As climate change accelerates, its most devastating impacts fall on those already marginalised, deepening existing inequalities. This underscores the need for climate change education to attend not only to the scientific but also to social, cultural and ethical dimensions. Like science fiction, climate fiction (cli-fi) has often reinforced colonial, patriarchal and anthropocentric worldviews. However, some contemporary cli-fi narratives challenge these paradigms by offering alternative visions that centre climate justice and the voices of those most affected by climate change. In this paper, we examine two contemporary Australian cli-fi narratives — Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book — and their potential role in climate education. Integrating these cli-fi into a cross-disciplinary higher education curriculum can enrich climate change education by encouraging critical, ethical and imaginative engagement and prepare students to navigate and respond to the crisis in transformative ways. Not only do these texts critique climate inequalities but they imagine alternative ways of being, positioning characters in relational entanglements with climate, cultures and place. We conduct an ecocritical analysis, applying a critical posthumanist and ecofeminist lens, to examine how these narratives disrupt anthropocentric and patriarchal logics and advocate for relational, justice-centred approaches to climate issues. Climate change concepts that emerged from this analysis act as a guide for educators.

Climate fiction (cli-fi) is widely assumed to have cognitive value for student and teacher understanding of climate change, often attributed to automatic mental processes based on trial and error. This study argues its cognitive value lies in systematic mental actions that transform cli-fi into school science problems for educational benefits to students and teachers. A guide, grounded in agentive activity theory, was developed to orient these actions and tested with three secondary school biology teachers. The participants worked with two excerpts from “The Ministry of the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson and another adapted from the article “Scientists at odds over wild plans to slow melting glaciers” by Hannah Richter. Think-aloud and retrospective interviews were used. Three key stages emerged: narrative immersion in cli-fi, problem structuring and editing/correction. The findings indicate that the guide supports teachers’ agency and self-regulation during the transformation process, although there is a limitation related to teachers’ content knowledge. It is concluded that the guide enhances teachers’ control over cli-fi transformations, and the educational cognitive value of cli-fi may reside in agentive activity.

Inclusive education, a foundation of modern educational discourse, requires progressive approaches that extend beyond cultural boundaries and promote effective, collaborative learning environments. In this systematic review, we thoroughly examine preservice teachers’ readiness for inclusive education by analysing how their attitudes, experiences, and training shape their perceptions and self-efficacy. Drawing on studies from the past two decades, we report generally positive attitudes toward inclusive practices alongside challenges such as limited practical experience, time constraints, and insufficient institutional support. In this review, we critique current tools for measuring teacher self-efficacy and call for more comprehensive, culturally responsive approaches. Findings indicate that although formal training fosters positive attitudes, its impact is maximised when combined with authentic teaching experiences. Overall, this systematic review underscores the need for an integrated teacher education strategy that bridges theory and practice, thereby equipping teachers with the skills and confidence to meet students with diverse needs.

The realisation that climate tipping points may be triggered in the upcoming decades underscores the urgent need for transformative educational responses to the climate crisis that integrate scientific knowledge with socio-political dimensions. However, the consolidation of Education for Sustainable Development has gradually displaced Environmental Education (EE) from institutional and academic spaces, shifting the focus away from systemic critiques of the socio-economic drivers of the environmental crisis. Through a historical perspective on the consolidation of the paradigm of sustainable development, this article calls for an EE capable of addressing the root causes rather than the symptoms of anthropogenic climate change, contending that the survival of EE as an independent, counter-hegemonic field is essential for fostering transformative educational practices that confront climate emergency.

The nexus of artificial intelligence (AI) and memory is typically theorized as a ‘hybrid’ or ‘symbiosis’ between humans and machines. The dangers related to this nexus are subsequently imagined as tilting the power balance between its two components, such that humanity loses control over its perception of the past to the machines. In this article, I propose a new interpretation: AI, I posit, is not merely a non-human agency that changes mnemonic processes, but rather a window through which the past itself gains agency and extends into the present. This interpretation holds two advantages. First, it reveals the full scope of the AI–memory nexus. If AI is an interactive extension of the past, rather than a technology acting upon it, every application of it constitutes an act of memory. Second, rather than locating AI’s power along familiar axes – between humans and machines, or among competing social groups – it reveals a temporal axis of power: between the present and the past. In the article’s final section, I illustrate the utility of this approach by applying it to the legal system’s increasing dependence on machines, which, I claim, represents not just a technical but a mnemonic shift, where the present is increasingly falling under the dominion of the past – embodied by AI.

While LGBTQIA+ identities are already mostly invisible in the Italian education system, the current anti-gender policies proposed by right-wing and far-right politicians risk further hindering an inclusive education. However, recent Italian graphic novels pave the way for a multifaceted representation of the LGBTQIA+ community and an alternative form of education. For instance, Nicoz Balboa’s Play with Fire (2020) and Alec Trenta’s Barba (2022) are two autofictional graphic novels that depict the authors’ discovery of their trans identity and their experiences in the cis-heteronormative society. The article argues that the two works by Balboa and Trenta are not just examples of autofiction but also constitute an archive of memory and activism. First, the article traces the damaging effects of a lack of education around LGBTQIA+ themes. Then, it explores how Balboa and Trenta understand their lives by reading LGBTQIA+ stories and histories. Crucially, the article investigates how both authors become a point of reference themselves by representing their own bodies and including explanations about gender and sexuality topics. Documenting the way Balboa and Trenta build a counter-educational space in their graphic novels and chart a literary queer and trans genealogy, the article ultimately suggests that their works are a form of activist practice.

Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are fixed, conventional strings of language (e.g. idioms, collocations, binomials, proverbs) which have been found to be widespread in language use. Research has shown that MWEs exhibit an online processing advantage over control phrases by first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers. While this line of research has helped us better understand the nature of MWEs and factors that may influence their processing in real time, there remain several gaps that future research should focus on. In this piece, we focus on four main topics related to the online processing of MWEs: (1) comprehension of MWEs by L1 and L2 speakers, (2) production of MWEs by L1 and L2 speakers, (3) the processing of modified MWEs by L1 and L2 speakers, and (4) the processing of MWEs by L1 children. Under each topic, we propose nine research tasks that will further advance our understanding of MWE processing in real time. We conclude with relevance of MWE processing research to L2 teaching and learning.

We resonated with the idea that dreaming is important, and that climate fiction is a way of dreaming with environmental educators. A well of resistance lives in art collaborations around the world which harness the power of the collective to face terrible realities and twist, bend, and dance them into alternative hopeful pasts, presents and futures. Engaging with other people and more-than-human lives, through creative collaborations have led us to understand complex and unfamiliar perspectives in ways that are unreachable alone, regardless of how much academic study we do. This story emerged from online meetings that crossed time zones and oceans: Vancouver to Istanbul. Our climate fiction surfaced from improvised, spontaneous story creation. It was as if the story was waiting for us to find her, if we acted with care and love while facing directly our own dark shadows and fears about climate catastrophe. This story of Cassandra, alongside our interpretations of its emergence, invites the reader to draw from any evoked confusion or other feelings as well as their own learnings to reflect on burdens of knowledge not acted upon. Leaning into confusion is a way to open up to the power of uncertainty for environmental education.

These excerpts from Inbetweenness, an upcoming hopepunk novel, intertwine eco-social justice narratives and Indigenous education through climate fiction. Inbetweenness challenges Western-centric paradigms by highlighting diverse voices and posthumanist perspectives, focusing on the tension between contemporary environmental crises and Indigenous knowledge systems. It features characters like Joanne Penderwith, a graduate student navigating social justice, ecological connection, and decolonial praxis, inviting readers to reflect on allyship and positionality within activism. The novel also juxtaposes human-centric actions with the voices of other-than-human entities, using multi-species ethnography to embody ecological storytelling. A pivotal segment details Joanne’s transformative experience at a salmon ceremony led by the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations, showcasing the resilience of Indigenous practices and their potential to guide sustainable futures. Inbetweenness uses fiction-based research methods grounded in 20 years of transdisciplinary research. It critiques performative allyship and advocates for authentic relationships with Indigenous communities, proposing a hopeful approach to environmental education and climate action.

This paper shares how a river-walking project in early childhood education created and experimented with two practices diffractively as an effort to do research differently. The year-long study, situated in Western Australia, explored river-child relations while walking with Derbarl Yerrigan/Swan River and was interested in decentring the human and attuning to more-than-human relations through situated practices. Using a feminist environmental framework this project took a non-representational approach to analysing data through two intra-related diffractive concepts: re-turning and re-membering. These concepts grounded the two practices, audiowalking and micromapping, and helped to shape the various forms of experimentation for a diffractive approach to analysis. Audiowalking is a practice that involved creating narrated audio recordings while walking with an intention of layering data from the present with pasts and futures. Micromapping is an embodied and performative practice that reimagined and unsettled place and space through mapping emotional encounters, river relations and the more-than-human. This paper shows how environmental education researchers, particularly those conducting place-based research, can approach research analysis diffractively to disrupt colonial ways of knowing, being and doing research through two practices that take a non-linear conceptualisation of time, embody data and research with worlds.

This article explores how pedagogy focused on affective possibilities of narrative genres can suggest new directions for climate fiction, potentially challenging the dystopian dominance in the climate crisis imaginary. We analyse a corpus of work produced by first year creative writing students. The students were given the task of “mashing” climate fiction with another genre (romance, horror, crime or any other genre of their choice) and asked to reflect on how this changed the emotional affect and tone of their narrative. Many students were still drawn to dystopian visions, reflecting how climate fiction has become entangled with this particular mode of storytelling, but the focus on reader affect resulted in the students adding layers of hope and agency. Many made use of the possibilities offered by genre: the whimsical allegory of fantasy, the critical thinking of realism, the active fear of horror and the comic potential of satire. By giving students the freedom to embed climate change into their preferred genre, and by asking them to consider the affective consequences of their choices, we offer challenges to the dominance of dystopian climate fiction, suggesting a different path to narratively engage with the climate crisis without descending into hopelessness.