Responding to our shared concern about the plight of the Bunya tree (Araucaria bidwillii) due to dieback caused by soil-borne pathogens, this composite article brings together narrative reflections from eight contributors, who respond to prompts on confronting dieback through their unique lived experiences and professional practices. The responses offer insights for advocating a voice for the Bunya tree whilst safeguarding its cultural and ecological significance through education, advocacy, and agency. This article presents five insights gleaned from our collective responses. These are 1. honour traditional knowledge and custodianship; 2. build collaborative networks and capacity to respond to ecological decline; 3. leverage art for ecological awareness and action. 4. empower community and business leadership; 5. catalyse awareness into action. These insights are offered not as definitive solutions but as a framework for thinking and acting that may support navigating the challenges of tree dieback and regenerative forest practices.

This article traces the contours of the history of women’s education in England and Ireland in the period 1850-2000, mapping dominant themes and key inflection points. Positing a framework for reading degrees of change over time, we propose four interrelated lenses: access, curriculum, institutional presence, and networks. Drawing on key contributions to the field, we argue that women’s engagement with higher education has followed a complex and uneven trajectory, reflective of the shifting sands of attitudes and accommodations toward women across time, space, and discipline.

We are in a metacrisis caused by exponential growth, extraction and entitlement. When we strive to abolish the abundant absurdities of the current system (i.e., modernity) with rehabilitative or reformist responses, we risk reproducing, even reinforcing, the very dynamics we seek to transform. The sensing seed is a visual heuristic and practice of resonant embodied ethics to aid in unravelling the machinations of modernity. The seed identifies three polarities that reflect salient patterns of modernity: separateness, linearity and abstraction. The sensing seed is designed to surface the many materialisations of modernity while elucidating ethical entrées that are decolonially discordant with dominant dispositions by enabling reflexive, visceral and committed praxes of the many adjacent alternatives available, but largely imperceptible, even unimaginable, to modern humans. Through radical acceptance, attention to aesthesis and action, we can show up, cultivate connexion, kindle kin, grow groundward, tarry with trouble, abide in aporias and wallow in wiser lifeways akin to those of our pre-modern (i.e., primal) ancestors.

As a possibility for critical forest-based pedagogies, our study explores the pedagogical implications of forest therapy to address environmental justice as social justice in teacher preparation (Beltrán, Hacker and Begun, 2016). Our research question is: How might forest therapy offer reorientations and reimaginings of environmental and social justice for teacher educators? We draw from human-land relationship restoration (Kimmerer, 2013), ecojustice education, embodied and contemplative learning theories and forest therapy. We utilise Barkhuizen and Hacker’s (2009) narrative inquiry design as a framework for the design and data collection of our study. Their data collection and analysis design includes the following dimensions: 1) living the stories, 2) telling the stories in written narratives and 3) analysing and interpreting the stories. We, the researchers, are the participants in this study. Using thematic deductive analysis and constant comparison methods, our study generates three interrelated themes: forest therapy offers new modes of perceiving the world, expands definitions of learning in community and embraces embodied learning with an emphasis on humility and vulnerability. Through exploring these interconnected findings, we explore implications for educators, environmental education and ongoing pedagogical possibilities for meaningful climate action for the flourishing for all living beings.

Ecocriticism often employs a mimetic, text-based model that includes literary analysis of canonical nature writings complemented with wilderness excursions seeking verification of literary representations and place-based experience. I suggest that in order to better integrate ecocriticism within the Environmental Humanities’ decolonial and material turns, a pedagogy of “entangled material literacy” should be explored. This approach, grounded in biosemiotics and new materialist thought, enables a relational reading of nonfiction forest writings like Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, positioning the forest as a co-author in these works. Aligning with critical forest studies, this project examines the forest’s biosemiotic intelligence and agential multiplicities in human–nonhuman communicative meaning-making. Moreover, as reflected by the authors’ personal connections to forests, I argue that teaching entangled material literacy necessitates embodied experience, where the forest becomes a co-teacher, cultivating students’ competency for responsive engagement with a sentient more-than-human world.

This contribution focuses on our co-affective encounters with the Great African Seaforest in Cape Town, South Africa. We use a diffractive methodology to read Blue Humanities and marine biology texts through critical posthumanism and our freewritings and depictions of our embodied co-affective encounters of swimming and diving in the kelp. Swimming diffractively through such texts, our freewritings and images, we consider how the focus areas identified in the call for papers (CFP), namely sentience, imaginaries, regeneration and pedagogies, might be differently configured and understood through the Great African Seaforest. In keeping with the interconnected hydrological cycle of which we are all part, we consider the Great African Seaforest as a Global South “sentient interspecies learning community” (CFP) for broader global politico-ethico-onto-epistemological practices and relations. We argue that such diffractive immersive encounters of transdisciplinary approaches and creative expression can enliven embodied environmental Critical Forest Studies learning in novel ways.

It’s time to get serious about educating for heat literacy. Global warming (as one of the identified and globalised “crises” contributing to the prefix, “meta”) is well underway. Dreadful heat both on land and in the seas is baked into our collective futures. Frequent and prolonged heatwaves are pushing communities to their limits. We take seriously the UNICEF warning that within 25 years, all children on Earth will be regularly experiencing heatwaves and dangerous heat conditions. Our argument is that heat education is necessary across all formal education sectors (early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary), and at all community levels including informal education. In this article we explore the emergent concept of heat literacy. We consider what this encompasses by framing it as a survival literacy within the context of ongoing exposure to injury, risk or peril in a warming world.

There is now an abundance of literature pointing to the relationship between the escalating global impacts of climate change and the adverse effects of irreversible ecological destruction on the emotional worlds of children and young people. Contextualised to Manitoba, Canada, this article is positioned as a call for a more relationally accountable and response-able engagement with climate change and (child/youth) emotions, supporting curricular and pedagogical enactments in (western) education to grapple more ethically with social and ecological threats and injustices of these times. Through an anticolonial and posthumanist self-study in collaboration with a middle-years classroom, this article experiments with climate anxiety as anticolonial activism. Such a move seeks to generate different types of relations with Indigenous peoples, Land, and multispecies kin; and (re)imagine curricular and pedagogical enactments that usher open-ended, ambiguous, and indefinite engagement with the emotional politics of settler-colonialism.

Universities embody a fundamental paradox: they are institutions created to solve civilizational problems that have themselves become primary sites where such problems are generated. This paper develops “crack literacy” – the capacity to read institutional breaking patterns as information rather than failure. Through methodological engagement with kintsugi, the Japanese art of golden repair, we examine how universities operate as recursive systems where attempted solutions intensify original contradictions. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s temporal analysis, Isabelle Stengers’ concept of “learning to be affected,” and Bruno Latour’s hybrid networks, the investigation reveals why conventional approaches to institutional reform consistently reproduce the patterns they attempt to address. Following Yoko Tawada’s literary practice, this exploration allows itself to be shaped by the impossible conditions it investigates, developing forms of attention that conventional academic discourse cannot provide. Kintsugi doesn’t eliminate breaking but creates conditions for fragments to hold together differently. Universities practising crack literacy would learn to work with contradiction as structural necessity rather than problem to solve, developing temporal patience adequate to transformation that cannot be rushed.

Stories are important for individual areas of endeavour and for communities. Beyond the purpose of storing and sharing communal and national knowledge, heritage and consciousness, stories can be used as a powerful source of guidance in life. In what one may regard as a journey towards moral truth, the paths we create in that journey are forged with the support of our families and communities as well as with the guidance of those who have forged their journeys in similar ways. For the Onkwehón:we (i.e., the Native peoples of Canada and related territories), the stories of their communities and ancestors provide important points of reference and inspiration represented in cogent paradigmatic structures that can support their respective journeys. The following will explore how storytelling supports the retention, sharing and celebration of Onkwehón:we knowledge, heritage and consciousness with a focus upon archetypes, struggles, achievements and territory. Using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey Framework and with a focus on the Journey of the Peacemaker, the following will explore how the various components of such a story may be related to and inform the journey through life of Onkwehón:we and their communities.

Haudenosaunee Indigenous ontology observes direct connection between the well-being of the land, and the health and authenticity of human minds. In coastal rainforest regions of western Canada, coniferous trees are stressed and dying from the effects of heat and drought. If the well-being of human minds is inextricable from the intactness of the land and aspects of the land are suffering, might human minds, spirits and epistemologies also be affected? What forms of attentiveness and healing are needed to enable us to better “think with and through” local forests rather than merely about them? This exploration begins with artwork depicting dying trees in a spirit of loving elegy, and also the intangible, interconnected webs of life weaving together the pan-sentience of living systems. The argument is made that aesthetic engagement with local land offers needed ways to relearn our receptivity to the companionship and teachings of forest systems. I explore how epistemologies grounded in worldviews of interconnectivity might be nurtured through holistic, affective forms of attention characterised by betweenness. Particular attention is given to Sheridan and Longboat’s notion of minding all things, where human minds are seen as inseparable from the land.

This essay will describe the critical importance of developing a posthuman aesthetic pedagogy capable of integrating what Eduardo Kohn (2013) has described as multinatural perspectivalism in How Forests Think. Multinatural perspectivalism describes the multiplicity of beyond-human perspectives staked on an event. An aesthetic system capable of integrating this beyond-human multiplicity poses the problem of forms of signification and semiosis which transcend the socialised register constructed by anthropocentric experience and should define signs which can be meaningful across the diverse levels of consciousness associated with more-than-human subjectivity. In this essay, I will describe this as a lucky aesthetic, capable of producing lucky signs. I will associate lucky signs with ecological practices oriented around stewardship such as regenerative farming and forestry, whereby the steward is tasked to identify and interpret lucky signs expressive of beyond-human experience. I argue this postulates an aesthetic pedagogy derived from our relationship with nature and is modelled by animist ritual practices like Capoeira Angola. I thereby conclude by arguing that animist ritual models forms of environmental education expressive of a beyond-human view of art practice.

To understand the challenges of climate change in a specific setting, it is essential to examine the social, cultural, environmental, economic and other national contexts. This paper provides an overview of Bhutan, highlighting the current climate change trends and their potential impacts on both the environment and society. Special attention is given to the impending implications for Bhutan’s education system, particularly how changing climatic conditions may affect learners’ well-being, learning and education. Additionally, the paper discusses the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) — the national development philosophy of Bhutan — and how climate change may challenge this aspiration while also presenting opportunities to advance sustainability. Finally, the prospects for further exploration and the role school communities may have in climate actions are underlined.