I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace … Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves … Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs …

Teachers are grappling with increased pressure and expectations to facilitate transformative education experiences, the kinds of experiences that cultivate dispositions and skillsets essential for young peoples’ preparedness to imagine and create sustainable futures. As expectations for teachers grow, so too do initiatives intended to assist their efforts, such as the advent of classroom-ready education resources. The rise of educational resources gives cause for closer examination of how they are developed, particularly with respect to the ways they situate content in the deployment of curricular, methodological and pedagogical concepts. This article presents a practice and process of education resource creation using multi-modal content that entangles global education and conservation agendas. Through the mediating lens of UNESCO’s pillars of education, a critical discussion of the utility of these for enabling and inhibiting the articulation of a professional practice for education resource creation is offered. With the imperative for sustainability-focused education and prevalence of education resources being produced to support this, we scrutinise the importance of demystifying the professional practice of education resource creation. In doing so, we point to insights that become available when the curricular, pedagogical and methodological concepts informing education resource creation are made transparent and accessible.

We are the living. We find ourselves in a mess that is sometimes called the ‘Anthropocene’. This is a mess that has been hidden, ignored, neglected through a narrative of progress, consumption, linearity, categorisation, control, prosperity, rationality. To respond to this narrative, we employ ‘mess-making’ as a force for resistance. We rethink our more-than-human relations by concepting with mess to invigorate, agitate and provoke. Employing Haraway’s (2008) ‘messmates’, we conceptualise how ‘we’ as ecosystems of thriving life forms are constantly living, learning and dying together and need to find new ways to co-research with/in/for more-than-human methodologies. These, we suggest, are inherently messy. The paper is organised in a nonconventional way in that it is mostly created by more-than-human narratives gathered from two doctoral post-qualitative inquiries exploring play in an urban forest school in London and animal-child relations in a wall-less school in Bali. We explore how mess-making is both generative and challenging as data emerge in dynamic and exciting ways. With this messy turn, we illuminate potential for educational futures that support multispecies flourishing.

This paper explores the potential for extending relational ontologies to include a specific focus on human-plant relations. We theorise the emergence of a vegetal ontology, as a novel way of working and remaking theories around human-plant relations that can be applied to the field of environmental education. A vegetal ontological approach, as applied in the environmental education research project that informs this article, abandons hierarchical comparisons of plants, which are often historically positioned as “lesser species,” mere “objects” and “resources” even. We start our paper with a modest review of key theoretical approaches informing past and recent environmental education studies on child-plant relations. We then return to the discussion started within the introduction to the paper on how we have theorised a vegetal ontology as a mode of a relational ontology focussing particularly on human-plant relations and drawing on posthumanist, new materialist and Indigenous approaches. To conclude the paper, we then put this newly named vegetal ontology to work. We apply it to a recent study on childhood-plant encounters where researchers engaged with young children and their families in a botanical garden setting and a group of environmental education elders reflected on the significance of plant relations in their childhoods.

Despite the growing influence of the “material” turn within childhood studies and education, scholarship related to teaching and learning within the early childhood classroom remains a largely humanistic endeavour. By applying relational and multispecies onto-epistomologies to both children’s classroom relations and our own teacher subjectivities, this work aims to highlight what other possibilities emerge when the dominant hierarchies of teacher-researcher-child-non-human are destabilised. Taking the idea of destabilisation literally, we diffractively map our own experiences as teacher-researchers within early years educational contexts, utilising diffractive methods to narrow-in on the mutually constituted conditions of movement. These more-than-human movements emerged during improvised classroom encounters between young children, animals and plants and varied in intensity and duration, as these constructed cuts and data (re)presentations continue to “move” us years later. Building upon research that explores the relationalities of children and non-human others, as well as “how movement does relationships’’ in early childhood educational contexts (Riley & Proctor, 2023, p. 663), we argue that a complex meta/physics of more-than-human movement affords literal and conceptual turning, enmeshing, decentering, connecting and rupturing, producing a less certain but more attuned early years teacher.

More-than-human refusal, as an expression of agency, plays an active role in constructing boundaries. In this article, I address what kind of environmental education is made possible by the productive constraints of respecting more-than-human boundaries and refusal. This is intertwined with how humans can practice being attentive to the intra-actions of more-than-humans when they are not physically present, are only speculated to be present or are present through artifacts. I rhizomatically analyse my relationship with a leafcutter bee (Megachile spp.) nest as a situated example of practicing a relational ethic of care. Through queering the boundary between myself and the leafcutter bee, nature becomes not something that I (human) experience, but as something we (bougainvillea-leafcutter bee-nest-human assemblage) produce through our human-and-more-than-human relationality. Rather than seeing limited proximity as prohibitive, environmental education can use this productive constraint to know-with more-than-human others in a way that disrupts the nature/culture binary — to blur the boundaries between humans and more-than-humans without violating the agency asserted by more-than-humans.

Though there has been a marked increase in research driven by posthumanist theory and inspired by the common worlds research approach, practical approaches to conducting this type of research have not been well documented and shared within the literature. This article explores the process of navigating the planning and conducting of research that aims to think with more-than-human worlds. Three research methods that were applied in a study involving young children in a forest school program are described: (1) non-participant observation, (2) observing the park through “sit spots,” and (3) the use of wearable cameras to film a different perspective. I explore each of these as a way to guide other researchers grappling with the tensions and challenges of conducting posthumanist research. Any combination of these methods could be considered within research that aims to disrupt the dominant anthropocentric lens in early childhood education for sustainability and beyond.

How well do we know how non-humans experience environmental stressors and how do we communicate that knowledge as educators? This paper addresses these questions by way of an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s experience of attempting to listen to the Great Barrier Reef, off the Queensland coast. Through a series of methodological failures and roadblocks, this paper discusses the difficulties in understanding non-human sensory worlds. Following the auto-ethnographic account, the paper explores how anthropological pedagogies can contribute to environmental education of non-human experiences more broadly. The paper uses anthropological pedagogy to draw an analogy between ethnocentrism/cultural relativism and anthropocentrism/ecocentrism. Utilising practices of “third place” then demonstrates how the latter terms of these relationships are correctives to the former terms rather than oppositions. This paper concludes by suggesting ways in which the lessons learned can be applied to environmental education. It recommends creating a third space environmental curriculum which defamiliarises human experience and creates a zone of contact between humans and non-humans. The use of mediating technologies and artistic practice in conjunction with scientific education is recommended to maintain a critical perspective of human knowledge and biological limitations in creating experiential relationships with the environment.

Researchers across outdoor and environmental education (OEE) are drawing on relational ontologies to break down dualisms, human-centric thinking and challenge neoliberal education that focusses on outcomes and achievements. Digital technology has been seen as problematic in OEE because of its distracting qualities within notions of authentic outdoor experiences. Re-conceptualising digital technology as something learners are entangled with — rejecting a dualistic position — offers a nuanced way of understanding how digital technology could be harnessed for OEE. This research presents speculative findings from a new materialist inspired project on how teachers considered video-making and the more-than-human in OEE. Working with assemblage theory and attention to affect, we portray ways assemblages of video-making and the more-than-human can shape OEE in new ways. Implications for educators in how they might assemble OEE with technology are suggested.

The case has been made — many of the approaches humans employ to address environmental collapse are founded on the very (White, Western, colonial, positivist, capitalist, human supremacist) thinking that advanced planetary degradation in the first place. We know how this story ends. If we continue perpetuating narratives of management, mastery and (White) human supremacy through environmental education (EE) and confront environmental issues accordingly, we will only advance Earth’s demise. Only by countering narratives of human exceptionalism and acknowledging the entangled and deeply relational nature of our existence can we begin to envision worlds of care for all. Reconceptualising EE as a polyphonic storying of relations with the more-than-human “keeps the way open” for humans to reassess our role in the world.

In this article, we adopt assemblage as methodology and as a way to foreground the vitality and relational agency of other species as they encounter humans. Research as assemblage is a process of becoming with others, and we experienced that ontological process during three environmental excursions as we became entangled in multispecies assemblages with children, the Crow, the Sea Eagle and the Bee. The production of the three assemblages and the rhizomic networks that formed materially and discursively across time occurred within an affective milieu characterised by sensory attentiveness and attunement to the affective power of coincidence. Analysing the formation and reformation of the assemblages enabled us to identify the phenomenon of “ontological flickering” where the ontological foundation of experience shifted moment by moment and remained playfully unresolved. We also consider how multispecies encounters relate to wildness, understood in Thoreau’s terms as unsettling encounters with otherness. In concluding, we recognise our incomplete becoming with others as co-authors and acknowledge the Crow the Sea Eagle and the Bee as powerful teachers.

While Indigenous knowledges have long recognised forests as sentient and caring societies, western sciences have only acknowledged that trees communicate, learn and care for one another in recent years. These different ways of coming to know and engage with trees as sentient agents are further complicated by the introduction of digital technologies and automated decision-making into forest ecosystems. This article considers this confluence of forest sentience and digital technologies through a pedagogy and ethic of immanent care as a relational framework for analysis and praxis in environmental education. The authors apply this framework to three key examples along Birrarung Marr, an ancient gathering place and urban parklands in the city of Naarm (Melbourne). These include an immersive theatre-making project exploring forest communication networks with young children; the Melbourne Urban Forest data set, which hosts digital profiles for over 70,000 trees; and the Greenline masterplan which aims to revitalise the north bank of the Birrarung over the next five years. Exploring the ethical and pedagogical contours of these examples leads to propositions for rethinking the role of environmental education in navigating the current confluence of animal, vegetal, fungal and digital life.

The history of environmental education in Australia is political, and fraught with power battles. Indeed, environmental education in Australia (as in many places elsewhere) has always been political. The early calls for environmental education came as a response to the perceived growing environmental crises on the 1960s. At this time, it was seen as a scientific and social priority by scientists, environmentalists and academics, but it was not seen as an educational priority by education departments. Rather, environmental educators were treated as yet another adjectival education lobby group wanting space in an already overcrowded curriculum. There was a time when most state education authorities were engaging with environmental education, but the politicisation of the placement of sustainability as (an optional) cross-curriculum priority has enabled avoidance of the politics of environmental issues and thereby a political stance that is tacitly supporting the status quo of the current neoliberal political systems. This article argues that the times have changed and so has the nature of politics and power bases, and it is time to rethink approaches to environmental education research and recognise that the politics of the past may not be the politics of the future as the generations grow different.