Conference Agenda

Contemporary educational research faces the challenge of responding to socio-ecological crises, epistemic injustices, and the limits of modern and universalist models of knowledge production, especially in the context of a globalized education marked by historical inequalities (Trott et al., 2023). “Place-based education” [PBE] (Yemini et al., 2023) is put forward as an approach to address the disconnection to place and environment by students who grow up in a globalised, colonial world of environmental crises. However, the authors note in their review that what is understood as PBE differs among researchers. The majority of researches focus on forms of outdoor learning and how educational tools, such Information and communication technologies, can connect student to their environments. Furthermore, they notice how PBE stems from mostly US researchers with limited engagement from and with research in and of the Global South. More importantly, they notice that social justice is sidelined in most PBE approaches, which is worrying, considering how PBE was early-on advocated as a means to construct a “critical pedagogy of place” to allow for decolonisation and reinhabitation fo the world (Gruenewald, 2003). Current research on PBE outside of the review’s scope from Nigeria (Ajaps & Mbah, 2022), Taiwan (Li & Shein, 2023) and Brasil (da Silva Ortiz & Gisloti, 2026) already bring new perspectives on indigenous education to the field. However, other researchers have continued the idea of a critical pedagogy of place by re-aligning PBE with “environmental justice education” (Stahelin, 2017; Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022; Ellington & Prado, 2024). These authors call for the reconnection of communities to their territories and awareness of histories of colonisation and erasure of local knowledges. They signall the need for more, tested, and varied teaching approaches to implement a critical PBE.

This paper presents Social Bionarratives [BIONAS] (Kato, 2020) as a possible answer to these challenges. BIONAS is a theoretical-methodological framework that emerges from educational practices situated in the Global South, articulating life, territory, and collectivity. Concretely, BIONAS are multimodal textual productions, i.e. booklets that incorporate artistic elements (video, pictures, poetry, design) that represent local knowledges that we’re encountered as students and teachers collaborated with local communities in and outside of the classroom. BIONAS are social because they do not narrate individual stories, but they are collectively constructed. They are bionarratives, because they emerge as embodied expressions of our collective lived realities from the territories in which they are produced. BIONAS are not conceived solely as narrative techniques, but as ontopolitical devices through which communities can preserve, recreate and transform their modes of existence in relation to human and more-than-human worlds. These characteristics, we argue, make BIONAS into a potent pedagogical tool for PBE with which to address the disconnect between communities and their territories in the Global North. Thus, we pose the following research questions: how do BIONAS promote a critical pedagogy of place that reconnects teachers and students to their territory, and which critically reflect upon the colonial histories that underlie socio-environmental conflicts in communities? How can BIONAS, developed in educational contexts in the Global South, contribute to pluriversal, territorialised place-based education in the Global North? The analysis of BIONAS experiences revealed four key patterns: the use of biocultural memories as pedagogical content; affective-epistemic bonds among participants; the (re)signification of territories as knowledge and resistance spaces; and collaborative reflection on socio-environmental justice. These patterns underscore BIONAS’s potential to foster a critical, relational, and decolonial place-based pedagogy.

In a time of poly‑crisis—defined by the intensification of climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, toxic exposures, inequality, and geopolitical instability—environmental and sustainability education (ESE) must critically re‑articulate its aims, knowledges, methodologies, and practices. This paper argues that to meet these conditions, ESE needs to foreground the biosocial lives of children: lives shaped simultaneously by social structures and relations, and the molecular and microbial forces that permeate everyday environments (Millei, 2025). Drawing on the concept of alterlife (Murphy, 2017), which recognises that all life is already altered by capitalist, colonial, and industrial chemical relations, I reposition schools as chemical‑multispecies assemblages. In these assemblages, microplastics, cleaning agents, air pollutants, and processed food chemicals operate as interagentic forces that shape how children learn, breathe, eat, sense, and become (Agard-Jones, 2013). By attending to these relations, I propose that ESE must widen its focus to material flows that co-constitute life processes and to cultivate ethical, situated capacities for living within chemically altered worlds (Landecker, 2019).

The theoretical paper develops a conceptual and methodological reorientation for environmental education by synthesising interdisciplinary research. This reorientation is illustrated through two examples. The first concerns atmospheric contaminants, which increasingly circulate through classrooms, schoolyards, and children’s commutes (Heydon & Chakraborty, 2020). These exposures are rarely perceptible within the conventional frames of school environmental initiatives, yet they materially participate in children’s respiratory health, cognitive functioning, and embodied experience of place. Participatory air‑quality monitoring by children—not merely as data collection but as a relational inquiry—offers an avenue for producing situated environmental knowledge that is at once scientific, experiential, and political. Such practices highlight how ESE can integrate embodied sensing, critical interpretation, and community action.

The second example explores food, gut ecologies, and molecular colonisation, emphasising eating as a threshold practice where bodies, species, materials, and institutions meet (Paxson, 2023). School foodways—snacks, school lunches, convenience foods—shape children’s gut microbiomes and metabolic processes, embedding chemical, economic, and cultural relations within the body. Multisensory pedagogies such as taste‑work (Coe et al, 2024), fermentation projects, and food inquiry expand ESE beyond nutrition and behavioural guidance by inviting children to consider the multispecies, chemical, and political dimensions of food (Paxson, 2008; Landecker, 2019). Such pedagogies also resist narratives that frame bodily health solely as individual responsibility, foregrounding instead the institutional and infrastructural conditions that shape microbial and chemical exposures.

Taken together, these examples demonstrate that ESE could evolve to address the environment in and through bodies, acknowledging that children’s embodied experiences are entangled with pollutants, microbes, and infrastructures that cross the boundaries of environmental, public health, and educational domains. This biosocial lens (Youdell and Lindley, 2019) might compel ESE to ask new questions such as: What educational aims become necessary when the conditions of life itself are being molecularly rearranged?

In response, we propose three contributions to the re‑articulation of ESE in a time of poly‑crisis. First, ESE’s aims could include cultivating children’s capacities to live well‑enough within contaminated, uncertain environments while nurturing collective imaginaries for more‑than‑human flourishing (Landecker, 2019; Murphy, 2017; Tsing, 2015, ). Second, ESE’s knowledge practices need to expand to include molecular, microbial, and embodied indicators generated through participatory, multisensory, and speculative methods (e.g. Coe et al, 2024). Third, ESE’s pedagogical and institutional practices could adopt more‑than‑human and new materialist governance frameworks that attend to the co‑constitution of children, materials, and environments (Nichols et al, 2025).

By reconceptualising schools as chemical‑multispecies environments and childhoods as sites of alterlife, this paper offers conceptual and methodological resources for renewing ESE’s purpose under poly‑crisis conditions and for fostering educational practices that respond ethically, creatively, and collaboratively to the realities of the Anthropocene.

Researchers have argued that human activities have now destroyed and altered planetary systems in such dramatic ways that the planet has entered a new geological epoch. They argue that we are now in the Anthropocene, the age of humans [1]. Despite being formally rejected as a geological epoch [2], the term has become a common way to address the crisis-rid state of the planet. Different critiques have emerged to question whether a global anthros (human) is responsible for the destruction of the planet, or if Western colonialism, capitalism or Cartesian worldviews are more specific root causes [3, 4].

In ESE, considerations about the Anthropocene situation have also evolved into a range of central theoretical themes:

Some scholars see the Anthropocene as an invitation to re-think established pedagogical theory, such as the Bildung tradition, critiquing the way these approaches encourage humans to act on the world as if it was merely a backdrop for human expansion and display. These scholars argue for, e.g., life-friendliness, place responsiveness and attunement to the more-than-human as new ideals, making way for a flat ontology that would enable more liveable space for humans and more-than-humans alike [5, 6].

Other scholars draw on Morton’s dark eco-philosophy to focus on inherently inaccessible, unknowable and eerie dimensions of education, which current climatic and ecological conditions seem to only amplify. This suggests that other kinds of pedagogy than the orderly, happy and quiet may offer critical potentials [7, 8].

Yet another group of scholars argue for a reintroduction of class as a seminal focal point in ESE. Laugesen applies a philosophical approach to create educational-didactical theory to critically respond to capitalistic motivated destruction of ecosystems and inequality [9]. From a sociologic-ethnographic angle, Urberg describes and question tendencies of Swedish youth resistance to sustainable development agendas and initiatives inside and outside of school [10]. Both shed light on how socio-ideological structures play into the current planetary situation, and they raise considerations on the meanings of and potentials for resistance in education.

With this paper, we seek to contribute to these theoretical developments. We do so through focusing on how the meaning and negotiation of ‘the Anthropocene situation’ is contingent on localized social as well as bio-geo-physical landscape formations, and how a sensitivity to such landscape formations may have educational theoretical implications. Behind this proposition lies the general idea that, despite being defined as a global phenomenon, the Anthropocene takes different forms and shapes in different places of the world [11]. This, moreover, poses a considerable challenge to ambitions of enacting ESE in the Global North, where the impacts of the Anthropocene are perhaps not as violently experienced (yet).

We argue that Western Jutland in Denmark is an interesting case through which to expand on these considerations. Western Jutland is a relatively sparsely populated region. It is home to both globally unique and protected natural habitats [12, 13] but also to much of Denmark’s agricultural sector. Moreover, in recent elections a gap between this largely rural part of Denmark and urban parts of Denmark has proved to be a significant political decider [14]. Concretely, in this political environment, resistance against large-scale sustainable energy infrastructure projects such as solar panels and wind turbines has become an important political issue [15].

Rather than interpreting this resistance as resistance to green transition initiatives in general, we wish to explore and discuss the potentials hereof from an educational perspective. In short, our research questions is: In what form does ‘the Anthropocene situation’ emerge in rural Western Jutland and what may be educational implications hereof.

This paper presents findings from a participatory research project developed within the municipal programme Sintra Jovem 2030 – Co-creating a Sustainable Territory, examining how young people perceive, experience and learn through green spaces across different everyday environments. Positioned explicitly within the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE), the study approaches green spaces not only as environmental or recreational assets, but as informal and non-formal learning environments where education, sustainability, social relations and territorial conditions intersect.

The research is grounded in the assumption that access to, quality of and opportunities for engagement with green spaces are central issues in sustainability education, closely linked to questions of social inclusion, territorial justice and democratic participation (Cordeiro et al., 2025). This perspective is particularly relevant in socio-spatially diverse European municipalities such as the Portuguese municipality of Sintra, where strong contrasts exist between consolidated urban areas and more fragmented or peripheral territories (Cordeiro et al., 2023, 2024).

Conceptually, the study adopts an ecological and territorial approach to education, understanding schools, their surrounding spaces, residential neighbourhoods and daily mobility routes as interconnected educational ecologies (Kraftl, 2013). These everyday environments shape young people’s opportunities for learning about and through sustainability, including contact with nature, environmental awareness, social interaction, well-being and civic engagement beyond the formal curriculum (Faure & UNESCO, 1972; Associação Internacional de Cidades Educadoras, 2020; Ward, 1978).

Methodologically, the research is based on a structured questionnaire administered to 4,990 students from several school clusters across the municipality of Sintra, encompassing a wide range of ages, educational levels and socio-cultural backgrounds. The questionnaire combined closed and open-ended questions and explored young people’s relationships with green spaces across four interconnected spatial domains: (i) green spaces within school grounds; (ii) green spaces in the immediate surroundings of schools; (iii) green spaces in residential neighbourhoods; and (iv) green spaces encountered along daily home-school routes. This multi-scalar design enables a nuanced analysis of how proximity, accessibility, safety, design quality and institutional regulations influence young people’s everyday spatial practices, perceptions and learning opportunities related to sustainability.

The study integrates quantitative and qualitative data within a descriptive-interpretative framework aligned with participatory traditions in ESE research (Coelho et al., 2022). Rather than producing a purely infrastructural or environmental diagnosis, the analysis foregrounds young people’s voices in order to interpret how territorial conditions shape autonomy, well-being, socialisation and informal learning processes associated with environmental and sustainability issues. Comparative analysis across school clusters reveals marked territorial asymmetries, highlighting how unequal spatial conditions translate into differentiated educational opportunities.

The findings point to a persistent gap between the symbolic recognition of green spaces as important for environmental quality and well-being and their effective use as learning environments, particularly within school settings and along daily mobility routes. While students consistently value green spaces as places for relaxation, contact with nature and social interaction, their actual appropriation is often constrained by safety concerns, lack of shade and equipment, limited accessibility and restrictive institutional rules. In contrast, green spaces located near the home tend to support more frequent use and informal learning experiences, underscoring the importance of proximity-based and neighbourhood-scale interventions.

By positioning young people as active contributors to knowledge production, this study contributes to ongoing debates within Environmental and Sustainability Education on learner participation, educational spaces beyond the classroom and the role of everyday environments in fostering sustainability learning (UNESCO, 2021). It argues that integrating youth perspectives into educational planning, urban design and local sustainability policies is essential for advancing more just, inclusive and effective approaches to ESE.