This study examines the role of gakushū manga, or educational Japanese comics, in shaping collective memory narratives of World War II. It explores whether these works diverge from or perpetuate Japan-centric interpretations of World War II by analysing thematic trends, representational strategies, and selective memory frameworks. The findings reveal a dominant emphasis on Japanese victimhood, mainly through graphic depictions of civilian suffering, while representations of foreign victims, such as Chinese and Korean civilians, remain abstract or marginalised. The responsibility of those in positions of leadership is selectively portrayed, often exonerating figures like Emperor Hirohito, and the actions of such militaristic leaders are contextualised within broader systemic ideologies.

These manga replicate postwar narratives by foregrounding societal complicity, deliberate omission, and the delegation of the ‘Other’ to the periphery, in line with broader patterns of media-driven nationalism. They provide nuanced critiques of Japan’s wartime conduct but simultaneously maintain a selective focus that minimises Japan’s responsibilities as an aggressor. This research underscores the need for a balanced collective memory to foster reconciliation and a more inclusive understanding of wartime legacies in East Asia.

In this paper, we explore the challenges and possibilities of environmental teacher education in the unravelling of a metacrisis. Drawing from multiple perspectives from post-growth literature, environmental sciences, political ecology and philosophy of education, we argue for the need to navigate complex environmental issues through simple yet profound narratives, what we term simplexity. As environmental educators working in the Pacific Northwest, we reflect on our distinct positionalities to propose five pedagogical touchstones that bridge the gap between overwhelming complexity and oversimplification in teacher education. These touchstones include: (1) challenging nature – culture divides and acknowledging alternative ontologies, (2) countering pessimistic views while fostering post-growth imaginaries, (3) confronting the Great Acceleration and ecological overshoot, (4) recognising power dynamics and colonial legacies in metropolis-periphery relations and (5) engaging with the aesthetic and embodied dimensions of climate disasters. Our framework seeks to propose pedagogical openings for teacher educators to cultivate agency and critical hope in environmental teacher education.

The Sundarbans in the short stories by Dalit writer Shyamal Kumar Pramanik is not some geographical setting but is instead a living environmental being that reinvents the relationship between man and the nonhuman world. Dalit, a word translating to “oppressed” and applied to groups that were traditionally marginalised by the caste system of India, becomes a key category through which Pramanik explores the ethics of survival, belonging and ecological resistance. This paper argues that the mangrove forest in Pramanik’s narratives such as “Life in the Forest” and “In Dakshin Rai’s Land” operates as a responsive vegetal agent that shapes the social, ethical and ontological dynamics of forest life for marginalised communities. Drawing on Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking (2013), J. C. Ryan’s (2018) botanical imagination, Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory (2015) and Matthew Hall’s (2011) articulation of vegetal life as a moral force – this paper develops the concept of “Dalit Botanics” – a term for a theoretical framework that understands forest life as a pedagogical and ethical system in which trees act as epistemic agents, to theorise the Sundarbans as a sentient pedagogical ecology and to examine how caste and plant life co-constitute each other in Dalit experience.

Humans possess the capacity to make sense of stories unfolding across different and difficult times with nuanced understanding and to unlearn and relearn what once seemed familiar. All human beings are storytellers, and the narratives of minorities deserve recognition and value within Westernised contexts. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives and employing a narrative inquiry approach, I share stories from my lived experiences as a former graduate student and current educator. These stories focus on pedagogical practices, dynamic identity formation and reflective engagements with place as valid and vital ways of knowing, doing, being and becoming. I highlight how choice often entails challenge, how agency and struggle can be intertwined with empowerment, and how marginalisation can coexist with celebration. This inquiry aims to reveal the layered complexity and sometimes paradoxical dimensions of learner and teacher identities within the assemblage of learning and teaching in higher education.

Native forests in Aotearoa/New Zealand are at significant risk from the plant diseases myrtle rust and kauri dieback. Mobilising for Action (MFA) was a four-year transdisciplinary research project exploring the social dimensions of these pathogens and forest health through social science, humanities, creative arts and mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), with experts, artists, iwi/hapū (tribes/sub-tribes) and communities, empowering and supporting them in their efforts to address forest disease and promote forest health. A waka houora (double-hulled canoe) framework guided MFA to enable Western knowledge systems to operate alongside mātaurangā Māori, allowing for collaboration, cross-cultural learning and Indigenous empowerment through artistic research and related approaches. We propose that through various creative arts approaches, MFA built relationships and partnerships between Māori and other cultures, people and forests and disciplines, in addition to developing novel research methods in forest health through storytelling and narratives, offering new possibilities in critical forest studies and care.

Martuwarra the Fitzroy River, is a living entity encompassing law, values, ethics and virtues who has laid the foundation for learning and self-regulation. Martuwarra foster peace, harmony and balance within a water system covering 93,829 square kilometres of the Western Australian Kimberley region. However, climate uncertainty as part of the unfolding metacrisis demonstrates the limitations of decades of colonial invasive development in the Kimberley. In this paper the authors illustrate Traditional Owner water knowledge, science and lived experiences as managers of the catchment from the beginning of time. Traditional Owner knowledge and practices, fine-tuned over thousands of years, carry water governance and management through First Law, the law of the land and not man. The authors advocate for this ancient knowledge to be learned by fellow citizens in the region, governments, industries and other parts of Australia, as it is essential to modernity. They propose a bicultural and bioregional governance model to create a better future for the greater good of all.

In Northern Finland, including sparsely populated Finnish Lapland and the small city of Rovaniemi, the widespread clearing of old trees has degraded the boreal environment. Disrupting the diverse relationships between people and trees, climate change will continue to alter the country’s northernmost forests, as is widely known. In this urgent context, we propose that the collaborative project Gifts from the Sentient Forest (GSF) has developed new modes of interacting with Northern Finland’s trees and appreciating their biocultural legacies. At the project’s core is arboreal sentience, a concept illuminating the capacities of trees to sense, communicate, behave, learn and remember. In the project, other-than-human sentience provides a basis for cultivating tree-human communication while expanding Lapland residents’ awareness of sylvan communities through painting, photography, film, music, poetry and performance. In this article, we present an account of three methods leveraged in the GSF programme to facilitate experiences of tree sentience in Northern Finland: sensing, interviewing (speaking) and remembering.

There has been an understanding of a disconnected relation between humans and nature in modern liberalism. The disengaged relation is closely tied to dichotomous perceptions of realities with a widening gap between humans and nature, subject and object and culture and nature. This article considers the disconnected understanding as a sense-making crisis of modernity and qualifies this as a metacrisis. Instead of the disengaged views and the dichotomous relation between humans and nature, this article claims that the relations between the human self and nature is culturally, socially and politically mediated. To elaborate on these phenomena, this paper examines the writings of two thinkers with diverse concerns: Charles Taylor and Antonio Gramsci. For Taylor, the self is mediated with nature through social imaginaries, language and reconciliation in labour. For Gramsci, the self is mediated with the natural world via common sense, socio-historical elements and work. This article argues that cultural and socio-political elements that mediate human-nature relationships are essential in environmental education.

As usually conceived and practiced, education – sustainability, environmental and beyond – is embedded in an overarching narrative of progress: increasing human knowledge leading us to make wiser decisions about our behaviour, as individuals and societies. This article outlines an alternative story that draws on the work of two Indigenous scholars, E. Richard Atleo (Nuu-chah-nulth) and Leanne Simpson (Nishnaabeg), who approach living well as a quest to co-exist in harmony and balance with all our relations (that is, the living world of which we are an integral part). Among the core principles they identify are self-determination, consent and sacred respect, understood both as operative in the functioning of healthy ecosystems and as guides to human development and relationships. We show how these principles are grounded in a quest for the mutual beneficial flourishing of free beings and trace some of their implications for environmental education. While stories of this kind are at odds with the current dominant conception of schooling, there are many ways in which they could begin to influence how we move beyond the metacrisis and further, how wethink about and practice education for eco-social –cultural change and the future world/s to come.

Digital oratory skills have become essential for academic and professional success in today’s digital world, making it imperative to integrate digital oratory training into public speaking pedagogy. This study examined second language (L2) speakers’ public speaking anxiety and nonverbal speech performance in the context of digital oratory. Participants were 40 English as a second language students enrolled in a public speaking course at a Hong Kong university. Each student recorded and uploaded an 8-minute speech to a digital learning platform. They also completed a questionnaire measuring digital oratory anxiety and participated in semi-structured interviews sharing their perceptions of digital presentation. Nonverbal speech performance was assessed, and correlations with digital oratory anxiety were analyzed. The results showed that cognitive and physiological factors had a greater influence on digital oratory anxiety than behavioral and technical factors. Although no significant correlations were found between digital oratory anxiety and nonverbal speech performances, the technical factor had the least impact on L2 students’ anxiety, leading to positive outcomes regarding the technical quality of the speech videos. Comparatively, eye contact and gestures attained much lower mean scores than voice control and facial expressions. Interview results further elucidated the benefits and challenges students experienced during digital presentations. Pedagogically, the findings highlight the need of a holistic approach considering cognitive, physiological, behavioral, and technical factors to address L2 learners’ digital oratory anxiety. Given its affordability and accessibility, digital oratory can be effectively integrated into instruction to develop L2 students’ multimodal communication and nonverbal delivery skills.