Conference Agenda

Climate change is a central driver in the current era of poly-crisis. Despite widespread awareness and scientific consensus (Lee et al., 2015), effective climate action remains insufficient (Finnish Environmental Institute, 2024). Thus, there exists knowledge-action gap related to climate change (Kirsten, 2025). This gap is shaped by structural factors (Middlemiss, 2018), systemic barriers (Markard et al., 2012) as well as psychological obstacles (Gifford, 2011). We focus on citizens’ psychological involvement with climate change and sustainability. We define this involvement to include individuals’ understanding, sense of responsibility and efficacy, resources, everyday challenges, personal contribution, alignment of actions with personal values, and whether they feel heard in societal discussions related to climate change. We view this involvement as a prerequisite for active environmental citizenship and agency, which are key aims of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE).

Climate concern and action are also gendered, as prior research has consistently shown that women express greater concern about climate change than men, especially in industrialized Western contexts (Davidson & Freudenburg, 1996; Echavarren, 2023) and engage more frequently in pro-environmental behaviors (Desrochers & Zelenski, 2023). However, gender has usually been usually treated as a single, uniform predictor of environmental concern with a focus on mean level differences (e.g. McCright & Dunlap, 2011). This approach may overlook variation in genders. Previous research suggests that, for example, conservative white men differ drastically from other men in their climate views (McCright & Dunlap, 2011). Additionally, psychological research indicates that men exhibit more psychological variation for example in certain personality traits and economical preferences (Borkenau et al., 2013; Thöni et al., 2021; Thöni & Volk, 2021). This provides reason to suspect more variation regarding climate views. In the public discussions there is a worry of widening gender gap among young men and women in their political ideologies (e.g. Burn-Murdoch, 2024), and some research suggests that young men are increasingly identifying with right-wing ideology and women with left-wing ideology (Milosav, 2026), while other studies find this effect to be small-to-medium at large and heavily culture-dependent (Nennstiel & Hudde, 2025). Because right-wing and conservative values are linked to lower levels of climate concern (McCright & Dunlap, 2011), we analyze whether a wider gap in psychological involvement exists among younger people.

Thus, we investigate the following questions: How do Finnish citizens perceive and evaluate their psychological involvement with climate change and sustainability? Are there gendered differences in psychological involvement? Do genders differ with their variation in psychological involvement? Does the connection between psychological involvement and gender remain after controlling for other background variables? Are gendered differences more pronounced among younger people? These questions are important for ESE as they shift focus from a knowledge-based approach toward understanding the complexity of psychological involvement. This challenges ESE to develop more nuanced and inclusive pedagogical strategies that can foster agency even among those currently disengaged.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has accelerated technological innovation across societies; however, global environmental, economic, and social challenges continue to intensify. In response, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, introducing 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. Education (SDG 4) plays a pivotal role in achieving these goals, as it equips learners with essential knowledge, values, and competencies necessary for sustainable development. Within this context, geography education holds a distinctive position due to its integrative focus on human–environment interactions, enabling the development of sustainability literacy, global citizenship, and responsible decision-making.

Internationally, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been recognised as a transformative educational paradigm that promotes critical thinking, systems thinking, collaboration, and ethical reasoning (UNESCO, 2017). Geography, as a bridging discipline between natural and social sciences, has increasingly been positioned as a core subject for embedding ESD principles into secondary education curricula. Across Europe and beyond, curriculum reforms in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and South Korea demonstrate varied approaches to integrating SDGs into geography education through inquiry-based learning, project-based activities, case studies, and interdisciplinary teaching (Kim & Lee, 2020; Xuan & Lindqvist, 2025).

In Kazakhstan, Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) implement a competency-based curriculum aligned with national development priorities and international educational trends, as articulated in the NIS Strategy–2035. The geography curriculum aims to foster critical thinking, research skills, environmental awareness, and global civic responsibility. Despite these intentions, the extent to which the Sustainable Development Goals are systematically and coherently integrated into the geography curriculum remains underexplored.

This study addresses this gap by examining the alignment between the Grade 9 NIS Geography curriculum and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The central research question guiding this study is:
To what extent does the Grade 9 geography curriculum align with the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of the Sustainable Development Goals?

The study pursues four research objectives:

1. to assess the level of SDG integration within the Grade 9 geography curriculum;

2. to identify which curriculum themes and learning objectives are linked to specific SDGs;

3. to evaluate the balance between environmental, social, and economic sustainability dimensions;

4. to identify curricular gaps and pedagogical limitations and propose directions for strengthening SDG integration.

The conceptual framework of this research is grounded in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and curriculum alignment theory. Drawing on UNESCO’s ESD framework, the study conceptualises sustainability learning as the development of key competencies, including critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, ethical decision-making, and self-awareness. In addition, curriculum alignment is examined through four analytical criteria: relevance, explicitness, balance, and pedagogy. This framework enables a systematic evaluation of how sustainability concepts are represented, emphasised, and operationalised within curriculum documents.

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative directed content analysis approach. Primary data consist of official Grade 9 geography curriculum documents, supported by secondary sources including the UN 2030 Agenda and UNESCO ESD policy frameworks. Curriculum learning objectives and themes are mapped against SDGs and categorised into environmental, social, and economic domains. This approach allows for both structured comparison and interpretive analysis.

From an international perspective, the study contributes to comparative curriculum research by providing insights from a Central Asian educational context that remains underrepresented in ESD literature. By situating the Kazakhstani geography curriculum alongside international curriculum trends, the research offers transferable analytical tools for examining SDG alignment in secondary education systems across Europe and beyond. The findings aim to inform curriculum developers, policymakers, and geography educators seeking to strengthen sustainability education through curriculum design rather than isolated classroom interventions.

This action research is part of the initial training of primary school teachers at the Haute école pédagogique du canton de Vaud in Switzerland, and more specifically within the framework of an intercultural exchange module (PEERS) between Switzerland and Italy (University of Bologna). Through the understanding of comparative education systems and the discovery of otherness, these PEERS projects, which involve a dozen Swiss and Italian students each year, aim to develop the mobility capital of future teachers in training in order to make it operational in the classroom. The main educational theme is the issue of including student diversity.

Students involved in these projects are encouraged to take a meta-perspective on their somatic experience of moving through space by keeping a travel journal, a kind of reflective space. They start from their experience of otherness and transpose it into their professional actions and identity construction as future teachers. This experience of spatial mobility, recounted through biographical writing, is then reworked in the form of a final report upon their return from their trip. This allows them to reflect on the transformations that have taken place in their professional stance. It is therefore a somato-reflexive approach (Eddy, 2016) since corporeality is strongly involved in this tertiary education program as well as the reflexivity that reflects this, through the students' logbooks.

We will focus on the spatial nature of this professionalization program, considered as a learning environment that is enriched by the multiplicity of experiences according to mechanisms of reflexivity and interaction with the places visited. It is a training space that opens up a potential space for the development of the individual's abilities and skills. This program strongly mobilizes the sensory experience lived through the students' bodies as they confront otherness. The students are led to become more attentive and aware of their bodily perceptions in space, due to the highly immersive nature of their experience in an environment that is different from their everyday lives. This phenomenological experience of the self (Merleau-Ponty, 1976) in a specific place (space) and at a specific time (time) is made visible in the reflective writings they are asked to produce upon their return to Switzerland. The body has always been shaped and socialized by the culture in which it exists. We will observe a training situation where physicality is used to aid learning. We propose to observe how the use of the sensory and embodied experience of moving through space can serve as a tool for learning, development, and professionalization for future teachers.

In this research, we will therefore observe how a formative space can become “transformative” (Meziani, 2021). We will see how a reflective space that is created and structured will interact with an existing space: a traversed territory (the city of Bologna), a kind of immersive urban terrain. The confrontation between these two spaces will possibly give rise to a utopian space (Foucault, 1984) or at least intermediate spaces, or even a highly educational and emancipatory co-spatiality.

In environmental and sustainability education, the arts are increasingly understood as pedagogical practices that foster sensory, emotional, and participatory engagement with ecological issues. Artistic processes support experiential and inquiry-oriented learning, enabling embodied and relational encounters with environmental phenomena. From this perspective, learning is not limited to cognitive understanding but involves affective, material, and sensory dimensions that shape how learners relate to their environments.

In parallel, collaboration between artists and scientists has expanded markedly since the 1990s, inspiring inter- and transdisciplinary approaches that increasingly inform educational practice. Material-based practices play a central role in such art–science collaborations, offering concrete ways to explore ecological processes and phenomena. In European Arctic contexts, where many communities live in close relationship with their natural environments, artists and educators frequently work with locally sourced materials that carry ecological and cultural significance. These practices support situated, relational, and place-responsive forms of learning that are particularly relevant to sustainability education. In Finland, the national core curriculum encourages multidisciplinary learning and phenomenon-based approaches, providing a strong foundation for integrating visual arts into environmental science education while maintaining the integrity of both disciplines.

This study examines interdisciplinary art–science education in the European Arctic, focusing on how hands-on engagement with natural materials can support learning processes that integrate cognitive understanding with emotional and sensory engagement. The research asks: How do material-based art–science practices contribute to pupils’ meaning making in environmental education, and how are cognitive, emotional, and sensory dimensions of learning intertwined in these processes? The theoretical framework draws on experiential learning, embodied and relational pedagogy, and arts-based environmental education, with particular attention to material engagement and artistic symbolisation as pathways for learning.

Ecological crises challenge education to expand its orientation toward pro-environmental values and actions. In the context of poly-crisis—including climate change, biodiversity loss and inequality—education faces the need for profound cultural transformations toward ecologically responsible ways of living. This requires both theoretical and practical approaches that can initiate and mainstream cultural sustainability transitions.

This poster addresses these challenges by developing sociocultural animation into art-based eco-cultural animation. Sociocultural animation emphasizes participatory, relational, and community-oriented approaches, connecting artistic activity, learning, and social interaction within temporary or evolving communities. While such approaches have been applied internationally in urban contexts, in Northern Finland and the European Arctic they have been strongly integrated with community art, place-based art, and environmental art education, drawing on Arctic art traditions and environmental pedagogy.

Within this research and practice tradition, an eco-cultural sustainability orientation supports both cultural continuity and the conscious renewal of local ecocultures in response to ecological crises. This approach aligns with futures-oriented frameworks that connect present communities with sustainable cultural practices and long-term responsibility.

Research aim: To develop a theoretical framework for art-based eco-cultural animation in rural communities.

Research question: What ecological, cultural, artistic, and communal principles enable impactful art-based eco-cultural animation, particularly in rural communities?

Within Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) and further afield, there is growing recognition that responding to climate and sustainability challenges requires more than the transmission of knowledge. In line with both sustainability education and energy transition discourses that feed into European and international debates, we examine how participatory, relational (Sterling, 2001; 2025; Wals, 2022) and sensory practice-based (Pink & Leder-Mackley, 2015) approaches can support learners and communities to co-create pathways towards just and sustainable societies across both formal and non-formal educational settings.

This poster presentation synthesises two doctoral studies that incorporated visual methods to investigate and communicate lived experiences of sustainability transitions in formal education (a school-university partnership in Norway and within non-formal contexts (public and community settings) in Scotland. The doctoral studies bring together examples of visual elicitation, auto-photography, sustainability walks, visual timelines, and digital storytelling as means to develop participatory research concerning how sustainability is learned, felt, and acted upon.

The formal education strand, based in Norway, explores a school–university partnership co-developing professional learning practices in support of a whole school approach to sustainability-oriented education. The data includes photographic artefacts, co-developed professional learning activities that incorporate visual methods, visual timelines, digital stories (Mathie, 2024; Mathie et al., 2026), and a reflexive practice developed as part of the PhD involving the creation of visual artefacts grounded in artistic self‑expression (Mathie & Omholt, 2026).

The non-formal community strand, based in a rural Scottish island context, examines sustainability-oriented energy transitions and how residents and stakeholders live with and make sense of changing energy landscapes. Photography is employed as a central qualitative method through visual surveying, auto-photography, and photo-elicitation. Digital storytelling and co-curated multimedia exhibitions, in turn, are also utilised to communicate complex experiences to wider public audiences and policymakers (Davey, 2024; Davey 2025).

Conceptually, both studies are grounded in participatory and visual methodologies and share complementary emancipatory research aims to identify supportive mechanisms for addressing environmental and social challenges (Pink, 2013; 2022). We argue that the visual can play a central role in responding to the call for resistance pedagogy and transgressive learning (Wals, 2022). Drawing on Davis (2018) and Sand (2012), we see visuality as a lived, sensory engagement that reveals place-based values and tacit knowledge. Anchored in interpretive, critical phenomenological, and participatory traditions (Magrì & McQueen, 2022; Gubrium et al., 2016), this study values embodied, place-based knowledge and considers research and art as a continuum, including the use of exhibitions to legitimise non-propositional, affective, and relational knowing (Hawkins, 2020). By directly addressing the gap between knowing and doing (Pfeffer and Sutton, 2001), visual storytelling, in its various forms, fosters empathy and reflexivity, making research more inclusive and responsive to participants' perspectives, aiming to bridge top-down policy and theoretical framings with lived experience.

The poster presentation brings the two doctoral studies into dialogue and asks:

1. How can visual methods support sustainability education in formal and non-formal contexts?

2. Which design features of visual co‑production can foster reflexivity in support of active participation in sustainability transitions?

3. How can visual dissemination formats (exhibitions, films, publications) function as research and communicate participant experiences of sustainability transitions beyond academia?

Through retrospective collaborative autoethnographic inquiry (Poulos, 2021), experiences of visual participatory work across school, university, and community-based settings in Norway and Scotland are critiqued. The poster offers conceptual and practical insights into how visual methods can enrich ESE by creating spaces for participant-led meaning-making, dialogue, and collective action. We posit that visual methods and exhibition examples are relevant across European formal and non-formal education and can contribute to a broader European dialogue on the role of participatory education in sustainability transitions.

Following the first oil crisis in 1973, energy education has emerged as a distinct field of educational research, focusing mainly on energy educational policies, systems, industrial environment, and participation (Hu & Yang, 2024). Yet educational discussions often take energy demand for granted, paying limited attention to how school knowledge constructs and normalises particular understandings of human needs. As Canale (2022) notes, textbooks are complex and influential educational media. Existing textbook research on energy has examined aspects such as readability (Pambudi et al., 2024) and content scope (Castañeda-Garza & Valerio-Ureña, 2022). Many of these studies are guided by frameworks such as sustainability literacy, green literacy, eco-literacy (Dong et al., 2023), the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Lasekan et al., 2024), and energy literacy (DeWaters, 2011). While these approaches acknowledge the importance of human needs, such needs are often treated as self-evident background conditions rather than as objects of critical inquiry. Even in studies that explicitly address teaching energy system transformation through perspectives such as Earth literacy (Sven Linow, 2025), limited attention has been paid to how educational materials frame, prioritise, and normalise particular needs in relation to energy use.

This study focuses on human needs, drawing on frameworks that address the realities of contemporary society (Boss, 2025). Theories of human needs have long been discussed within economics and philosophy (Doyal & Gough, 1991). As energy underpins nearly all human activities, the global demand for energy has risen sharply alongside population growth (Abdalla et al., 2018). Building on the concept of Decent Living Standards (DLS) and referring to material prerequisites, Millward-Hopkins et al. (2020) quantified basic needs in terms of energy requirements. However, Petz (2025) critically questions such energy-based approaches and argues for integrating basic needs theory with a more reflective understanding of energy requirements (Millward-Hopkins et al., 2020). Drawing on this critique, this study adapts the seven challenges to energy-based approaches identified by Petz (2025) into three analytical dimensions, organized according to their distinct critical emphases: silence behind quantification (robustness, comprehensiveness, cultural appropriateness, and aggregation), suppression of agency by authority (paternalism and procedural justice, narrowing of policy space), and resourcism.

Rather than rejecting the concept of human needs, this study critically examines how needs become stabilised when translated into energy-based educational discourse. The purpose of this study is to examine how energy-related human needs are constructed in school science textbooks. Specifically, it analyses textual and visual representations of energy in sixth-grade science textbooks from Shanghai using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

The analysis reveals that energy-related human needs in these textbooks are framed as natural and inevitable, while underlying support systems, such as food supply, power supply, and fuel systems, are abstracted or omitted. These systems, which form the foundation of energy transportation and transformation, are largely invisible, and their associated energy costs are overlooked, representing "silence behind quantification". At the same time, energy crises are primarily attributed to limited resources rather than demand structures or social distribution. Furthermore, needs are implicitly framed through a business-oriented lens that positions responsibility for energy consumption with abstract “others” rather than with consumers themselves, reflecting both "suppression of agency by authority" and "resourcism".

In recent years, experiential learning using virtual reality technology (VR) has attracted attention in educational settings. VR can provide experiences that are difficult to implement in the real world when the activities involve danger or require considerable time and cost (Bailenson, 2018). One of the learning practices where VR could be useful is the field trip. Field trips can stimulate interest even among learners with no prior knowledge (Neher-Asylbekov and Wagner, 2023). At the same time, the cost of implementing field trips and the scheduling burdens have been identified as barriers (Behrendt and Franklin, 2014). These barriers can be addressed by using VR.
Pugsley et al. (2024) report a case study showing that VR field trips (VFTs) are more efficient than comparable physical field trips (PFTs) in terms of time, cost, and environmental impact, while achieving similar learning outcomes. McGivney (2025) notes that when VR is used for STEM education field trips, it fosters curiosity, fear, and enjoyment among high school students and encourages high levels of intrinsic motivation to learn in the VR environment. These findings suggest that VFTs can address time and cost constraints and provide high levels of intrinsic motivation and learning outcomes comparable to those of PFTs. Nevertheless, previous studies are limited to comparisons between VFTs and PFTs. No research, as the authors have surveyed, has compared VFT learning outcomes with those of people who engage daily in VFT-related activities. Because such people possess knowledge and practical understanding of the content, they can serve as an appropriate benchmark for assessing learning outcomes through VFTs.
Meanwhile, to realise a sustainable society, initiatives promoting a circular economy (CE) are being pursued worldwide. A CE is a sustainable economic model that minimises resource inputs, waste, emissions, and energy leakage through activities such as long-term product design, reuse, and recycling (United Nations, 2019). In Japan, since 2000, the law has mandated that businesses and consumers use reusable containers and reduce excessive packaging. As a CE initiative among businesses, Japanese retailers collect empty plastic bottles and food trays in stores. From a consumer perspective, efforts toward CE require establishing better consumption habits to promote resource conservation (Gallaud and Laperche, 2016). Tucho et al. (2024) have identified challenges in waste management practices for people from abroad, including neighborhood issues arising from gaps between practices in their countries of origin and their new homes, as well as language barriers to accessing information about waste management rules. This highlights a challenge related to the re-education of people from abroad, suggesting the need for inclusive, experiential learning approaches beyond language-dependent instruction. Given these considerations, CE initiatives can be achieved not only through school education; they require broader, community-wide learning that engages not only students but also the people around them, including parents and workers in CE-related businesses.
This study aims to clarify the learning outcomes of VFT with the topic of recycling and waste disposal in the CE. Because recycling and waste disposal involve employees, it is possible to compare these employees with general consumers who have experienced the VFT. First, as the pre-survey, baseline environmental awareness among employees (CE employees) of retail companies participating in CE initiatives is assessed. Second, environmental awareness among consumers after experiencing the VFT (VFT consumers) was measured using the same scale developed from the pre-survey.

As part of our observations and interviews exploring how being rooted in a supportive environment can support education about life and sustainability, we stayed and talked with the wider community of the Domaine du Possible, a french school located in Arles. Experiential and sensory learning are approached through the prism of complexity (Morin, 2014) in order to foster transdisciplinary teaching through fruitful connections between different areas of knowledge and the realization of creative projects. It is in this particular educational context, providing us with an original field of study, that we collected multiple testimonials in order to analyze the links between self-narrative and one's relationship to living things. In the context of the climate crisis, we will examine how the conditions for producing knowledge directly related to living things and the environment can generate knowledge that promotes and contributes to education for sustainability. This type of alternative and innovative educational context is a possible response to the poly-crisis as defined by Edgar Morin and Anne-Brigitte Kern (1999). It is also a proposal to root knowledge and learning in the territory and reality in order to escape from the digital world and the phenomenon of “off-the-ground” children.

Our presentation will address the conditions for collecting statements in a school context and how these statements provide valuable information in terms of the learning process, particularly regarding the meaning given to experiences related to the environment (Cottereau, 2025). We will observe how, through the experiences of students recounted in their own words, an ecological and environmentally conscious awareness emerges. The experience of parents will highlight the links between educational choices, ethical values, and everyday practices. The experiences of teachers will raise questions about their position, their role, and the pedagogical adaptations necessary to support the transmission of knowledge in this particular educational context. Indeed, it should be noted that the Domaine du Possible is part of a new pedagogy inspired by outdoor education and the whole school approach.

Proposal Information

Topic & Problem: As a practitioner teaching sustainability, I observed a persistent shortcoming: school carbon footprint projects often culminate in a number—a technical exercise that leaves students informed but disempowered. This "calculation trap" reflects a broader deficit in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD): an overemphasis on technical literacy at the expense of cultivating the civic agency needed for real-world change (Hadjichambis & Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, 2020). This study addresses this critical gap by challenging the standard project paradigm and testing a redesigned model that explicitly targets higher-order competencies.

Research Question: Our central question is: Does a civic-oriented Project-Based Learning (PBL) model, which integrates carbon auditing with systems analysis and democratic advocacy, lead to greater development of environmental citizenship attitudes and systems thinking skills in secondary school students compared to a traditional, calculation-focused carbon project?

Objective & Theoretical Framework: The primary objective was to design and rigorously evaluate an intervention that moves school sustainability education "beyond calculation." We aimed to transform a common activity into a transformative civic learning experience. The study is grounded in two powerful, complementary frameworks:

1. The European Model of Environmental Citizenship (EC): This framework (Hadjichambis & Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, 2020) defines the environmental citizen not merely as a responsible consumer, but as an active participant in democratic processes, equipped with the knowledge, skills, and—crucially—the willingness to act individually and collectively.
2. Systems Thinking (ST) in Science Education: Drawing from Assaraf & Orion (2010), we view ST as an essential cognitive skill for navigating complexity. It involves identifying interconnections, understanding feedback loops, and anticipating unintended consequences—moving beyond linear cause-and-effect reasoning to grasp the school as a socio-ecological system.

EThis work directly operationalizes the EU GreenComp competence "Acting for sustainability" (Bianchi et al., 2022), translating policy into a tested classroom practice. Its core contribution is providing educators with an evidence-based, three-phase pedagogical protocol ("Audit-Analyze-Act") that demonstrably bridges the gap between knowing and doing. It offers a scalable alternative to superficial projects, equipping students to become not just calculators of problems, but analysts of systems and advocates for solutions within their own communities.