Friluftsliv is a Scandinavian concept that emphasises a deep connection with nature through outdoor activities. This study examines its transformative role in fostering physical literacy and environmental ethics among international students. The University of South-East Norway offers a year-long programme that integrates theoretical coursework with outdoor experiential learning, including multi-day expeditions, exemplifying embodied pedagogy. Students were observed for one week, and at its conclusion participated in creative focus groups where they discussed and illustrated their most memorable experiences. The winter expedition emerged as a clear highlight. Analysis of interviews and artwork revealed that the teaching methods used enhanced students’ skills, knowledge, social connections, and motivation to engage with nature, thus reinforcing the four pillars of physical literacy. It also fostered a significant emotional transformation. While students initially approached nature from an anthropocentric perspective, the challenges of the winter trip, in particular, helped most of them to shift their outlook towards a more ecocentric view by deepening their connection with the natural environment. This study highlights the powerful role that experiential outdoor education can play in cultivating both physical literacy and environmental stewardship.

This article examines how redefining health through the perspectives of One Health, EcoHealth and Planetary Health can enrich Physical Education (PE) by advancing both health and environmental sustainability. While PE and health education are often treated as separate subjects, most PE curricula worldwide emphasise the promotion of an active lifestyle as a key component of health education through PE. This promotion of an active lifestyle is central to the concept of physical literacy (PL), which is a fundamental aspect of quality PE according to UNESCO (2015). This article focuses on how PE, contributing to health education through the promotion of PL, can evolve to incorporate sustainability goals through the recent new definitions of approaches to health. One Health approach underscores the interconnections between human, animal and environmental health, expanding PL to address zoonotic diseases and ecological impacts. EcoHealth highlights the sustainability of ecosystems, promoting PE activities that (re)connect humans with the more-than-human worlds without causing environmental harm. Planetary Health takes a global perspective, encouraging sustainable physical activities that reduce ecological footprints, such as cycling and walking. By integrating these holistic frameworks, PE can nurture not only individual health outcomes but also environmental stewardship and global health awareness. This shift seeks to educate individuals about their PL, but also their responsibility in preserving ecosystems and the planet, fostering a more sustainable and environmentally aware generation through PE.

This History of Education Society Presidential Address considers Blackfoot education and how psychologist Abraham Maslow attempted to make sense of it after his six-week stay at the Siksika reserve in 1938. Maslow encountered an educated, secure people at Siksika, who had a fully formed system of education grounded in reverence for children, stories, ceremonies, songs, language, humor, land, and connection, all of which had been tested over millennia. Though he might not have been able to interpret what he was seeing and hearing as fully as would a member of the Blackfoot community, what he experienced stuck with him, and can be read as the basis for the theories he presented as the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. As Maslow learned, Blackfoot history is an education history, which Blackfoot Elders sought to document and keep for generations not yet born.

In 1946, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was formed to promote peace through education and cross-cultural understanding. In the postwar atomic age, American leaders saw UNESCO and education for world citizenship as critical to the prevention of future war, the promotion of a new pluralistic vision, and the development of a well-informed society. A hyper-local case study, this article follows the story of Milton S. Eisenhower, leading UNESCO delegate and president of Kansas State College, and the series of progressive reforms he pursued to promote democracy, citizenship, and global peacebuilding at a rural land-grant college in the center of the former “isolationist belt” of America. This article traces the impact of these curricular reforms, the UNESCO campus-community partnership they inspired, and the subsequent peacebuilding movement that agitated for humanitarian action, civic participation, and desegregation from 1947 to 1950.

This essay examines academic freedom in Chile under the 1980s Pinochet military dictatorship. While much has been written on the topic, the literature is fragmented and difficult to access owing to the diverse range of stakeholders involved. Historians have tended to explore single cases, actors, and institutions to highlight struggles with the Chilean dictatorship. Bringing their stories together and assessing them collectively, however, sheds new light on this episode of academic freedom. It captures collaboration among students, faculty, and the public across multiple settings that has not yet been adequately explored by existing literature. Through an analysis of secondary and primary sources—including monographs, journal articles, government reports, newspaper articles, and Spanish-language publications—this essay traces a collaborative turn during the dictatorship that occurred separately among students, faculty, and the public as well as between those groups. It thus offers insight into the Chilean experience during the 1980s and the cooperative efforts to protect academic freedom.

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is primarily examined through official narratives, propaganda, and victims’ testimonies. However, the deeper motivations driving Russian men to enlist and fight often remain underexplored. While Western and Ukrainian media frequently attribute this to Russian propaganda, animosity towards Ukrainians, naivety, or financial incentives, these factors only partially capture the issue’s complexity. An additional motive rooted in an enduring ‘behavioral schema’ also plays a significant role. This schema is based on traditional gender roles influencing men’s decisions to engage in combat and women’s decisions to support them. By analyzing Russian social media and combatants’ writings, this research reveals how war discussions are framed by entrenched ‘traditionalist’ behavioral patterns. Utilizing Astrid Erll’s concept of ‘implicit memory’ and James V. Wertsch’s concept of narrative templates, this study elucidates not only the official narratives of the war but also the ‘hidden’ narratives that shape collective feelings and memories.

The present contribution proposes a low-threshold action plan for research into what we consider critical areas in multilingualism where we see an urgent need for more empirical studies and research-based classroom interventions and a stronger commitment to multilingual standards both in research and teaching. Reaching out to a wide audience of researchers, educationalists and decision makers, we first stake out the conceptual frame for our discussion and delineate the theoretical base that informs our thinking. This is followed by a perforce perfunctory overview of the current state of things. Next, we outline three research tasks with concrete practical suggestions and guidance on how to operationalise and implement the respective projects. Each task is contextualised in terms of its broader socio-educational embedding and prospective practical-theoretical relevance. The overall aim is to challenge traditional monolingual-grounded notions of language development, promote a dynamic and inclusive multilingual perspective in language learning, teaching and assessment, and contribute to a more informed understanding of multilingualism.

Within environmental education research, there is an ongoing interest in trying to understand what factors might lead to pro-environmental action and pro-environmental behaviours. This study explores the relationship between environmental attitudes and self-perceived action competence for sustainability by combining a questionnaire measuring self-perceived action competence for sustainability (SPACS-Q) with a questionnaire measuring environmental attitudes, the 2 factor Model of Environmental Values (2-MEV-Q), among 236 primary school student teachers in France. Our results show that the SPACS-Q adapted to the French context is largely valid within this sample and that the factor Preservation in the 2-MEV model is a predictor for SPACS. This connection is strongest for the factor Willingness to act. Likewise, we conclude that age impacts the SPACS factor Confidence in one’s own influence, whereas other variables such as training in sustainable development issues do not impact any of the SPACS factors. The study provides some insights into how self-perceived action competence and pro-environmental attitudes might be promoted through education.

English as a foreign language (EFL) students are increasingly learning English in extramural digital settings (informal digital learning of English; IDLE). Previous research has investigated the antecedents of IDLE engagement, focusing on basic psychological needs (BPNs) in classroom settings. However, little attention has been given to the role of BPNs in digital settings, where digital-native EFL students often fulfil their psychological needs. This study explores the relationship between two core BPNs – competence and relatedness – in both classroom and digital settings and IDLE engagement among 226 Kazakhstani university EFL students. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicate that, in the classroom, students who perceive themselves as more competent are more likely to engage in receptive and productive IDLE. Also, a higher sense of in-class relatedness strengthens the positive relationship between in-class competence and productive IDLE. In the digital settings, students who perceive themselves as more competent are more likely to engage in receptive IDLE, while competence alone does not directly lead to productive IDLE. A higher sense of relatedness positively moderates the links, amplifying the connection between competence and engagement in both receptive and productive IDLE. These findings suggest that educators can enhance EFL students’ IDLE engagement by designing and recommending activities that foster competence and a sense of community in both classroom and digital settings.

This article explores the extent students’ environmental values are informed through a socioecological learning framework when a deep-time universe hi/story is integrated with environmental education and local cultural origins in the primary school curriculum. The research concept grew from teacher observations that students addressed sustainability from a fragmented action approach, rather than incorporating a lifelong learning and wider worldview of past, present and possible future environmental changes. The research was conducted with 8–9-year-old students during a 17-week transdisciplinary pedagogical intervention, adapted for primary-aged students, from an educational evidence-based, online Big History Project, empowering young learners to engage in transformative thinking and to add their voices as co-researchers. Additional data was collected from the same co-researcher and student cohort two years later. The research findings over the two years remain significant, where students continued to discuss the environment and sustainability in the context of a child-framed deep learning pedagogy framework of the changing 13.8-billion-year universe story. If this original research is to remain significant, further research and programming need to be undertaken with students and educators, to ensure that the value of deep-time hi/story is embedded at all levels of the education continuum, including primary-aged students.

An urban forest school, London, UK: Stegosaurus (self-chosen pseudonym) is crouching and looking down intently at something on the ground. I notice he is rubbing two pieces of chalk in his hands. Chalk gently sprinkles over blades of grass, covering each leaf in a white dust.

A wall-less school, Bali: Paintbrush hails me. I pick her up, stroking her smooth, moist bristles likening them to fur. Between my fingers, I roll her brittle wooden handle backwards and forwards, imagining that this could be a twig, bone or spine.

What if we were to attend to the peculiarities of these material encounters?

How might Chalk and Paintbrush enact wild pedagogies?

Chalk and paintbrushes are everyday objects in educational settings and traditional, dominant pedagogies focus on how humans use these objects to support learning. Drawing on two material-multispecies moments from our posthumanist, feminist, materialist inquiries, we think-with rather than about Chalk and Paintbrush as intra-acting, co-creators of knowledge. These provide ways for becoming-wild that resist the anthropocentric, developmental and civilising processes so deeply imbued in educational approaches. Instead, becoming-wild offers hopeful and generative wild pedagogies that acknowledge the power of the everyday, ignored and divergent that strengthen and expand all our response-abilities.

In this paper, we focus on a particular example of human–wildlife conflict involving Dungalaba (Dungalaba, Saltwater Crocodile, C. porosus — this paper will interchange between the various names of the species. It is preferred to us various names as we would like to acknowledge the various ways in which people come to understand and recognise the species) (Saltwater Crocodile) in the Northern Territory, Australia. We seek to both better understand and improve relationships with such potentially dangerous animals, positioning this as an educational endeavour. Drawing upon interviews with a small number of relevant stakeholders, we utilise storytelling as a method for informing contemporary relationships with Dungalaba. The method of storytelling has been used effectively by Indigenous Australians for thousands of years to pass teachings of our older people for the benefit of future generations. During interviews, research participants told stories of their lived experiences, which informed the creation of narratives that depict current relationships of conflict and past relationships of harmony. We discuss these narratives and how they may educate for respectful interactions and mutually beneficial coexistence between humans and Dungalaba. This paper contributes to the growing body of work that embraces Indigenous ways of knowing for improved environmental relations. Furthermore, this paper offers specific possibilities for the use storytelling as a tool within crocodile safety education programs within the Northern Territory.