This paper involves the unlikely partnering of a designer/design educator and an environmental philosopher of education as they consider together pedagogical responses to the metacrisis. It will begin with an exploration of some recent research that positions education at the heart of the project of eco-social – cultural change. Then, using six prompts proposed as a starting place for this type of education we will follow a full semester of a third-year undergraduate design class as students are immersed in a curriculum created with a vision towards both eco-social – cultural change and, by implication, ‘doing design differently’. Through this reflective study, the research hopes to explore some of the successes, failures, learnings, and potential challenges that exist for students, educators, and theories of educational change in the work of educating in, through, and beyond these times of crisis. The paper will end with a rendering of our findings and an extended discussion of the pedagogical possibilities, prompts, and peculiarities of teaching during this metacrisis and some considerations around the potentialities and limitations of these six prompts for eco-social – cultural change and environmental education.

The discourse on decolonising environmental education necessitates a critical engagement with Indigenous epistemologies and narratives that challenge dominant, Eurocentric paradigms of ecological knowledge. Sheela Tomy’s Valli (2022) offers a compelling literary intervention in this context, concentrating forest narratives and subverting colonial legacies of environmental exploitation. The analysis positions Valli as a narrative intervention that centres the Adivasi communities of Kerala’s Wayanad district. The fiction portrays the forest as a sentient, sovereign entity, challenging colonial and post-colonial forest policies that commodified nature through timber extraction and plantations, leading to ecological ruin and displacement. Guided by the insights of decolonial theorists such as Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar and Vandana Shiva, the article demonstrates how the fiction leverages folklore and testimony to validate oral histories, presenting them as crucial for understanding ecological crises. Valli enacts a pedagogical project that recentres Indigenous knowledge, aligning with environmental justice movements. The article concludes that decolonising environmental education requires fundamental ontological shift from human domination to coexistence. It advocates for a pedagogical model, exemplified by the fictional Kadoram school, which integrates Indigenous knowledge, advances multispecies empathy and recognises the land as a co-instructor. This approach thereby fosters pluriversality and a sustainable environmental ethic.

Task-based language teaching is believed to facilitate language learning opportunities that arise when performing tasks. Although the synergies between task and learner variables in this process rose to prominence recently, little has been undertaken to explore the individual difference-task interaction in textual meaning-making activities. This study thus explored how second language (L2) writing performance under different task complexity conditions was impacted by L2 writing willingness to communicate (WTC) and L2 writing proficiency. Participants with upper-intermediate English proficiency were recruited following a within-between-participant factorial research design. The results confirmed that WTC significantly influenced syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency in L2 writing, suggesting that conative individual differences (IDs) might play a more prominent role in L2 writing than cognitive IDs. Among the sub-components of WTC, motivational predispositions performed better than emotional, cognitive, and writing-specific features in affecting L2 writing performance. Additionally, WTC played a more pronounced role in the complex task, supporting the claim of Robinson’s cognition hypothesis that ID effects are more evident in complex tasks than simple tasks. However, no interaction between L2 writing WTC and proficiency was found. Theoretical and pedagogical implications were offered on considering both L2 WTC and task complexity in task-based writing instruction.

Environmental education is being reconfigured in this era of runaway economic growth and social and environmental unravelling. The aim of this article is to articulate interconnected challenges confronting education in a time of polycrisis by articulating new conceptions of technology and technological progress, hopefully leading to a more refined critique of growth-based economics and technocratic solutionism. We begin by synthesising research related to the Anthropocene and post-growth discourses, presenting two simple heuristics that we have found useful in designing educational responses to the metacrisis and unravelling. Afterwards we discuss these heuristics in relation to disaster studies, land- and stratification-economics, as well as ancient/long-standing practices of resource/wealth redistribution (e.g., potlatch), highlighting implications for future research.