Conference Agenda

This presentation extends insights developed in a large-scale Nordic research project Education and the Green transition: Exploring Qualities in Sustainability Education (Brückner, Lysgaard, Elf, & Reid, 2025), to ask the question: how do rapid changes in sustainability and geopolitical agendas force educators and ESE researchers to think and practice differently with regard to notions of quality ESE (Elf et al. 2026)? While the aforementioned project builds on a didactical understanding of how to view and conceptualize multiple approaches to quality in ESE teaching, this presentation goes beyond that scope and its findings in explore how such perspectives are embedded in, destabilized by and potentially strengthened through contextual, political and societal changes across the Nordic region and globally.

Our point of departure is to re-examine understanding of the concept of quality as multidimensional (Elf, 2021) in the sense that it can be framed as being in tension between three aspects. First, “prescribed quality”, often in the form of theories, norms, and policy. Second, “documented quality”, such as arising from empirical data from qualitative and quantitative studies and assessment. And third, “experienced quality” in terms of impressions and atmospheres experienced by participants in specific situations. A central part of our argument is that “experienced quality” often is underrepresented and less emphasized when it comes to ongoing discussions of different forms of prescribed and ambitions to document quality (Brückner et al., 2025). Working with this in research and practice development settings from qualitative and quantitative perspectives, for example, in trying to understand the role of experienced quality in shaping priorities for policy and provision, reveals that young people’s interactions with environmental and sustainability teaching and dilemmas are frequently overlooked in recent thinking and analysis, e.g. in so-called ‘Greening Education Partnerships’ (see UNESCO, 2026) focusing on greening schools, curriculum, teacher training and education system capacities, and communities.

The Nordic research project has influenced and drawn the multi-national presenters into different directions and raised new questions in relation to how it is possible to understand this multidimensional perspective on ESE quality in the face of the poly crisis that continues to unravel nationally and globally (Elf et al., 2026). For example, the second term of President Trump has put ESE teaching in the United States and in European settings under severe pressure and has strained resources in this already underfunded area. This situation adds further complexity to the affective entanglements – uneasiness, capacity limits, structural impediments, incongruent agendas and compromises – that already shape teachers’ ESE practice and affect their students and school communities (e.g., Greer & Glackin, forthcoming).

Together, we argue that while changes in policy and leadership, and new professional development and curriculum are needed, such structures must recognise the complexity and the importance of ‘experienced quality’ of teaching amidst the socio-ecological crisis. This further emphasises how a revitalised notion of Bildung can be used to draw in a greater plethora of subjects when dealing with ESE issues that, to a growing extent, show themselves as outside of the grip of individual school subjects (Elf & Andersen, 2026-2029).

In sum, the presentation proposes that socio-ecological crises have been a central aspect of the ESE field, but that times are changing in the sense that the acceptance and severity of these crises appear simultaneously mainstreamed and marginalised in various policy and practice discourses (Lysgaard & Reid 2026). This situation invites further questions and inquiry regarding how ESE researchers identify the field and its role in shaping education on a more general level, while accepting that the “poly-crisis” that has been a ESE fixture has now materialized across the globe.

The Network 30 special call outlines global poly-crises as complex and connected, suggesting that singular epistemic frameworks are insufficient in providing comprehensive responses. Indeed, scholars increasingly urge for the development of approaches to research through epistemic expansion to more adequately navigate these challenges (e.g. Escobar, 2018). There is broad recognition within the ESE field that to avoid perpetuating the same epistemic enclosure that has created the conditions for such poly-crises, research approaches can challenge habitual methodologies by taking into account pluriversal approaches to knowledge-creation practices (Kumalo, 2017; Nesterova, 2020). In response, this paper asks what methods might help us identify and resist epistemic enclosure within research and how might doing so create possibilities for epistemic expansion?

To approach these questions, a moment from a 2014 novel, Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer offers an apt provocation in describing a team of researchers attempting to study and understand an unknown invasive species. When confronted with such an incomprehensible ecological phenomenon, one of the researchers in the book concludes, "If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish" (p.192). It is to this that I turn when considering the role of ESE research in a time of poly-crisis. How might we approach research in ways that creates possibilities for different questions, or different kinds of questions to be asked?

This paper presents multi-register writing as a methodological approach to this challenge. Multi-register writing refers to research practices that deliberately work across different “registers” of writing, using, for example, poetry or fiction alongside more traditional modes of academic writing within the same inquiry. Using the context of a rich variety of texts that demonstrate multi-register writing, I conduct a close examination of a section from an ESE doctoral thesis that includes fictioning alongside academic style writing. In doing so, I present the purpose and possibilities of situating these different registers together in research writing to contribute an analysis of multi-register writing as a method for practising epistemic interrogation.

First, I outline the purpose of using multi-register writing in this example by drawing on theory about writing as epistemic-practice and fictioning (Bayley, 2026). This illustrates how writing in different registers generates distinct worlds through different modes of sense-making, highlighting the necessary ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions and exclusions embedded in each that create the worlds differently.

Next, I explore the site of interplay between these two modes to present the possibilities of constructing these worlding-practices in relation with each other as a method for epistemic interrogation. I consider not the differences of the worlds they make, but the ways they make those worlds differently. These registers in relation enable more than simply pluralised viewpoints (e.g. perspectives of an academic debate or different characters from the same fiction), they provide opportunities to trace the differing processes of world-making across registers, exposing the epistemic constructions through which worlds are created.

Consequently, multi-register writing holds potential as a research method for ESE in offering ways to interrogate epistemic constructions, which necessarily includes enclosure, and provides the possibility for generating expanded epistemologies within research writing practices. Given the international nature of poly-crises, scholars in the field call for research that engages with pluriversal knowledges to resist epistemic erasure or universalism on the global stage of ESE research, notably those found in decolonial, posthuman, feminist literature and critical theory. Thus, methods for enacting epistemic interrogation within our European context can provide possibilities for approaching epistemic expansion in research practices to help us navigate times of poly-crises.

As a conjunction of environmentally and educationally informed ideas and practices, over approximately the last 50 years, the environmental education (EE) field has taken a wealth of forms worldwide, shaped by a variety of traditions, emphases, mainstays, and innovations for participants and providers. Research-based assessments of the strengths and limitations of a particular approach, correlations between objectives and outcomes, and identification of possible causal mechanisms between what is expected and experienced have generated insights about the process of designing, conducting, and evaluating both programs and instances of EE. These insights foreground the significance of, for example: learning dispositions, factors shaping educator capabilities, and a suite of teaching-and-learning strategies related to fostering environmental quality and associated matters. Making sense of the quality and dynamics of the field’s evidence base can also help confirm, extend, redirect, and shift the focus of practice, policy, professional development, research priorities, and more.

Decades of research have shown that prioritizing the provision of information about environmental challenges is necessary, but not sufficient, for motivating associated behavioral changes through education (e.g., Zelezny 1999; Reid et al. 2021). Although building environmental knowledge is important, developing attitudes, awareness, values, skills, and action competence is also crucial, and this is what the field of EE is committed to doing (UNESCO 1977). At its core, EE is about cultivating meaningful relationships between people and nature—relationships that serve as the foundation for conservation and environmental action (Clark et al., 2020). For researchers, understanding the connections and disconnections between the various approaches, methods, and affordances within EE, and the reasons for these, has remained central to EE scholarship, including through regularly revisiting what works well, when, why, and for whom, within and beyond the field (e.g., Marcinkowski & Reid 2019; Świątkowski et al. 2024).

Alongside the rise of the evidence-based conservation movement over the past twenty years, EE has also emerged as a worthwhile strategy to help achieve conservation goals. Engaging people at individual and collective scales is essential to develop the societal attitudes, knowledge, skills, behaviours, and norms that address conservation and environmental challenges in both the short and longer term. EE in formal, informal, and nonformal settings can be a powerful vehicle for building such capacities and competencies that build deeper connections between nature and people.

To understand the ways in which EE in achieving such outcomes has been an effective strategy in a range of conditions and contexts, and what contributes to that effectiveness, we conducted a series of systematic reviews (marked * in reference list) of evidence-based scholarship over the last decade. In this presentation, we synthesise key findings into 6 recurring themes, derived from an analysis of 546 international peer-reviewed studies for distinct audiences (e.g., early childhood, K-12 provision) and contemporary priority areas in the field, namely: climate change, conservation, civic engagement, positive youth development, and community/citizen science.

Our synthesis reveals six key themes that contribute to shaping debates on what constitutes ‘effective EE’: employing diverse teaching and learning approaches; fostering participatory methods; including direct action components; focusing on local community settings; connecting to personally relevant information; and collaborating with experts and stakeholders. While no universalisable model has emerged from the review, programs can help strengthen people-nature connections by integrating these educational elements into evidence-based conservation.

As we show from discussing the substance and gaps in the reviews and meta-review, EE programs do well to prioritise authentic, community-grounded experiences that engage participants as active agents rather than passive recipients. To achieve desired conservation and broader environmental goals, EE initiatives also require sustained investment, cross-sector partnerships, and evaluation frameworks that capture long-term behavioural and environmental outcomes.