, or ideologies, we live by, questions the stories that are destructive, and then tries to come up with new stories (Stibbe, 2015).

Science education has been criticized for being fact-oriented, avoiding normative issues, which would rather be addressed in other subjects (Bostad & Hessen, 2019; Kvamme, Reiss, 1999). Values are an important part of education for sustainable development, but in science curricula, textbooks, and classrooms, normative and value-laden issues are often avoided to present an image of science as objective (Knain, 2001b). Bostad and Hessen (2019) argue for the importance of balancing fact-based science and ecology education with an education that fosters an emotional connection with nature. In a supporting document to the science PISA framework (White et al., 2022), it is highlighted that we need to rethink our relationship with nature and other species by adopting an ecocentric worldview that sees humans as an integral part of the environment rather than separate from it.

This paper focuses on The Salmon Project, a 13-week interdisciplinary open schooling intervention co-created by teachers and researchers. Through classroom instruction and field trips to the salmon spawning site, the students engaged deeply with the lifecycle of salmon. The teaching intervention had a narrative approach, in which the students, throughout the whole period of the project, worked on developing a film script about the salmon life cycle. Focusing on students’ film, we have done a qualitative discourse analysis partly based on the framework of functional grammar (Halliday, 2003) and a social semiotic analysis based on Kress & Van Leeuwen’s framework (2006).

Research questions:

1. How do the students negotiate different ideologies about the salmon, humans, and nature?
2. What expressions of students’ agency can be identified in the student’s language use in the film?

Austria’s largest network for sustainable development education in schools is ÖKOLOG, which currently comprises 11% (over 700 schools) of the Austrian schools of all types as well as all university colleges for teacher education. ÖKOLOG was developed in 1996 by an Austrian team of teachers working on the international ENSI project (Affolder & Varga, 2018). ÖKOLOG is a national support system with the aim of promoting and integrating a sustainability approach into the development of individual schools and attempts are being made to embed the programme in Austria's federal states inter alia by regional networks and a webpage (www.ecolog.at).

ÖKOLOG is structured in three levels to support schools in the ÖKOLOG program: (1) the coordination by the Institute of Instructional and School Development at the University of Klagenfurt in partnership with the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, (2) nine ÖKOLOG regional teams (one in each Austrian province) in collaboration with educational and environmental authorities, University Colleges of Teacher Education and various organizations of environmental and sustainability education, and (3) ÖKOLOG coordinators and teams in all ÖKOLOG schools (Rauch et al., 2023). Schools analyse the ecological, technical, and social conditions of their environment and, resultingly, define objectives, targets, concrete activities, and quality criteria to be implemented and evaluated. Students and other stakeholders of a school should be involved in a participatory way, and collaboration with authorities, businesses, and other interested parties is encouraged. The measures concern, among others, areas like saving resources (energy, water, etc.), reduction of emissions (i.e., waste, traffic), spatial arrangement (from the classroom to the campus), the culture of learning (communication, organisational structure), health promotion, social learning, as well as the opening of the school to the community (Rauch & Pfaffenwimmer, 2020).

Since the beginning of the ÖKOLOG-schools network's existence, a series of evaluations, inquiries, and studies have been produced and published both using qualitative and quantitative methods (Rauch et al., 2023). Evaluation studies are carried out on an ongoing basis to gain a better understanding of organizational and individual educational processes and to ensure the quality of educational governance. The current evaluation study is also specifically dedicated to so-called all-day schools. Traditionally, school lessons in Austria are mainly held in the morning. In recent years, all-day schools have gained in importance, not least for social reasons (e.g. parents working). In principle, all-day schools spread school life over the whole day (usually from 8:00 to 17:00) and offer lunch. The structuring of lessons and extracurricular activities at the schools is additive or integrative.

The main theoretical model used is currently those on ESD effective schools by Verhelst et al. (2022). In this model six central processes are identified which influence a "whole school approach": Pluralistic communication, shared vision, democratic decision making, adaptability, collective efficacy and supportive relations. It is assumed that all-day schools have specific potential for transformative educational processes due to the fact that they go beyond conventional teaching, but at the same time specific demands are placed on them. The aim of the studies described below was to explore these relationships and their potential.

In Norway, as in other countries the world over, to ensure sustainability education is to move beyond an ‘add-on’ approach (Scott, 2013; Sterling, 2004), a shift in what, where, how, and with whom students learn is required. For sustainability education to move beyond the traditional classroom setting, and proactively engage learners with real-world issues and solutions, engagement with multi-stakeholders is also required (Leicht, Heiss & Byun, 2018; UNESCO, 2017).

In 2017, a multi-stakeholder school-university partnership was established consisting of four upper-secondary schools, the school district, and a teacher education department situated in the southeast of Norway. The aim set was to improve professional practice between campus-based and school-based understandings of sustainability-oriented education. The third-space concept (Lejonberg et. al., 2017), was employed, where researchers, teachers, leaders, students, and pupils collaborate and co-construct knowledge (Daza et, al., 2021). Originally set to end in 2022 the partnership agreement was then renewed until 2025. This paper is situated in this renewal process, a point of reflexive transition within the partnership, where understanding the following is essential; to reflect on the challenges, tensions, and opportunities experienced in establishing a partnership from a third-space perspective; to understand better why systemically embedding sustainability education is challenging; and to explore if, and or, how collective capacity building can support and provide structures to overcome these challenges in future practice.

To examine the collaborative frameworks and conditions for cross-institutional collective capacity building developed in this partnership the research questions this paper addresses are:

1. How does a School-University partnership structure and evolve collective capacity building for supporting sustainability-oriented transitions?

2. How can the partnership itself navigate and evolve to support each of the partner's own whole-institution process?

A Whole School/Institution Approach (UNESCO, 2017; Wals & Mathie, 2022) frames multiple stages of this research; the development of the school-university partnership over time; informing co-developed and reflexive professional-development content creation; and the field of research, that the PhD study this artilce is situated in, aims to contribute to theoretically. As part of this theoretical contribution, this paper's theoretical framework builds upon and is informed by two publications; 1. Mathie (in press), where a broad understanding of a Whole School Approach as a reflexive thinking tool for general quality educational change processes is proposed and in turn a composite Whole School Approach model detailing "Overarching principles, processes, and strands of a Whole School Approach to Support Educational Change Processes" (Mathie, in press, p.24) is presented; and 2. Hugo & Iversen's (in press) Whole School Alignment Model, where, in a school-university partnership context "[...] the liminal space of collaborative inquiry processes assumes the central role of navigating and attuning inherent tensions and aligning structures, programme design, space and pedagogies to co-create coherency" (Hugo & Iversen, in press, p.15).

In the pursuit to better prepare the new generation of teachers to address sustainability education in their professional practice, Higher Education turns to outcome-oriented competence-based education (CBE) (Rieckmann, 2012). At the same time, education needs to be transformative and profoundly change our perspectives, beliefs, and behaviours through reflecting and questioning the interpretation of our surroundings (Bianchi 2020, p.25). Both CBE and Transformative education (TE) in the context of sustainability, are great challenges but at the same time, highly prioritized amongst Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Europe. An emerging question is: How can HE best convey and learn sustainability competence in a way that will be transformative?

Living labs are spaces that can offer authentic learning. Apart from the interpretation of living labs as physical spaces - “sites where experiential learning takes place” (Favaloro, Ball and Lipschutz, 2019), living labs can also be viewed as non-physical spaces or frameworks that enable learning. These spaces demand real-life settings with multi-stakeholder participation, co-creation, active involvement of the users, and may follow a multi-method approach. Such contexts provide authentic learning experiences with real practical outcomes. Authentic learning is intrinsic to living labs, being a learning approach through which learners explore, discuss, and construct concepts and relationships meaningfully, in contexts and/or projects connected to real-world problems. It is student-centered and encourages students to take an active role in their learning, develop learner autonomy, and self-reflection in learning, and enable flexible learning pathways (Klemencic M., Pupinis M., Kyrdulyte G., 2020, p.29). Authentic learning is experiential learning that holds important attributes that facilitate the development of competences and create conditions for transformative learning.

The present work reports the outcomes of an empirical study concerning the collaboration of a university course on sustainability issues for undergraduate pre-school teachers (1^st and 2^nd year of studies), with a primary school and an environmental organization in a Living Lab framework that provided the context for authentic learning. The objective was to explore, how such experiences help build future educators’ self-efficacy and readiness to undertake their professional role and more specifically deliver sustainability education. The step-by-step methodology followed provided the university students with opportunities for reflection, collaboration, competences’ development, and meaningful learning and assessment.

Briefly, university students were trained to deliver a set of gamified activities on the sea turtle protection, to 6-year-old pupils. The process aimed at meeting the organisation’s need for delivering the activities to young children and obtaining feedback about the activities’ effectiveness and appropriateness; the schools’ need for enriching pupils’ learning experiences with non-formal education activities; and the university’s need for exposing future educators in out-of-the-box activities for sustainability and experiences that would enhance their self-efficacy and competences to deliver sustainability education. To allow for all the children to go through all the activities’ stations, the activities were offered twice (the first time to thirty children divided into five groups and the second time to twenty-six children divided into five groups).

The data were collected through self-reporting by the students in structured reflection handouts, a group interview, and a questionnaire. The outcomes, are not to be generalized as they concern a small group of students, but will help improve the living lab project experience in the future.

Outcomes highlight a strong engagement of the university students in the project and the development of a high sense of purpose and responsibility. Students reported a more effective collaboration amongst the group members, compared to other conventional university projects due to the shared responsibility despite the distribution of the work and commented that their experience enabled the development of specific sustainability competences.

Abstract

Climate change threatens all Earth's species. Future educators must understand the significance of this issue and acquire the necessary skills to formulate efficient strategies. To achieve decarbonization in a short time, incorporating Climate Change Competence (C3) has been suggested. This competency aims to prepare individuals in formal education to address the global crisis effectively. This study assesses C3 using a modified questionnaire. Data was collected from 659 preservice teachers in Honduras and Spain. The analysis clearly identifies the three dimensions of competence and their subdimensions. We validated the Questionnaire of Climate Change Competence to Preservice Teachers (Q-C3PST) questionnaire for future teachers using a third-order model. This framework is essential for objectively assessing and improving this vital competence for addressing the global crisis through education.

INTRODUCTION

The IPCC (2019) declares climate change as the utmost significant global crisis, having profound implications for society, the economy, and the environment. Education plays a crucial role in enhancing the capacity of students, teachers, school communities, and organisations to comprehend and tackle these issues within the limited timeframe. Climate Change Education (ECC) assumes a vital role in facilitating this transformation(United Nations, 2016) as its core aim is to enhance individuals' awareness of the multifaceted origins, repercussions, and measures for mitigation and adaptation. Likewise, Education for Sustainable Development (EDS) seeks to integrate these subjects into the formal education system to promote the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of the key objectives of the ESD approach, as discussed by Buckler & Creech (2014), is to empower individuals to make informed and responsible decisions that have positive implications for themselves and others, both in the present and in the long term. The proposed holistic and interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving and decision-making by the ESD is essential for the promotion of active citizenship and civic engagement.

On the contrary, numerous studies in the literature establish that misconceptions surrounding actionable steps to combat Climate Change diminish the effectiveness of such efforts(Ikonomidis et al., 2012). Within this context, the introduction of Climate Change Competence (C3) by Fuertes et al. (2020) aims to enhance knowledge, skills, and attitudes within the formal education system. This initiative seeks to incorporate practical aspects of ECC, ESD, and scientific knowledge into school curricula. The introduction of this concept preceded that of Europe Green Competences (https://green-comp.eu/) by a small margin, and demonstrated numerous similarities. The C3 has the capability to facilitate the design of educational programs and courses, as well as the incorporation of this crucial element into existing curricula. In recognition of the crucial role played by C3, it is necessary to have assessment tools that can yield information regarding its development and facilitate targeted educational interventions. Considering the significant impact that future educators will have on climate change education, the development of an assessment tool to evaluate their C3 is imperative.

Objectives

This study aims to examine how the assessment tool C3 can be adapted for use with pre-service teachers (PSTs) and explore the self-perception of PSTs regarding a specific set of actions that are important for mitigating climate change within component C3.

„Rethinking the purpose of education and the organization of learning has never been more urgent” (UNESCO 2015, p.10).

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is fundamental to achieving all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN, 2015 and UNESCO 2021) and the goals of the European Green Deal (CoE, 2022). In Germany, demands to include ESD in initial teacher education come ‘top-down’, through international, national and federal resolutions and ‘bottom-up’ from student teachers and serving teachers (Grund et al., 2019). As a result, ESD is being increasingly included in German universities at policy level (Holst et. al., 2022). However, beyond embedding ESD in university policies and curricula, much more work is needed to realize ESD in teaching and research, and in management, campus and transfer activities (ibid.). Indeed, systemic changes are needed to embed ESD as an integral part of institutional and pedagogical practices (Evans et al., 2017).

This paper describes the scientific process monitoring of the institutional sustainability process of the Centre of Teacher Education and Education Research (ZLSB) at TU Dresden University of Technology. A whole institution approach is a systemic approach to sustainability that engages diverse actors and their situated priorities, needs and resources and embed sustainable practices across an institution's operations, policies, and cultures (SMK, 2019). Whole institution processes are a vital part of implementing ESD in initial teacher education and across education systems because understandings and practices cannot solely be dictated from outside, but must also be re-contextualised by people and communities within and between particular contexts of practice (Kohl et al., 2022). Further, in order to foster socio-ecological transformation education must itself be transformed (UNESCO, 2021), including recognising and addressing the close correlation between formal education and socio-ecological injustices (Pirbahi-Illich et al., 2023; Orr, 2004). Sterling (2001) critiques sustainability education within a ‘mechanistic’ paradigm of education and society, where the focus is technical solutions to complicated problems. He argues for an ‘ecological’ approach, which includes ‘transformative learning’, or learning as sustainability, to enable emergent ways of seeing, thinking and acting in the world. This necessitates moving beyond established roles and discipline boundaries to engage questions of social and ecological justice and the imagination of alternative futures in relation to particular positionalities and contexts of practice (CRWR, 2023).

The study investigated sustainability and ESD from the perspectives of different individuals and teams at the ZLSB. In particular, we focused on identifying the priorities, resources and challenges towards implementing sustainability and ESD for individuals, teams and the a whole institution. The study aims to foster understanding and action within and between teams at the ZLSB, and further research-based understandings of whole institution approaches to sustainability and ESD.

This process is important, because the ZLSB is a potential ‘lever’ in the university, and within federal, national and European teacher education systems. With around 4,300 student teachers, TU Dresden is the largest provider of initial teacher education in Saxony, Germany. The ZLSB coordinates teacher education across the University, including managing timetables, practicum placements, examinations and side-entry into teaching programs; offering in-service training for teachers and teacher educators; conducting research; and coordinating projects around cross-cutting themes, such as internationalization, inclusion, digitality and ESD. As a result, the ZLSB has strong links with students and staff across the University, with the education Ministry, and with schools and other teacher education providers in Saxony, and internationally. The broad and diverse remit of the ZLSB, enables comparisons to be drawn between this particular case and that of other teacher education institutions in Germany and Europe.

Many environmental and sustainability education (ESE) researchers have a strong commitment to improving ESE practice. Building capacities of educators to shape and implement high quality ESE is also an important policy objective. It has been put forward as a ‘priority action area’ in UNESCO’s Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in 2014 as well as its follow-up framework, the ESDfor2030 Roadmap (UNESCO 2020) that is currently informing international efforts to promote and improve teaching and learning about sustainability issues. This paper explores varied ways in which transdisciplinary collaboration between ESE researchers and teachers can contribute to this ambition. We discuss the potential and possible pitfalls of diverse existing approaches to bridging research and practice and propose a novel methodology, Lesson Design Workshops (LDW). This is an approach for cooperation between researchers and teachers that is focused on co-creating educational products (lesson plans and teaching materials) and holds potential to improve ESE practice by, simultaneously, designing high-quality lessons and building educators’ sustainability teaching capacities as well as improving the didactical models used in the co-creation. Through a case study of a LDW on fostering capabilities for argumentation about sustainability issues, we empirically explore these potentials.

Collaborative settings that aim to bridge educational theory and practice have taken shape in varied ways. In this paper, we discuss ‘Lesson studies’ (Duez 2018, Gordon 2019), ‘Learning studies’ (Marton and Booth 1997, Kullberg et al. 2019), ‘Design-based research’ (Anderson & Shattuck 2012), and ‘Didactical dialogue’ (Olin et al 2023). What these practices share, is that, in contrast to traditional in-service training, they are designed for collaboration and participation, considering teachers and their knowledge and experiences as valuable resources. Thus, they acknowledge crucial differences between research-based knowledge and professional knowledge (McIntyre 2005). According to Bates (Schön 2019) practitioners want solutions to their teaching problems, while researchers seek new knowledge. Thus, scientific knowledge is seen as not directly useful for teachers unless it is transformed and/or contextualised to the specific teaching practice.

The methodology of LDW shares these assumptions. Like the other abovementioned methodologies, LDW takes departure in a specific teaching challenge that needs further attention in order to improve students’ learning. It shares with Lesson studies its focus on lessons. Similar to Lesson studies and Didactic dialogue, the methodology does not see a collaboration on doing research as a means for theory-practice bridging. While LDW shares a focus on the transdisciplinary process with Didactic dialogue, the difference is that in LDW this dialogue is mainly used for co-creating educational products. Like Design-based research LDW are not connected to one theory but are theory neutral. What is unique about LDW, is its focus on transdisciplinary co-creation of educational products, i.e. lesson plans, as a mean for theory-practice bridging. These can be said to be one of teachers knowledge products (Runesson & Gustafsson, 2012). Sharing and refining them over time makes accumulation possible. Since lesson plans developed in LDW are a product of a hybridisation between scientific and professional knowledge, the theory-practice bridging becomes materialised in a product that is central in the profession of teaching and therefore is directly useful.

In this paper we explore how the specific characteristics of LDWs can contribute to bridging research and practice. We do not only address how it can improve lesson design and foster capacity building, but also pay attention to how also research models can benefit from such transdisciplinary collaboration. The focus of our investigation is on how didactic modelling (Hamza, Palm & Wickman, 2018) contributes to the hybridisation of scientific and practical knowledge.

Amid a global shift toward decolonisation in education, this research aims to identify evidence-based strategies for developing a sustainable, inclusive, and culturally responsive curriculum. As universities advocate for inclusivity in curricula, it remains crucial to scrutinise the impact of these strategies on educational spaces. Although educators acknowledge the move towards sustainable intercultural and inclusive education, challenges persist in integrating these practices effectively (Greer, 2020; Stentifod & Koutsouris, 2022).

Recent studies highlight the transformative nature of decolonising sustainability in education, challenging dominant narratives, fostering cultural sensitivity, and promoting equity (Hutchinson et al, 2023). Creating an environment that allows learners the freedom to explore innovative and ‘disruptive’ ideas facilitates the development of critical perspectives, encouraging reflection on individual values, attitudes, behaviours and lifestyle choice. Recognising the interconnectedness of social, cultural and environmental dimensions is essential in shaping sustainable solutions (Sorkos & Hajisoteriou, 2020).

The Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Framework emphasises the urgency of instilling sustainability principles across policies, curricula and practices (UNESCO, 2020). However, a critical reflection is needed as ESD tends to be treated as a thematic topic rather than adopting a systemic approach. To address this, the study explores how education can empower the younger generation to make informed decisions for environmental integrity, economic viability, and cultural diversity (Ajmal et al, 2017). In what ways can we shift the global education agenda’s primary focus from solely assessing access and quality through learning outcomes to placing greater emphasis on the educational content’s role in promoting a sense of responsibility towards sustainable practices?

This paper delves into these transformative processes, aiming to improve stakeholders’ readiness towards ESD by 2030. This includes empowering students and training staff through a holistic approach, encompassing the whole student lifecycle. Inclusive involvement of all stakeholders, from educational leadership to administrative professionals, and fostering student partnerships is emphasised.

Research Questions:

• How can sustainability education be decolonised to ensure inclusivity and cultural sensitivity in diverse education settings?
• What are the existing challenges and opportunities for integrating decolonised sustainable education, considering the diverse cultural contexts?

Grounded in critical pedagogy, postcolonial theory, and sustainability education, the research explores cultural biases and historical perspectives that shape sustainability education (Shahjahan et al, 2022). Emphasising an interdisciplinary approach, the research investigates how decolonial thinking can inform the development of inclusive and intercultural sustainability education.

The aims and objectives include integrating sustainable development principles into teaching, learning, and curriculum. The research seeks to foster cohesion, enhance understanding on culturally relevant sustainability education, address the intersectionality of social, cultural, and environmental issues, and engage marginalised groups in the development and implementation of sustainability education initiatives. Ultimately, evidence-based recommendations will inform policy changes, initiatives, and strategic developments across educational institutions and communities.

Reference to the Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015), especially SDG 4 on ensuring “inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”, is more frequent in discourses on inclusive education (Resch et al., 2021). However, Heigl et al. (2022, p. 19) emphasize the need for further research on the intersections of inclusion and sustainability. Based on their situational analysis on these intersections in schools in Austria, teachers are in a central position between the school structure and teacher training, which are interrelated with regard to the curriculum. On the policy level, teachers are positioned as “powerful change agents” with regard to the SDGs (UNESCO, 2017, p. 51). Previous work on teacher agency underlines the need for taking into account the situatedness (e.g. Riveros et al., 2012), for instance, with regard to teachers’ way of negotiating restrictive policies in their daily “on-the-ground decisions” in classrooms (Wessel Powell et al., 2019, p. 171). As with regard to different understandings of inclusive education, their specific situatedness on local levels (Clairborne & Balakrishan, 2020) as well as “backlash against this idea(l)” (Powell, 2023, p. xxii) emphasize the need for „critical reflection and engagement in dialogue about complex social issues that are intertwined between the local and the global“ (Niemczyk, 2019, p. 4).

Linking inclusion to the overall aim which is also reflected in the SGDs of “achieving equity and attaining social justice in divergent contexts” (Powell 2023: xxii), we understand inclusive education as “a commitment to critical pedagogy” (Erevelles, 2014, p. x). Drawing on a theoretical framework based on social justice-oriented teaching, critical literacy, diversity and inclusive education (e.g. Everelles, 2014; Ortaçtepe Hart 2023; Vasequez et al., 2019; Zygmont & Clark, 2015), this paper focuses on exploring the intersections of inclusive education, social justice education and sustainability education in teacher education. Situated in specific contexts, developing teacher education for inclusion, social justice and sustainability needs to consider the global issue of the “lack of diversity within the teaching profession” (Heinz et al., 2022, p. 229). This implies addressing exclusion and (missing) representation while opposing essentialisation by building “critical awareness of teacher education and schools as sites of cultural practice” (Heinz et al., 2022, p. 229-230). This can be linked to Catarci’s (2021) perspective on “an educational approach to sustainability for everyone” which emphasizes the need for critical reflection, especially among those who represent majority positions to “allow them to become aware of the major critical issues of the contemporary world (migratory dynamics, armed conflicts, climate change, etc.) through a perspective of global citizenship” (p. 4-5).

This paper aims to explore challenges and possibilities in developing teacher education for inclusion, social justice and sustainability focusing on relationalities of the global and local or the ‘glocal’ (Luke, 2004) in the field of internationalization at home and digital learning formats. With an increased focus on shifting to digital or hybrid learning formats following the Covid-19 pandemic (Li & Xue, 2023), the relevance of internationalization at home (e.g. Beelen & Jones 2015) is emphasized in terms of sustainability. Focusing on possibilities of internationalization at home in teacher education is important for making international experiences accessible to all teacher candidates, particularly those who often face barriers to participating in a study-related stay abroad based on their financial or care-related situation (Rachbauer & Plank, 2021, p. 125).

Based on an interdisciplinary research and teaching collaboration between scholars from midwestern US and German universities in the field of literacy and language education, social studies education, English language teaching and inclusive education, this paper aims to contribute to understanding overall “complexities of ‘situatedness’” (Clarke, 2005, p. xxviii).

The ‘Voices of the Future’ project was jointly funded across environmental science, arts and humanities and social science (NERC NE/V021370/1]. It aimed to explore children’s relation to treescapes with a focus on belonging and hope. It brought together a number of disciplines including the science of tree-measuring, childhood studies and human geography. There was a particular focus on belonging and hope for treescapes in the project, and it is this focus that we will address in this presentation.

The future of treescapes belongs to children and young people (CYP). Despite increasing child and youth led environmental activism, CYP voices are still rarely heard in policy and practice. In our project, we worked with school children in a number of schools across the North-West of England, with both primary and secondary age children. Employing an innovative co-production approach, we draw together arts, humanities, social and scientific methods, and knowledge to imagine future treescapes that meet the interdependent needs of humans and the environment.

In the contexts where we worked, we were working with a mix of children and young people who had migrated from a number of different countries, including India, China and Pakistan, over a number of years, also, more recently, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia. Our team were diverse, and we focused very much on multilingual children and families. The experience of working in schools was a multilingual one, with many languages represented, particularly in central Manchester in the North-West of England. Many of the children were third, fourth or even fifth generation of migrant families who had moved to the North West of England to work in the many factories there in the 1950’s and 1960’s (Werbner 1990). They settled in small-scale terraced housing, often from the Victorian era in the UK, and their community life was close knit and involved many languages, including Urdu, Punjabi, Mandarin and Arabic.

Our focus in the presentation will be how trees afford opportunities to migrant children to engage dialogues to negotiate their national identities referencing their biographical and migrating histories (Savage et al 2010). We include stories from “being with trees in the school forest” opening dialogues about trees and children’s relations with the place in a transnational context. Here, we see stories which do not just represent but also make worlds. We see children’s stories as a messy mix of temporalities whereby story layers pile up and create the possibility of turn and return (Hohti and Tammi 2023, p 10). We also discussed the value of creating relational and democratic conditions for children to enable them to engage open dialogues about their belonging (ness) (Nunn 2022) as part of learning about their environments. We see these research encounters as potential space developing an emergent sense of belonging (Nunn 2022) among children. Children in these encounters are enabled to see themselves as co-researchers to document/record encounters of about trees and their environments.

Networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

France and the United Kingdom pioneered the organisation of citizens' climate assemblies to involve a broad representation of citizens in proposing measures and recommendations to address climate change at the national level (Climate Assembly UK, 2020). The EDUCLIMAD project aims to explore the innovative potential of climate assemblies, by contextualising and adapting it to the school context. Thus, this investigation presents school climate assemblies, conceived as an innovative educational tool for the co-creation of climate change and sustainability solutions within educational institutions and communities. An intervention research project has been designed and piloted in 24 Primary and High Education Schools in the region of Tarragona (Spain). This study is situated in a qualitative-interpretative research paradigm (Bisquerra, 2019) and is an Intervention Based Research (Tricket et al, 1996), which consists of designing and carrying out interventions to study the effects of the implementation of school climate assemblies.

The study emphasizes the potential of co-creation methods in the educational context and underscores the critical role of education in fostering sustainability citizens and empowering students to become active change agents in their local community. The main objectives of EDUCLIMAD are: 1) Design, validate and pilot an instrument to assess the sustainability competences of primary and secondary school students, 2) Assess the influence of school climate assemblies on environmental awareness on the development of sustainability competences in primary and secondary school students, and 3) Design, test and develop a methodological framework and recommendations for conducting school climate assemblies. The activities foreseen in this project are organized in 3 phases: A first preparatory and design phase of educational and methodological materials and resources, including the design of an assessment instrument aligned with European competence framework on sustainability Greencomp (Bianchi et al, 2022). This instrument is adapted to primary and secondary education and consists of a questionnaire related to sustainability knowledge, attitudes and behaviors, with 4 Likert-type response possibilities and 4 contextualised situations, following the pre-test and post-test design with the aim of measuring the level of competence among the students before and after implementing the school climatic assemblies. The second phase of the project involves the organization and development of school climate assemblies in 24 schools and the elaboration of an action plan and policy recommendations by the participating educational communities, and the third phase consists of evaluation and dissemination of the results, the educational resources derived from the project will be disseminated to agents of the territory, including political representatives and other educational centers in the area. The organization of a fair is foreseen in which the proposals can be presented to the different educational agents, entities of the territory and policy makers. The results suggest policy implications for integrating co-creation approaches into school curricula, aiming to empower students and drive sustainable action. This project is considered of scientific relevance because it presents the methodological conceptualisation for implementing climate assemblies in schools and the results of a pilot with primary and secondary school students, establishing a framework that can be replicated in different contexts and educational levels, which makes it adaptable and scalable.

Introduction

Young people are taking increasingly public and overtly political action in response to environmental concerns. There is a need for schools to support young people in navigating current environmental challenges, however, the capacity for schools to do this is inconsistent and often inadequate. Research is needed to understand how we can better support schools and young people in confidently responding to contemporary and evolving environmental issues. This presentation explores how environmental citizen science can contribute to lived eco-citizenship in young people while they are in formal schooling. A major finding is that environmental citizen science experiences offer opportunities to connect pupils with scientific research practices in a way that offers authentic citizenship opportunities not ordinarily available in schools. The research took a qualitative, in-depth, multi-method, case study approach, exploring the experiences of school-based participants (n=74, pupils, teachers and scientists) across three different school-based citizen science projects, and a small number of pupils who had no citizen science experience in schools as comparison.

Theoretical Framing

The capability approach (Nussbaum, 2011, Sen, 1993, Robeyns, 2017) offers an alternative to considering ‘environmental action’ as a key end goal. Instead, taking a processual approach to the identification of a suite of eco-citizenship ‘capabilities’ that can be brought into being as ‘functionings’ should the pupils involved feel compelled to do so. Robeyns (2017) describes three ‘conversion factors’, or “the factors which determine the degree to which a person can transform a resource into a functioning” (ibid. P.45), ‘personal’ or internal to the person, ‘social’ or stemming from the society, and ‘environmental’, the physical or built environment. In this analysis, the ways in which the citizen science experience can be considered to provide the different types of ‘conversion factor’ will be identified and the opportunities and constraints of these explored.

Hayward (2012) suggests that young people have different experiences of environmental citizenship than adults. Emphasising the everyday experiences that young people may have, at home, in school or with their friends, rather than ‘adult’ experiences like voting or environmentally conscious consumerism, offers a way of realistically understanding eco-citizenship in young people. Kallio, Wood and Hakli (2020) describe lived citizenship in a way that explores the reality of citizenship in everyday situations rather than relying on the formal, legal status of citizenship. This analysis draws upon that conception, placing the embodied experiences and acts of eco-citizenship in the daily life of young people at its core. The concept of lived citizenship (Kallio, Wood and Hakli (2020) offers an approach to considering the citizenship related experiences of young people as part of the mundane, everyday experience of formal schooling. Situating the citizen science experience within this conception also acknowledges the non-voluntary nature of the young people’s participation in the experience.

Findings

Across the responses from participants in citizen science projects (and non) in this research, for these pupils who all participate in environmental or scientific subjects through their formal school experience, the nature of the citizen science experience did not inspire a radical change for them. Environmental, social and personal conversion factors were, however, recognised and reported in my observations of the pupils engaged in the citizen science activities, and in their reflections and responses. These include, physical and sensory encounters, working with others, and caring for the environment. While the short-term, single encounter with citizen science, as experienced here, could not be shown to move the pupils towards more public actions such as campaigning and protest, the nurturing of eco-citizenship capabilities can begin with relational, sensory and affective experiences. Environmental citizen science affords young people opportunities that offer a springboard towards authentic eco-citizenship actions and dispositions.

This paper presents a small exploratory study of how introducing role play as a learning activity in a science education class for student teachers can provide them with a powerful instruction tool in their future teaching. The role play is used for involving students in multiple emotionally charged perspectives together with cognitive challenges of attempting to resolve an ecological problem. The narrative of the role play is based on a true story involving published pieces of marine research in a sustainability context. The role play offers a setting for further deliberation of central issues of sustainability, helping the student teachers contemplate the place of sustainability in science education. Though emotional and ethical aspects are part of socio-scientific issues, many student teachers are insecure of how to deal with them in learning science. Fortus etal. (2022) highlights why the affective domain is important to develop scientific literacy. Toonders, etal. (2016) declares that drama is a relatively unexplored tool in academic science education, and addresses how the use of drama may allow science students to deepen their understanding of science innovations and the ethical dimensions of them.

One of many challenges for environmental and sustainability education is to engage students in realistic transdisciplinary issues where they can use and develop their agency and emotional reactions for dealing with sustainability dilemmas. With this proposal, the discussion is raised of how role play and other drama activities can contribute to student teachers’ involvement in sustainability. By first engaging in a personal role play the participants gain empathic and embodied understandings of different perspectives of the issue in mind. In the following reflective discussion, the level of discourse may be lifted from the individual to the collective and eventually to a global level through a lens of empathy and embodiment.

This study’s research question is:

How do student science teachers experience role play as a learning activity for reflecting on values in sustainability and preparing students for future citizenship?

There are trends in education for sustainability, sustainable citizenship and scientific literacy that points towards transformative learning (Unesco, 2018; Biesta, 2006; Van Poeck & Vandenabeele, 2013; Granados-Sanchez, 2023; Valladares, 2021), and that the perspective shifts from acquiring competences to the democratic nature of educational spaces and practices (Van Poeck & Vandenabeele, 2013). By using sustainable citizenship as a theoretical frame the role play is studied as an educational space for exploring an ecological problem in a complex environment where the participants in role “respond to each other’s divergent and mutually exclusive concerns, a space in which things are made public” (Van Poeck & Vandenabeele, 2013, p.6). In the post-role play reflecting dialogue the discussion offers links to matters of global sustainability and citizenship which refers to “a sense of belonging to the global community and a common sense of humanity” and “collective responsibility at the global level” (UNESCO, 2017 p.2).

This study leans on a framework of drama for sustainability issues (Author, 2017, 2023), based on Leinweaver’s (2015) sustainable storytelling. The Bleeding Water role play is characterized as a Little drama that is conducted on a personal level involving a story connected to individuals and how they explore their lives and make their choices based on values and facts (Author, 2001). The dramatic action is personal, exploring personal expressions (Neelands, 2000). Middle dramas, may explore conflicts on an interpersonal and sociocultural level. They have focus of explaining power relationships, organization of society and how culture shapes our collective senses. Big, symbolic dramas help people make sense of the mystery of life and the wonder of being. (Author, 2023). All three levels connect to sustainable citizenship.

Young people are pivotal in driving the (future) implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and fostering successful sustainable transformation both globally and regionally. To achieve this, they need engaging learning opportunities and effective support to acquire essential sustainability competencies. By establishing this foundation, the young generation will be empowered to assume responsibility and actively contribute to shaping a sustainable future.

However, the challenge lies in designing learning settings that effectively engage, motivate and cater to diverse groups of young people, enabling them to collaborate on solutions for future challenges. Understanding the sustainability awareness and competencies of young individuals is crucial for developing tailored learning interventions. In Germany, numerous well-established-surveys routinely gather data on the daily lives, attitudes, and opinions of young people [1-5]. At the European level, the #ClimateofChange project conducted one of the latest surveys across 23 European countries, primarily exploring young people’s perception and knowledge regarding the interplay between climate change and migration [6]. While shedding light on motivations for sustainable living, the study also unveils variations based on gender, residence in urban or rural areas, and educational background. However, the existing German studies lack the specificity to scrutinize data at a regional level, such as our focus on the northwest part of Lower Saxony, characterized mainly by rural regions.

Additionally, our emphasis is on embracing the diversity of young individuals, taking into account their social backgrounds, interests, and needs to cater to all segments of society. Many existing studies exhibit a pre-existing bias towards groups with a heightened affinity for sustainability, as these individuals are more likely to participate in interviews on this topic. Consequently, we conducted focus group discussions, engaging with diverse groups of young people from various contexts, to gain deeper insights into their awareness of sustainability and their proficiency in sustainability competencies.

These findings serve as the foundation for crafting a novel learning intervention rooted in the principles of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) [7] and ‘learning workshops’ [“Lernwerkstaetten”], a concept originating in German-speaking countries in the 1990s [8]. The innovative format is built upon action-oriented and transformative pedagogy, prioritizing learner-centric approaches, reflection loops, active participation, and exploratory, interconnected learning as main pedagogical principles [9 and 10]. Furthermore, the design of the learning environment is pivotal in realizing these pedagogical objectives. Leveraging the 'learning workshops' concept provides a valuable framework, particularly in shaping an environment that fosters diverse ways of learning and cultivates an atmosphere of astonishment, irritation, exploration, invention, and inspiration [11].

The amalgamation of prior experiences with these concepts and the insights gleaned from the focus groups will enable us to formulate a novel approach aimed at effectively empowering young people to actively engage in sustainable transformation. To foster a comprehensive understanding of both cross-regional dynamics and regional nuances, engaging in European-level exchanges proves invaluable. While our initial focus is on a regional level, targeting specific groups of young people, our findings and newly developed concepts can contribute to an international discourse on empowering youth for the globally essential sustainable transformation. Thus, a crucial aspect involves comprehending the intricacies of the addressed groups, a goal our study aims to advance.

INTRODUCTION

Our paper analyses the affordances of a selection of pre-university subjects for climate-related learning, focusing on Victoria and extending this to other Australian states and territories. Internationally, the K-12 education sector has seen a range of responses that illustrate shallow to deeper forms of engagement with the climate crisis (e.g., NRC, 2012; Bonnett, 2013; Henderson & Drewes, 2020; Dunlop et al. 2021; Finnegan, 2023). On the one hand, studies show curriculum is designed and enacted in particular subject areas in ways that can foster forms of denialism, disavowal and negation,directly and indirectly (see Eaton & Day, 2020; Höhle & Bengtsson, 2023; Perrin, 2023; Säfström & Östman, 2020; Tannock, 2020, and most recently, PragerU and climate denial education in Florida). On the other, there are a range of initiatives in curricular, co-curricular or extra-curricular spaces may propose fostering variousdimensions of ‘climate literacy’ to combat this, as well as reframe contemporary educational priorities (see Huopenen, 2023; Kwauk & Wyss, 2023; Mayes & Center, 2023; Ruiz-Mallén et al., 2022; Cook et al., 2023).

In Victoria, like the affordances in other Australian states and territories, current state-level education policy has created two main clusters for learning about climate within Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) subjects: STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and HASS (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences). Our study illustrates how both clusters offer core and optional areas for provision of quality climate-related learning—i.e. that might engender hope and action—for 16-19 year olds, even as they present diverse opportunities for advancing learning and competence development in cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural domains.

Extending Dawson et al.’s (2022) recent international comparative study of middle years climate-related curriculum, we offer an examination of the the breadth, depth and quality of learning affordances in the current and next generation versions of VCEs, and present an analysis of patterns of possible learning within and across subjects. Findings for Victoria suggest continued fragmentation within some study designs, innovation and depth in others, and significant differences in emphasis and approach across each cluster. We then extend this analysis to the equivalent provision in the other current state and territory senior secondary school certificates.

Dawson et al. (2022) documented the inadequacies in climate change education provision in Australian Foundation to Year 10 (F-10, 4-16 years old) curriculum, a curriculum policy that sets the foundations for each of Australia’s state and territory curriculum authorities. While the term ‘climate change’ appears in the policy, it is barely mentioned. Most often it appears at Years 9 or 10 (15-16 years old) and when it does, it is presented as a context or example rather than a core or mandated aspect or discrete topic and knowledge. For the previous version of the Australian curriculum, Dawson et al. (2022) concluded “although there are implicit opportunities for a teacher to choose to teach climate change it is not explicit or mandated” (p.1387). Now, Version 9.0 of the science curriculum for Year 10 mentions, “Describe trends in patterns of global climate change and identify causal factors”, but this is the only entry, and it is unlikely to offer what NOAA regards as ‘climate literacy’ (or climate science literacy for that matter). For students too, it ill affords sufficient preparation to select pre-university courses that round out their knowledge and competences, or know how to address the shortcomings in current provision by choosing subjects or finding teachers that can correct this (Beasy et al., 2023).

Biodiversity, i.e., the variety of life on Earth, plays a crucial role in sustaining human life directly by providing ecosystem services like feeding humanity or producing oxygen and indirectly by increasing the resiliency of biosystems toward global changes like climate change. Unfortunately, the growing human activity on Earth has led to a rapidly increasing loss of biodiversity. Given the uttermost importance of biodiversity, it should be very alarming that according to scientific estimates, the rate of biodiversity loss is not just one of the areas of planetary boundaries in which humankind has reached the planet's limits but it is the area where the boundary transgression is the greatest (Rockstörm, 2009). The rate of human-driven biodiversity loss is so high that it is classified as the sixth major extinction event in the geological history of life (Chapin et al., 2000).

Despite the above-mentioned dangerous trend of biodiversity loss, even current global educational overviews declare that there is a common lack of awareness of the importance of biodiversity. In many cases, biodiversity is still perceived as a mere resource for exploitation (UNESCO, 2022). Fortunately, there are data available that contradict these conclusions. According to the analyses of the European Commission, Europeans' knowledge about biodiversity had increased between 2013 and 2018, and almost two-thirds of the Europeans are aware that human life is based upon biodiversity (European Commission, n.d.).

In light of the importance of biodiversity as a topic and the inconsistencies in the data on public thinking about biodiversity, there is surprisingly little comprehensive research on students' attitudes towards biodiversity. Much of the research on biodiversity among students has not so much focused on attitudes towards biodiversity but on students' knowledge systems and gaps in their knowledge of biodiversity (e.g. Bermudez & Lindemann-Matthies, 2020).

Teenagers are at a crucial stage of personal development where their values and attitudes are shaped. Harnessing their enthusiasm and curiosity for the natural world can have a lasting impact on their environmental consciousness. By instilling a sense of responsibility and appreciation for biodiversity, teenagers can become conservation advocates, influencing current and future generations.

The importance of integrating biodiversity education into the curriculum cannot be overstated. Schools play a pivotal role in shaping teenagers' attitudes toward the environment. Practical field trips, interactive learning modules, and engaging classroom discussions can provide a holistic understanding of biodiversity. These experiences enhance scientific knowledge and instil a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of all living organisms.

Therefore, the main objective of the presented research is to give an insight into the attitude of Hungarian teenagers toward biodiversity and reveal if participation in a national sustainability education program correlates with more positive attitudes toward biodiversity.

This paper revisits the scholarly debate about Sustainability Competencences (SCs) concerning graduate employability from a Kenyan Perspective. UN Policy documents state that Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) is instrumental in realising Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development (SD) by producing competent graduates who become future leaders, thinkers, and decision-makers able to solve complex issues (IAU, 2012). Moreover, sustainability competencies (SCs) are expected to align with transitions to a green economy (GE) contributing to millions of new jobs (UNECE, 2012; ILO, 2022). While 71 million youth were unemployed globally in 2016, in 2023 out of 192 million overall global unemployment (UN, 2023) 13.3% were youth (ILO, 2024). It is estimated that GE could account for 100 million new jobs by 2030, which requires specific skills and training (ILO, 2022). Although Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is assumed to foster employability values, skills, and practices, necessary for green transitions, only a fraction of this potential is being tapped (Nishimura M. and Rowe, D. 2021; ILO, 2022). Researchers have argued that education ought to work towards achieving a sustainable world and acknowledge that students’ SCs are correlated to their employability competencies (Gora et al., 2019) to create sustainable societies (Stables & Scott, 2002). Therefore, authors have argued for mainstreaming ESD into all university curricula (Rieckmann, 2012; Mochizuki & Fadeeva, 2010). Others, however, have criticised a narrow, instrumental focus on facilitating competence development (Van Poeck & Vandenabeele, 2012; Deleye et al., 2019; Vare, 2022) and the acquisition of SCs for employability (Weinert, 2001) as it disregards transformational and emancipatory aspects of education (Wals 2011, 2015; de Haan, 2006).

We revisit the debate about SCs and employability by discussing the contextual relevance (Vare et al. 2022) of the arguments used and exploring the case of Kenya. While, in the global North, instrumental approaches to education and ESD are often criticised, Mbithi et al. (2021) posit that Africa's needs are unique compared to developed economies and therefore argue for the acquisition of skills that are relevant to the emerging economies while paying attention to SD. This position is confirmed by Lotz-Sisitka and Raven (2009) in the light of post-apartheid South Africa. Also, Kenyan universities see ESD integration as an opportunity to enhance employability aligned with SDG 4 on Quality Education and SDG 8 on Decent Work for graduates (UNESCO, 2016). Kenya’s ESD strategy is guided by three strategic objectives: Enhance the role of education and learning for equitable, efficient, and sustainable utilization of the country’s resources; promote quality education through diverse learning and public awareness for improved quality of life and productive livelihoods; and promote teaching and learning that inculcates appropriate values, behaviours, and lifestyles for good governance and sustainability (Imbuga, 2010). Nyatuka (2020) argues that SCs should be fully integrated into the newly introduced competency-based curriculum (CBC) in Kenya.

It is problematic that scientific literature on sustainability in higher education, including on SCs which can be considered a game changer in the employability of graduates, is dominated by contributions from the global North with less knowledge about the African, Asian, and Latin-American contexts (Adomßent et al., 2013). With this contribution, we aim to respond to the need to conduct more research in underrepresented regions.

In this theoretical paper we draw on the concepts of powerful knowledge (Muller & Young, 2019; Muller, 2023; Young & Muller, 2013) and powerful pedagogies (Roberts, 2017) to argue that school geography curriculum is a key site to develop structured teaching programmes for students to extend their knowledge and act as citizens for a sustainable future. We argue that Geography education uniquely opens up opportunities for action with its focus on place-based experiences, that centre students’ schools and their communities. We posit that while important, merely identifying powerful knowledge in geography is not enough, teachers must also engage with geographical ‘powerful pedagogies’ (Roberts, 2017; 2023). Geography as a discipline holds a critical role when it comes to sustainability and education for the future as it makes the links between people and the environment clearly visible, opening their eyes to the bigger picture. Yet for Geography to be a discipline that is powerful for students to navigate their current and future life-worlds it must encompasses action through fieldwork and incorporate dialogue between students, teachers, experts and the public that focus on perspectives and possibilities for praxis – action for the good of humankind (Kemmis, 2023; Mahon, 2020).

INTRODUCTION

The idea of ‘powerful knowledge’ is heavily associated with the scholarship, students and interlocuters of Michael Young (e.g. 2009, 2013a, 2013b). It has generated much debate in recent years in the field of education, including in geography education. While it is an attractive and promising idea, it can also be subject to critique. In this paper we explore the main lines of critique by way of the following questions:

1. What is meant by powerful knowledge for teachers and students?

2. What is powerful geographical knowledge?

3. What might a powerful geography education be?

4. How might we evaluate the claim that it powerful knowledge benefits students of geography in schools?

Our full paper is structured into four corresponding sections. Each section presents a synthesis of the debates and contributions that have been made in recent years regarding the meaning of powerful knowledge and its use and development in the field of geography education. (llustrative extracts are included below.)

The first section introduces the origin of the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ and includes the main criticisms raised in debate in recent years (e.g. Beck 2013, Biesta 2014, Young et al. 2015, Muller & Young 2015, Deng 2021, 2022). The next provides a contemporary definition of what the notion of ‘powerful geographical knowledge’ implies (see Béneker & van der Vaart 2020, Bladh 2020, Roberts 2014), including its relevance to companion fields, such as environmental and sustainability education (see Mitchell 2022, Reid 2018). The third focuses on whether and how we can talk about a powerful geography education (drawing on Biddulph et al. 2020, Boehm et al 2018, Maude 2018, Slater et al. 2016). The fourth includes the importance of research on students’ learning and how teaching and curriculum are decisive for concluding that the knowledge they may deploy or acquire is ‘powerful’ (Bouwmans & Béneker 2018, Catling & Martin, 2017, Hordern 2021, Gericke et al. 2018, Virranmäki 2022).

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF ‘POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE’

For this proposal, we note Young (2009) approached the concept from a curriculum studies perspective in an effort to restore attention to the importance of knowledge in curriculum development and learning, e.g. during 'curriculum making' by practitioners. A key argument revolves around the fundamental role that an agreed curriculum (e.g. national or state), plays in promoting social justice, as well as framing who makes curriculum within particulary parameters, or tries to subvert or repurpose this (Roberts 2014). According to Young, while there are young people who, due to their particular social situation and standing, will have access to knowledge, there are others who will not (see Deng 2022). Therefore, the school has a duty to combat this inequality by offering all students access to the best possible knowledge, in others words, a 'powerful knowledge' that is true, trustworthy, and valuable.

Much of the academic debate about powerful knowledge has focused on elucidating what is meant by ‘powerful’, critiquing that and suggesting alternatives. Young (2014, 74), for example, distinguished three characteristics of powerful knowledge: 1) It is different from everyday knowledge, 2) It is produced in specialized scientific communities; and 3) It is systematically categorized into the concepts that are part of the disciplines. For Young (2013b), it is necessary to recover the content of the subjects and teach the most strategic and valuable knowledge of each discipline so that students can gain an idea of how the world works. Muller and Young (2019) state that this knowledge can be found in school subjects since these are taught according to the canons of their reference disciplines, and thus create a 'knowledge-rich curriculum' too.

In the ever-increasing VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex & ambiguous; Bennet & Lemoine, 2014) reality of societies across Europe and beyond, there is a strong need for scientifically literate citizens who are willing and able to contribute to a more sustainable future. Education is seen by many as one of the key factors that can and should contribute to this goal. SDG4.7 explicitly addresses the need to equip all learners with competences that allow them to be(come) active and responsible citizens. SSIBL (Socio-Scientific Inquiry-Based Learning) is a pedagogy that aims to foster responsible citizenship by connecting inquiry driven by socio-scientific issues (SSI) and taking responsible action (Levinson, 2018). In the Horizon2020 project COSMOS, we aim to support schools in their development towards openness (Sarid et al., 2023) by connecting science education to learners’ real lives and stakeholders beyond school walls. An approach combing SSIBL and Communities of Practice (CoP) is central.

SSIBL combines citizenship education, SSI-based education and inquiry-based learning, in an attempt to promote science in, with and for society underpinned by the responsible research and innovation (RRI) principles of social desirability, ethical acceptability, and sustainability (Levison, 2018). SSIBL consists of three concrete didactical stages: (1) ASK: raising authentic questions through salient SSIs that require a solution; (2) FIND OUT: explore and find answers to these questions through social, personal and scientific inquiry; (3) ACT: collectively taking responsible action towards addressing the SSI (Knippels & van Harskamp, 2018). The focus of SSIBL on identifying solutions through personally-relevant inquiries fosters collective work by students and teachers to address issues relevant to them and their communities.

A CoP is characterised by joint enterprise, which is agreed and negotiated through collective participation and mutual engagement using a shared repertoire of resources co-created over time (e.g., language, values), created when individuals work together within a certain set of social norms and routines and thus develop a shared way of seeing, doing and being, a shared practice (Wenger, 1999). Using SSIBL to learn and mitigate against local, relevant SSIs and contributing to the community can demonstrate the relevance of science to all participating members, creating common ground for collaboration and shared learning, and thus supporting the development of CoPs within these social settings.

The COSMOS project seeks to explore opportunities to include stakeholders in SSIs (teachers, students, families, scientists, companies, science centres) creating CoP (Wenger, 1999) that collaboratively work towards addressing SSIs through implementing SSIBL in their science education. Through this, we aim to empower teachers with the competency to build their students’ learning of science attitudes as well as their action competence in sustainable development (Sass et al., 2020). Engaging students in SSIBL inherently provides a powerful formative educational experience for science learning and for experiencing the relevance of science to the lives of students, their peers and their families. Employing SSIBL also supports the development of students as personally responsible and justice-oriented citizens (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). The aim for change in students’ attitudes towards science as well as their action competence in sustainable development, enables students to critically engage with local, global and intercultural issues, understand and appreciate different perspectives, interact respectfully with others, and take responsible action towards sustainability and well-being.

We hypothesize that SSIBL’s explicit focus on scientific, social and personal inquiry and its orientation towards learners’ deliberate action taking, combined with the real-world and collaborative nature of the CoP approach, are a potent mixture to drive student learning. Our central research question in the current proposal is, therefore: What is the impact of SSIBL-CoP implementation on students’ attitudes towards science and action competence?

The symposium centers on how Young people imagine the future and what it implies for their present dealing with contemporary life in an age of environmental disaster. Through taking outset in students’ perspectives, the symposium seeks to nuance the understanding of student’s relation and imagination of themselves in relation to or as part of a sustainable future. Further it deals with what can be done educationally to support cultivation of young people’s future expectations in constructive ways, for instance through playful classrooms and/or other kinds of research and educational playspaces (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2022) and/or more flourishing in our schools and the use of outdoor spaces. Central questions are: To what extend and how is it possible and desirable to support young people to foster hope and/or positive imaginations about the future? To what extend and how is it possible and desirable so educate young people of today to become eco-democratic citizens and creators of a life-friendly society of tomorrow? To what extend is such aims and democratic education in need of becoming rethought in connection with eco-democracy? (Lundmark, 1998; Pickering et. al, 2020). Thus, prepare the young generation to support and achieve diverse, democratic social, and ecologically just sustainable societies – living within the Earth's carrying capacity – eco-democracy might be an important perspective helpful to think of and understanding educational change, but also enacting change in educational practice supporting living and learning democracy, young people's contemporary and imaginary future. The papers present different angles on this. The aim of the symposium is therefore to bring the papers into a shared conversation about educational research that focuses on young people, their perspectives, and how to respond educationally to the challanges of growing up on a damaged planet, in an ecologically unsustainable society, where many, not least young people dream of something better, yet risk becoming depressed, apathetic or anxious about the future, in the Anthropocene age we now live in (Paulsen, et. al. 2022).

The world's current environmental and climate crises are shaping the future in which our children grow up, which makes knowledge about how primary schools can and should currently navigate in this a subject of both existential and societal friction. This paper investigates how students understand, experience and relate to climate and sustainability issues, and how this informs their view on sustainability education. Despite being the primary concern of education, the students’ perspectives often figure in the background of theory and research concerning sustainability education (Brückner et al., 2023; Payne, 1997; Rickinson, 2001). Therefore, this paper aims to place the student perspective in the foreground by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at three different primary-level schools in Denmark that explicitly work with sustainability in their teaching and school development (CHORA, 2024). Based on ten focus group interviews with around 30 students in 5-6th grade, including participatory observation in different educational settings in and outside the classroom. These empirical findings are combined with focus group interviews using creative methods that explore different ways for the students to express their experiences of sustainability education, which led to several examples containing both local-global, here-and-now and future perspectives. Building on this, this paper presents key findings and themes on how students participate, perceive and experience sustainability education. To explore which frictions and potentials arise through students’ meaning-making processes, expressions of actions, and connection-making etc., with a particular interest in examples of how different forms of we-stories, are illustrating often taken-for-granted categories as e.g. we at this school, we as a group, or we as humans (Verlie 2019; Lehtonen et al., 2019; Gulløv & Højlund, 2015; Gilliam & Gulløv, 2022). Centering the student, motivates an examination of both the child, children and their context, and a curiosity towards different representations of sustainability that incapsulates and illustrates the entangled, transnational, and complex interconnectedness of the children’s world-building. Specifically, looking at examples of fire-fighting as a concern of the students, both in a symbolic and practical sense, as their descriptions, stories and illustrations about sustainability education connect and contain notions of flourishing nature and burning factories, this presentation will present a qualitative perspective on how to nuance the understanding of which different aspects and factors influence sustainability education and the student’s relation and imagination of themselves in relation to or as part of a sustainable future.

Brückner, M., Lysgaard, J., & Elf, N. (2023). Dimensions of Quality in Environmental and Sustainability Education Research. CHORA. (2024). 2030 SKOLER Verdensmålscertificering af uddannelsesinstitutioner. Retrieved 25th of January 2024 from https://chora2030.dk/verdensmaalscertificering-af-skoler/ Gilliam, L., & Gulløv, E. (2016). Children of the Welfare State: Civilising Practices in Schools, Childcare and Families (Vol. 57734). Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1jktscx Gilliam, L., & Gulløv, E. (2022). Children as potential - a window to cultural ideals, anxieties and conflicts. Children's geographies, 20(3), 311-323. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1648760 Gulløv, E., & Højlund, S. (2015). Feltarbejde blandt børn : metodologi og etik i etnografisk børneforskning (1. udgave. ed.). Gyldendal. Lehtonen, A., Salonen, A. O., & Cantell, H. (2019). Climate Change Education: A New Approach for a World of Wicked Problems. In Sustainability, Human Well-Being, and the Future of Education (pp. 339-374). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78580-6_11 Payne, P. (1997). Embodiment and Environmental Education. Environmental Education Research, 3(2), 133-153. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462970030203 Pink, S., & Morgan, J. (2013). Short-Term Ethnography: Intense Routes to Knowing: Short-Term Ethnography. Symbolic interaction, 36(3), 351-361. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.66 Rickinson, M. (2001). Learners and Learning in Environmental Education: A critical review of the evidence. Environmental Education Research, 7(3), 207-320. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620120065230

Many of the problems in the Anthropocene age we now live in – such as the climate crisis – seem rather depressing and unsolvable, due to prevailing political regimes and human folly (e.g. Scranton, 2015). It is, therefore, only natural that this situation gives rise to a plethora of hopelessness, anxiety, passivity, frustrations, as well as burn out and ignorance strategies among young people (Paulsen et. al. 2022). As argued by Marek Oziewicz (2022), contemporary youth predominantly (through media etc.) encounter dystopic narratives regarding the future of the planet and their own lives. In this paper three different types of future narratives and expectations are discussed: a) a dystopic vision where 'everything will collapse,' b) a technofix perspective wherein 'technical solutions will be developed to solve or at least mitigate the worst problems related to climate and ecological crisis,' and c) an outlook where 'we will develop new ways of living, more life-friendly, in partnership with the living world’. In line with Oziewicz (Ibid.) it is proposed that the third type is what we need most, but that it is only marginally cultivated and creatively engaged with by young people today (Nørreklit and Paulsen, 2023). On this background and based on posthuman educational research approaches (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2022) the author of this paper have developed a solarpunk speculative cli-fi-roleplaying game, together with Sara Mosberg Iversen, which have been proto-tested with 12 young students, during four days in January 2024, as a potential educational tool to facilitate non-dystopic and life-friendly future imaginations, but also deep reflections on hope and the role of one’s expectations on one’s present engagement in the world. The paper discusses the results of the first testing of the game, in relation to the forementioned 3 types of narratives. By this the paper tries to add important aspects to present discussions about what role education can play in facilitating a transformation to a life-friendly future society. How can education support young people’s future?

Scranton, R. (2015). Learning to die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the end of a civilization. City Lights Publishers. Nørreklit, L., & Paulsen, M. (2023). Life-friendly: who we are and who we want to be. Journal of Pragmatic Constructism, 13(1), 9-22 Oziewicz, M. (2022). Planetarianism now: On Anticipatory imagination, young people’s literature, and hope for the planet. In M. Paulsen et al. (Eds.) Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: Rewilding education for a new earth. Palgrave. Paulsen, M., jagodzinski, J., & Hawke, S. (2022). A Critical Introduction. In M. Paulsen, J. jagodzinski, & S. Hawke (red.), Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: Re-Wilding Education for a New Earth. Palgrave Macmillan. Rousell, D., & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A. (2022). Posthuman research playspaces: Climate child imaginaries. Taylor & Francis.

The Anthropocene is, among other things, an age of disentanglement, disenfranchisement, and of onto-epistemological isolation of the human from its surroundings. The polarization is manifest on multiple scales, to the point that we risk leaving young people feeling both hopelessly and helplessly alone against the troubles of our time. The importance of educating for the ability to not only tolerate, but to be active in both imagining and practicing acts of peaceful, mutually constitutive being-with (Haraway, 2008) cannot be understated. Experiences of interdependence and -connectedness is vital for human well-being, yet the paper also takes legitimate human experience of interdependency with nature as a necessary component of successful Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) (Lloro-Bidart & Banschbach, 2019). The aim of this presentation is to examine the potential of meetings between human learners and the more-than-human as part of ESE. More specifically, the paper discusses such meetings in ESE when structured as didactical perspective-taking, building on the critique of reductionism in perspective-taking by Iris Marion Young (1997) as part of the larger discussion on representations of nature in ESE. Importantly, if ESE is to be made to be an eco-democratic endeavour, then the question of the place and representation of the more-than-human becomes paramount (Vetlesen, 2023). While some degree of reduction in education is unavoidable, the paper contends that a less isolated, ahierarchal, interdependent awareness of “nature” in all its forms both is and can be represented in education. Following this, the paper argues for both the possibility and the necessity of respectful reduction as an approach when taking the perspective of more-than-human Others. Here it is suggested that the value of such respectful boundary-crossings between human and more-than-human may supersede the lack of perfect representation, given the potential of revealing previously unsensed entanglements and relationships. The paper further proposes didactical more-than-human perspective-taking as an avenue for of engendering ‘receptive-responsiveness’ to nature as described by Bonnett (2012). Childrens’ meetings with more-than-human Other perspectives may thus serve as an opportunity to broaden conceptions of whom and what to acknowledge as morally relevant, opening for imagining alternative ways for young people to envision their futures. The theoretical discussion will be contextualised with preliminary findings from ongoing empirical research on more-than-human perspective-taking practices in Norwegian secondary education.

Bonnett, M. (2012). Environmental concern, moral education and our place in nature. Journal of Moral Education, 41(3), 285-300. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2012.691643 Gehlbach, H., & Mu, N. (2023). How We Understand Others: A Theory of How Social Perspective Taking Unfolds. Review of General Psychology, 27(3), 282-302. https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680231152595 Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press. Leopold, A. (1949). The Land Ethic. In A Sand County Almanac. Penguin Classics. (Reprinted from 2020) Lloro-Bidart, T., & Banschbach, V. S. (2019). Introduction to Animals in Environmental Education: Whither Interdisciplinarity? In Animals in Environmental Education (pp. 1-16). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98479-7_1 Vetlesen, A. J. (2023). Animal lives and why they matter. Routledge. Young, I. M. (1997). Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder and Enlarged Thought. Constellations, 3(3), 340-363. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.1997.tb00064.x

Climate change is becoming one of the most pressing issues in the social sciences, because the certainty that the future is open and moldable is challenged deeply. Thus, social institutions especially in education are called upon to find new answers to these uncertainties.

In natural sciences, this insecurities were processed through developing the term “Anthropocene”(Crutzen 2002), the “geological age of humans” (Yusoff & Gabrys 2011). This conceptual vehicle is being used to describe how specific natural events (like floodings or forest fires), global warming and its aftermath (like the loss of biodiversity) are intertwined with human activity on earth (Wallenhorst 2023). It has served for conveying the concerns of scientific communities about the fragility of the Earth's habitability, e.g. by identifying tipping points (Rockström et al., 2023). In social sciences, scholars have highlighted the importance of the cultural, social, discursive and political implications of climate change. In this context, we expect the focus on shifting notions of time and space as particularly insightful, as the following arguments have received little educational attention to date:

For the Anthropocene, it was found that an "end-of-the-world" narrative is common in scientific discourse (Dürbeck 2018). This narrative conveys the impression that "our" world will soon come to an end and must be saved. Rooted in a dominant Western understanding of Modern Science, this perspective was firstly criticized in terms of its underlying anthropocentric understanding, which re-actualizes the category “man” and his fantasies of omnipotence over nature. The idea of an educated human subject who rewins control over nature through positive knowledge that brings adequate technical solutions was heartedly taken up also in the field of education, e.g. in theories of sustainable development. Hence, as suggested by feminist and post-human theories (Haraway 2015; McKagen 2018; Taylor & Hughes 2016), there is a need for spatial concepts that de-centralize the human and the notion of a “man” who finds solutions for global problems, putting forward the entanglement of human and non-human beings with nature instead.

Secondly, postcolonial, Black and indigenous interrogations of the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2022; Mitchell & Chaudhury 2020; Yusoff 2018) have shown that the perceptibility of climate change has long been part of the present for certain groups of people around the world, who already have been dealing with natural events for some time. In fact, not everyone is equally affected by the consequences of climate change. Rather, social inequalities are perpetuated and consolidated here, particularly affecting people living in the so-called global south and especially children, women and people of color. This notion challenges the end-of-the-world-narrative mentioned above, which suggests that climate change is “suddenly” happening or in the near future yet to come. Hence, dealing with climate change is not urgent because it is increasingly noticeable for people who live in Europe, but because it has been shaping lives all over the world for many years.

As a consequence, there is a need for analytical tools of future-making in education in order to develop notions of hope and creativity instead of apathy. In the symposium, we therefore ask: How can we conceptualize educational spaces in a way that integrates humans, non-humans and nature instead of hierarchizing man over nature? How can climate change be understood as a present and everyday phenomenon that shapes very distinct narratives, educational pathways, spaces and futures?

Objectives: With reference to the concept of the Anthropocene, this paper inquires into the methodological foundations of investigating a decentered understanding of the subject. The attempt to overcome the binary logic of culture/society and nature inevitably leads to a paradox. On the one hand, human beings are part of nature, and on the other, science is a prototypical expression of the mastery of nature and - as is very evident in educational science - of the centering of the subject. In other words: Although the findings of the Enlightenment can be relativised, e.g. post-colonially, they are also achieved with Eurocentric methods (Spivak; Chakrabarty 2022). Theoretical framework: Two theoretical concepts can be used to address the paradox of a critique of the Enlightenment and the simultaneous use of 'enlightened' and enlightening methods to discuss educational processes. The first concept is relational spatial theory (Löw 2001; Hummrich & Engel 2023), which, by focusing on the interrelationship of positioning and contexts, makes it possible to approach knowledge structures about educational processes that lie beyond universalistic understandings. The second concept refers to the importance of relational heuristics, in which structures and positions are considered as a multi-level system (Hummrich 2024). In both, the spatio-temporal positioning of research objects becomes clear. Methodology: On the basis of selected reconstructive methods, the paper develops an understanding of epistemic violence and the capacity for reflection that is prototypically inscribed in qualitative research. This is because qualitative research has a long tradition of reflecting on the positioning of science, which can also provide meaningful impulses for research on educational processes in the Anthropocene. Data sources: The data sources come from two research projects in which structures of the production of postcolonial order were reconstructed (e.g. interviews, group discussions, observations). They provide exemplary insights into the production of positioning in educational processes and into the traces of epistemic violence. Results: The results of this discussion should contribute to a qualitative understanding of relational spatial orders in the production of science and scientificity. In doing so, the role of postcolonial critique is juxtaposed with a critical understanding of the dialectic of enlightenment, which on the one hand enables insights into the here and now of the production of subjectivity and sociality, and on the other hand discusses the necessity of systematic reflection on insights and their context of origin.

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Objectives: This research is based on the observation that scientific knowledge about the bioclimatic context is insufficiently central to the public debate, which is saturated by different types of political narrative that regularly have nothing to do with the facts. We have produced a typology of political narratives in the Anthropocene epoch. The purpose of this typology is to help people make political judgements and to distinguish between facts (accessed through the mediation of scientific knowledge) and narratives (most of which are ineffective in containing the bioclimatic runaway of the Earth system). This is a major challenge for education. Theoretical framework: The underlying theoretical framework is the new geological epoch we are entering, the Anthropocene, characterised by a lasting change in the conditions of habitability of the Earth for all living organisms and for human life in society. We are mobilising both biogeophysical and socio-political knowledge of the Anthropocene to produce an effective interpretative framework for reality. Methodology: To assess these new narratives in terms of what they contribute to the human adventure or what they plan to do with it, we will use two analytical criteria. The first is scientific, based on current environmental knowledge. Our guide will be the scientific state of play on the planet, i.e. the research that has led to an international scientific consensus. The second criterion is political: we will focus on what deepens democracy rather than what weakens it. We will examine the political threat posed by the current environmental context. Data sources: 300 documentary sources were categorised and analysed in an attempt to identify the six major political narratives of the Anthropocene. Results: A deciphering of the six political narratives of the present day, which provide a possible breeding ground for de-democratic failure and/or ecological failure: the false narrative, according to which we are not sure that climate change is man-made; the Chinese narrative, according to which the end justifies the means; the Californian narrative, which holds out the prospect of techno-scientific salvation; the carefree-but-not-so-carefree narrative, which bases global change on each citizen's conversion to ecology; the perverse narrative, which wants to make everything fit at once; the alternative narrative, which postulates that only a democratic radicalism will enable us to live together on Earth.

Dalby, S. (2016). Framing the Anthropocene: the good, the bad and the ugly. The Anthropocene Review, 3(1), pp. 33-51. McCarthy, F. M. G. et al. (2023). The varved succession of Crawford Lake, Milton, Ontario, Canada as a candidate Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene series. The Anthropocene Review, 10(1) 146-176. Mychajliw, A. M., Kemp, M. E., & Hadly, E. A. (2015). Using the Anthropocene as a teaching, communication and community engagement opportunity. The Anthropocene Review, 2(3), 267-278. Rockström, J. et al. (2023). Safe and just Earth system boundaries. Nature, 619, 102-111. Steffen, W. et al. (2018). Trajectories of the earth system in the Anthropocene, PNAS, 115 (33) 8252-8259. Wallenhorst, N. (2022). Qui sauvera la planète ? Les technocrates, les autocrates ou les démocrates… Actes Sud. Wallenhorst, N. (2023). A Critical Theory for the Anthropocene. Springer-Nature. Wallenhorst, N., Wulf, C. (2023). Handbook of the Anthropocene. Springer-Nature. Zalasiewicz, J. et al. (2014). When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. Quaternary international, n°30, pp. 1-8. Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Haywood, A., Elis, M. (2011). The Anthropocene: A new epoch of geological time? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, n°369, pp. 835-841.

Objectives: While climate change research often prioritizes the present, recent efforts within Educational Sciences have highlighted the crucial link between different temporalities, social positionings and future visions (Kumpulainen et al., 2023; Spyrou et al., 2021). We argue that the prevalent discursive framings of climate futures lack spatio-temporal and ecological diversity insofar as they silence voices not included in the hegemonic frame of white, western representation (Whyte 2018). This challenges educational science to open up to such marginalized narratives, positionings as well as concepts of time (Facer 2023). Hence, our objective is to investigate alternative imaginations of climate futures (Yusoff & Gabrys 2011) by observing visual data created by marginalized young people. Theoretical Framework: Our considerations are rooted in feminist, postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the Anthropocene and climate change (Haraway 2015; Whyte 2018) and hegemonic time concepts (Facer 2023). Importantly, this perspective moves beyond existing narratives of skepticism and denial and instead advocates for a shift towards fostering creative agency and imagination for a transformative and sustainable future through education (Mitchell & Chaudhury 2020). Methodology & Data Sources: In our qualitative analysis, we use the methodological concepts of imagination and temporalities (Facer 2023; Yusoff & Gabrys 2011) to unveil alternative ideas about the future. This methodology also emphasizes the importance of embracing the emic knowledges and imaginations. The pictures and texts we analyze stem from the public media discourse on climate change. In our analysis of discourse in visual data (Traue 2013), we focus particularly on the construction of temporalities, generations and human-nature-relationships in climate future visions (Facer 2023; Leccardi, 2021). Results: Overall, the paper contributes to the theoretical and methodological debate on integrating non-hegemonical, alternative future perspectives and imaginations into our educational frameworks. The paper unveils how hope and critique disrupt dominant end-of the-world-narratives and offers insights into shifting concepts of time and their potential for educational research.

Facer, K. (2023). Possibility and the temporal imagination. Possibility Studies & Society, 1(1-2), 60-66. Haraway, D.J. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159-165. Kumpulainen, K., Wong, C.-C., Byman, J., Renlund, J., & Vadeboncoeur, J. A. (2023). Fostering children’s ecological imagination with augmented storying. The Journal of Environmental Education, 54(1), 33–45. Mitchell, A., & Chaudhury, A. (2020). Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the world’: White apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms. International Relations, 34(3), 309-332. Spyrou, S., Theodorou, E., & Christou, G. (2021). Crafting futures with hope: Young climate activists’ imaginaries in an age of crisis and uncertainty. Children & Society, 36(5), 731–746. Traue B. (2013). Visuelle Diskursanalyse. Ein programmatischer Vorschlag zur Untersuchung von Sicht- und Sagbarkeiten im Medienwandel [Visual discourse analysis. A programmatic suggestion for the study of visibilities and sayabilities]. Zeitschrift Für Diskursforschung 1, 117-136. Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning: Nature and Space, 1(1–2), 224–242. Yusoff, K., & Gabrys, J. (2011). Climate change and the imagination. WIREs Climate Change, 2(4), 516–534.

Objective: In recent years, the ‘Anthropocene’ has become a gathering term to address constitutive concerns regarding Earth system epochal change across a complex and entangled web of material, philosophical, scientific, ethical, and political significances. At the same time, children of the Anthropocene remain relative marginalized from ongoing discussions. Importantly, there is little recognition of children’s perspectives or capacity to be agents of change and future-making, apart from activist youth. This study responds to this research gap by investigating educational approaches that position children into the roles of investigators, authors, and change agents rather than mere receivers of adult information and advice about the Anthropocene. It does so by focusing on time-space narratives of children’s ecological imagination through a novel mobile augmented story-crafting method (Kumpulainen et al., 2023). Theoretical framework: Our inquiry is grounded on posthuman scholarship informed by ‘common worlds’ (Haraway, 2008, 2016), new materialism (Barad, 2003, 2007), and nomadic philosophies (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987). Posthuman theorizing helps us generate knowledge on how children of the Anthropocene narrate their relations with the human and more-than-human world across time and space and the performative power of these narratives. Methodology: Our methodological choices draw on post-qualitative approaches that allow us to attend to the time-space contexts of children’s ecological imagination through the mutual becoming of materialities, bodies, and atmospheres. Post-qualitative methodologies offer us creative means to study complex relational entanglements of human and nonhuman encounters shedding light on the contextual processes, events, and relationships (Byman, et al., 2023; Kumpulainen, et al., 2023; Renlund, et al., 2023). Data sources: Our inquiry draws on empirical research material generated together with children (aged 7 to 9 years old) and their teachers in a Finnish elementary school by means of videos, observational field notes, children’s narrations of their stories, interviews, and children’s story artefacts. Discussion: Our research results evidence the children’s narratives attuning into complex relational entanglements of affective, embodied, sensual, symbolic, and moral intensities of the Anthropocene that also question human exceptionalism. The narratives were entangled with the children’s past experiences and cultural knowledge, ongoing involvement and yet-to-accomplished goals, as well as hopes, worries and concerns. The children imagined possible futures that called for change and action, demonstrating relational agency and care. In all, our research provides insights into the importance of recognizing children of the Anthropocene as important stakeholders whose perspectives can enrich our relational imagining and acting for the future of the planet.

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Byman, J., Kumpulainen, K., Renlund, J., Wong, C.-C., & Renshaw, P. (2023). Speculative spaces: Children exploring socio-ecological worlds with mythical nature spirits. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Deleuze G. & Guattari F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press. Haraway D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Kumpulainen, K., Wong, C.-C., Byman, J., Renlund, J., & Vadeboncoeur, J. A. (2023). Fostering children’s ecological imagination with augmented storying. The Journal of Environmental Education, 54(1), 33-45. Kumpulainen, K., Byman, J. Renlund, J., & Wong, C. C. (2023). Dialogic learning with the ‘more-than-human world’: Insights from posthuman theorising. In C. Damşa, A. Rajala, G. Ritella, & J. Brouwer (Eds.), Re-theorizing learning and research methods in learning research (pp. 47-64). Routledge. Renlund, J., Kumpulainen, K., Byman, J and Wong, C.-C. (2023). Rhizomatic patchworks: A postqualitative inquiry into the aesthetics of child-environment relations. Digital Culture & Education, 14(5)

The symposium centers on how Young people imagine the future and what it implies for their present dealing with contemporary life in an age of environmental disaster. Through taking outset in students’ perspectives, the symposium seeks to nuance the understanding of student’s relation and imagination of themselves in relation to or as part of a sustainable future. Further it deals with what can be done educationally to support cultivation of young people’s future expectations in constructive ways, for instance through playful classrooms and/or other kinds of research and educational playspaces (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2022) and/or more flourishing in our schools and the use of outdoor spaces. Central questions are: To what extend and how is it possible and desirable to support young people to foster hope and/or positive imaginations about the future? To what extend and how is it possible and desirable so educate young people of today to become eco-democratic citizens and creators of a life-friendly society of tomorrow? To what extend is such aims and democratic education in need of becoming rethought in connection with eco-democracy? (Lundmark, 1998; Pickering et. al, 2020). Thus, prepare the young generation to support and achieve diverse, democratic social, and ecologically just sustainable societies – living within the Earth's carrying capacity – eco-democracy might be an important perspective helpful to think of and understanding educational change, but also enacting change in educational practice supporting living and learning democracy, young people's contemporary and imaginary future. The papers present different angles on this. The aim of the symposium is therefore to bring the papers into a shared conversation about educational research that focuses on young people, their perspectives, and how to respond educationally to the challanges of growing up on a damaged planet, in an ecologically unsustainable society, where many, not least young people dream of something better, yet risk becoming depressed, apathetic or anxious about the future, in the Anthropocene age we now live in (Paulsen, et. al. 2022).

Defining love from an ecological rather than anthropocentric perspective may facilitate the interspecies collaborations and relational epistemologies needed to face and address the Anthropocene. Definitions of love in the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, science, and theology almost always centralize human experiences of love. In doing so, they reinforce environmentally-problematic assumptions of human exceptionalism and isolation. In Western countries, scholars note that younger generations increasingly experience love as a selfish, anxiety-ridden, depressive, narcissistic, cynical, and consumeristic phenomena. Along with increased human suffering, contemporary experiences of love are linked to unecological behaviour, such as heightened consumerism, reduced empathy, and potentially reduced morality. This crisis in love and belonging walks hand-in-hand with critical environmental crises. Hope for both could be found, in part, by enabling young people to understand and begin to experience, what I call, eco-love. Eco-love, as a perspective, takes the stance that the world is fundamentally loving, that despite danger, suffering, evil, and other contrasts to love, a radiance of light and love runs through everything, whether newts, aspen trees, stars, or starfish. Eco-love may result in actions that can be viewed as loving, such as communities of trees that feed and protect their young, but it is not defined by actions. From an eco-love perspective, water, trees, insects, soil, and sunlight are oriented toward supporting planetary wellbeing, including human wellbeing. The Beech Trees near my home, for example, offer neighbouring humans care, commitment, protection, and promote physical and mental wellbeing, while also attracting humans with beauty, comfort, and sensual pleasure. The park itself is evidence of complex, enduring, and mutual bonds between humans and trees. Eco-love overlaps with but is broader than the gift worldview articulated by Robin Wall Kimmerer and others. Educational experiences that work to foster bonding, intimacy, companionship, and other elements of love between humans and their more-than-human kin have potential to ease the crises of both. Furthermore, interspecies eco-love appears to expand ways of knowing in intriguing and provocative ways. For example, the growing practice of intuitive interspecies communication appears to be enabled by eco-love and is now being used to collaborate with more-than-humans in veterinary clinics, on farms, in wildlife sanctuaries, and in developing government land practices. Comprehending eco-love enables epistemologies, collaborations, and healing that may be otherwise inaccessible.

Gerhardt, S. (2010). The selfish society. London: Simon & Schuster. Han, B-C. (2017). The agony of Eros. MIT. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions. Kuchta, E. C. (2022). The epistemological possibilities of love: Relearning the love of land. Pedagogy in the Anthropocene. Eds. M. Paulsen, J. Jagodzinski, & S. H. Mackenzie, S. H. Palgrave. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-90980-2 Kuchta, E. C. (2023). Knowing the unknowable; Visions of troubled lands. Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 6. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.25035/jche.01.01.06 Kuo, M. (2015). How might contact with nature promote human health? Promising mechanisms and a possible central pathway. Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1093, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01093. Kuokunannen, R. (2008). Reshaping the university: Responsibility, Indigenous epistemes, and the logic of the gift. UBC Press. https://www.ubcpress.ca/reshaping-the-university Lewis, T., Amini, F., & Lannon, R. (2000). A General Theory of Love. Vintage. Martin, A. M. (2019). The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy (1st edition.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315645209 Narvaez, D. (2024). Returning to evolved nestedness, wellbeing, and mature human nature, an ecological imperative. Review of General Psychology. Jan. 2024 Vol. 0(0) pp. 1-23. DOI: 10.1177/10892680231224035 Oord, J. T. (2010). Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement. Brazos Press.

The aim of this presentation is to explore how Forest School (FS), as experienced by the staff of one Irish primary school, offers a pedagogical path to move from policy framework to pedagogical practice, towards flourishing for all. Irish education policy (Department of Education, 2023) sets out a vision of flourishing school communities, predicated upon progressive pedagogy and democratic, inclusive, playful classrooms. This vision is embedded within our Education for Sustainable development strategy (ESD to 2030) (Government of Ireland, 2022), the goal of which is to build a more just and sustainable world through five priority actions across the education system. However, enacting this vision in our classrooms remains a challenge. In Ireland, nature as a learning environment remains peripheral and undervalued (Kilkelly et al., 2016), despite compelling international evidence of the benefits of spending time with(in) nature as part of formal education (Kuo et al., 2019; UNESCO, 2015) and the knowledge that human flourishing is inextricably linked with the Earth’s living systems (The Care Collective, 2020; UNESCO, 2015). Successful implementation of the policy framework requires a review the primacy of the indoor classroom, as the normative site of learning in our schools (Waite, 2013) towards a view local nature as an equally valued learning environment and co-teaching partner (Blenkinsop & Beeman, 2010; Jickling et al., 2018). FS, a progressive nature-based pedagogy premised on the idea that flourishing must comprise mutually reciprocal benefit for all sentient beings offers possibilities toward meeting this challenge, based on the findings of a study of seven staff who participated in FS in one Dublin school. FS is about a group of learners and teachers spending one day a week across the seasons in a local woodland or park, during formal schooling. Learning is integrated with curriculum requirements and protocols to ensure safe experiential learning with(in) nature are provided. (IFSA, n.d.; Harding, 2021). Data comprised focus groups, staff review meetings, and reflection sheets, collected over 22 FS sessions during 2019-2020. Inductive thematic analysis sets out how FS promoted connection to nature; offered a distinctive space for social and emotional development, employed novel pedagogical routines and enabled a broader expression of teacher identity. These findings were facilitated by being with(in) nature and a collaborative culture that included the FSL. FS offers a novel and accessible pedagogy which enables public policy to be enacted, towards flourishing in our schools.

Blenkinsop, S., & Beeman, C. (2010). The world as co-teacher: Learning to work with a peerless colleague. Trumpeter, 26(3), 26–39. Department of Education (2023) Primary Curriculum Framework . 2023-Primary-Framework-ENG-screen.pdf (curriculumonline.ie) Government of Ireland (2022) ESD to 2030. gov.ie - National Strategy on Education for Sustainable Development in Ireland (www.gov.ie) Harding, N. (Ed.). (2021). Growing a Forest School. Carlisle: Forest School Association. IFSA. (n.d.). www.irishforestschoolassociation.ie (accessed 16 January 2021). Jickling, B., Blenkinsop, S., Timmerman, N., & Sitka-Sage, M. (2018). (Eds.). Wild pedagogies. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Kilkelly, U., Lynch, H., Moore, A., O'Connell, A., & Field, S. (2016). Children and the outdoors: Contact with the outdoors and natural heritage among children aged 5 to 12: current trends, benefits, barriers and research requirements. The Heritage Council. Kuo, M., Barnes, M., & Jordan, C. (2019). Do experiences with nature promote learning? Converging evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 305.1-9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00305 The Care Collective. (2020). The care manifesto. Verso. UNESCO. (2015). Rethinking education: Towards a global common good? UNESCO Publishing. Retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/news/rethinking-education-towards-global-common-good Waite, S. (2013). Knowing your place in the world: how place and culture support and obstruct educational aims. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(4), 413-433. https://doi-org.dcu.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/0305764X.2013.792787

The ecological and social crises we face, and a need for Eco-Social-Cultural-change toward living in an ecologically and socially just society are intriguing questions for education (Blenkinsop and Fettes, 2023). In this paper, I set up a discussion about if, then what, and how the concept and meaning of eco-democracy might contribute for, in and through education, and implications that it might have for future research. If the purpose of education is to prepare the younger generation to support diverse, democratic, social, and ecologically just and sustainable societies then eco-democracy might be an important conversation for educational change, including questions of change in educational practices supporting uncertain tomorrows, young people's contemporary and imaginary future. The question is: What could eco-democracy mean for how to think about and enact public education whilst working towards an ecologically sustainable and just society where all living beings can flourish? The discussion builds on assumptions that to enact change education needs to be transformed (Jickling, et al, 2018; Paulsen, 2022). If considering the well-being of the whole community, more-than-humans included, and the right of mutually beneficial flourishing, the question that democracy seeks to answer -- how we should live together? - has to be re-thought. Accepting an ecocentric worldview has implications for democratic values such as participating, having a voice, liberty (freedom), and equality (Lundmark, 1998). The idea of a space for change and adaptation to new problem situations, the need for stabilizing forces, and rules necessary in democratic processes, as well as tools that make it possible to evaluate (Petersson, 1999) must then also include the more- than-human. To elucidate and explore eco-democracy for, in, and with education I draw on philosophical and theoretical work such as Bateson, 2000; Shiva, 2005; Macy, 2021; Martusewicz, 2020; Pickering et. al 2020; and put them in conversation with how (eco) democracy emerges in educational research focusing on environmental crises. Preliminary findings through a literature review are that democracy is mentioned in the context of more ecocentric worldviews but seems to be loosely defined. Eco-democratic education as such is seldom explicitly mentioned, nor is fostering eco-democratic citizens or enacting eco-democracy in teaching practice.There appears to be work to be done to re-think axiological, ontological, and epistemological assumptions that educational that will push the boundaries of education in search of an eco-democracy (Orr, 2020; Payne and Hart, 2020).

Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press. Fettes, M & Blenkinsop, S. (2023). Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-Cultural Change. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. Jickling, B., Blenkinsop, S., Timmerman, N., & Sitka-Sage, M. (2018). (Eds.). Wild pedagogies.Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Lundmark, C. (1998). Eco-democracy: A green challenge to democratic theory and practice (thesis). Umeå: Umeå University. Martusewicz, R.A., Edmundson, J. & Lupinacci, J. (2020). Ecojustice education: toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities. (Third edition.) London: Routledge. Macy, J. (2021). World as lover, world as self. Parallax Press. Orr, D.W.(2020) Democracy and the (missing) politics in environmental education, The Journal of Environmental Education, 51(4), 270-279, Payne, P. G. & Hart, P. (2020) Environmental education, democracy, Thunberg, and XR, The Journal of Environmental Education, 51(4), 263-269, Paulsen, M., jagodzinski, J. & Hawke, S. (2022) (red.), Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: Re-Wilding Education for a New Earth. Palgrave Macmillan. Petersson, O. (1999). Samhällskonsten. Stockholm: SNS Förlag Pickering, J., Bäckstrand, K. & Schlosberg, D. (2020) Between environmental and ecological democracy: theory and practice at the democracy environment nexus, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 22(1), 1-15, Shiva, V. (2005). Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. South End Press.