The study explored physical education teacher educators’ (PETE educators) perspectives on integrating sustainable development (SD) imperatives within PETE courses. Nine PETE educators participated in a nine-month professional learning project featuring six workshops and seminars promoting reflection, peer discussion and dialogic encounters. The PETE educators designed pedagogical interventions based on their teaching practices, selecting teaching units where SD perspectives could be integrated. Data included intervention papers, audio-recorded sessions and logbooks, analysed descriptively and thematically. The proposed interventions focused on inclusion, equality and lifelong physical activity, and typically included lectures, seminars, student-centred teaching, reflections and assignments. Challenges included contextualising SD in PETE, framing SD goals, integrating SD content and addressing its normative nature. The study offers insights into the potential of integrating SD perspectives in PETE, highlights associated challenges, and calls for further research to bridge theory and practice.

Critical Forest Studies is a rapidly growing field that takes multispecies relationships with/in forests as the starting point for critical and creative inquiry. Shaped by the contested political ecologies that emerge where different forest cosmologies, languages, histories, and ecologies meet, the field builds on related developments in the environmental humanities which explore multispecies relations through artistic, historical, philosophical, poetic, literary, and performative approaches. As the first special issue dedicated to Critical Forest Studies, this collection brings the field into direct dialogue with the theories, methodologies, and practices of environmental education. Environmental education has a rich and generative history of relational engagement with forests — from place-based and outdoor learning traditions to more-than-human and posthumanist approaches — and this collection builds on and extends that history. Indigenous and place-based perspectives are foregrounded throughout, bringing together diverse interdisciplinary understandings across four key areas: forest sentience, forest imaginaries, forest regeneration, and forest pedagogies. The collection bridges conceptual, artistic, empirical, methodological, and educational practices across these four themes, opening new possibilities for how environmental education might think, feel, and act with forests in times of ecological urgency.

This study conducts a historical analysis tracing the evolution of climate change narratives from the late 1960s to the present. The analysis produces a comprehensive map of these narratives and identifies three key shortcomings that still need to be addressed in academic literature. First, there are inherent limitations to each narrative, which operate within the confines of their respective theoretical frameworks, shaped by their unique perspectives. Second, climate narratives are not isolated but interconnected; new narratives often emerge from earlier ones, forming a continuum that evolves over time. This dynamic corresponds closely to the three structural dimensions of narrative analysis. Third, existing climate narratives insufficiently incorporate perspectives from territories and cultural contexts beyond dominant Western geographies, thereby marginalising non-Western voices and experiences. As a result, many cultural and political factors that influence responses to climate change remain underrepresented, narrowing how we understand this global issue.

This paper uses karlup bidi (pathway home) as a metaphor to show and explain the cultural landscape of a significant central Perth locality: Kaart Gennunginyup Bo, or Karrgatup, or Kaarta Koomba, also known as King’s Park. Drawing on oral histories, cultural narratives and contemporary reflections, the study uses Noongar understandings of Country, family, time and relationship to challenge and decolonise Western paradigms of land use and identity. The intent is to narrate Noongar Boodja (Country) as it was, remains and always will be – as Noongar heartland. Central to this paper is the trilogy of boodja, moort, kaartdijin (Country, family, knowledge), a framework for relating with Noongar boodja in caring, animate, thriving and responsive ways.

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.

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.

For many First Peoples, language is indissociable from living relationships within interspecies communities where humans are not the only ones who feel, think, listen and speak. Words not only carry meanings attributable to human language but also carry the spirit of a place, as both a material and metaphysical transmission of sentience across species and generations. This article draws on ecolinguistic research into the Indigenous language of the Dayak Ngaju people and its role in regenerating peatland forests in Central Kalimantan. The study employs an Indigenous research methodology led by the first author, who is a PhD student and member of the Dayak Ngaju community. This methodology situates Dayak Ngaju language within an animistic reality inclusive of nonhuman creatures, objects and spiritual beings. Attending to the complexities of Indigenous PhD studies, the article proposes the cultivation of “new animisms,” which recognise the future-making pedagogies of Indigenous ontologies and ecolinguistic systems.

Ecological awareness is a global priority, and Green School initiatives seek to embed environmental education in everyday school practice. This study examines how the “Green School” is discursively constructed by interpreting visual materials from Indonesian schools designated as Adiwiyata (Green) Schools. Guided by social semiotic theory, we conducted a phenomenological interpretative analysis. The analytical framework follows three metafunctions: Ideational, interpersonal, and textual. We analysed images, icons, and posters associated with two recurring activity domains: (1) greening the school environment and (2) promoting environmentally friendly behaviour. The findings indicate that Adiwiyata discourse foregrounds ecological awareness, normalises pro-environmental practices, and positions students and teachers as key agents of environmental preservation.

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.

The study investigates the interplay between personal values and attitudes toward environmental responsibility (ER) among MBA students from two distinct cultural contexts: Australia (individualist) and India (collectivist). Drawing on survey responses from the University of Newcastle, Australia and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Kolkata, the study employs factor analysis and Multivariate Least Squares (MLS) to test whether cultural orientation moderates the predictive relationship between value priorities and ER attitudes. Findings reveal significant cross-cultural contrasts: Australian respondents prioritise security, conformity and power, whereas Indian respondents emphasise achievement, benevolence and universalism. Contrary to theoretical expectations, self-transcendence (benevolence, universalism) and self-enhancement (achievement, power) values exert a stronger influence among Indian participants. These results challenge universalist assumptions in sustainability education. The study offers actionable implications for corporate recruitment, climate policy and MBA curriculum design, highlighting how cultural value systems shape managerial attitudes toward ER.

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.

We designed and implemented a clay art-making workshop with teacher candidates called Change with the Earth in Mind, focused on listening to the Earth. Drawing on Bentz’s (Bentz, J. (2020). Learning about climate change in, with and through art. Climatic Change, 162(3), 1595-1612). Framework, we sought to engage teacher candidates in, with, and through art that evokes climate change themes. Leveraging this art education experience as a research study utilising a/r/tography and narrative inquiry, we drew meaning from our observations of the workshops and the resulting art pieces. Here we feature composite narrative reflections on how the teacher candidates were preparing and working the clay, leaving traces, creating clay leftovers, and how we engaged with decay of the clay. The contributions of this study to teacher education, art education, and environmental education are in how clay art-making pedagogies can become a generative medium, and a generative metaphor, for human relationships to the Earth, and for climate education pedagogies.

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 paper explores the multiple stories and affective traces that wetlands and swamps generate in more-than-human environments. Situated on what was once a swamp, Naarm (Melbourne) provides the setting for the authors’ collective creative inquiry. This work explores more-than-human methodologies of knowledge creation, examines how these approaches impact multispecies justice and investigates how wetlands can serve as transitional, unstaged spaces that challenge and disrupt colonial infrastructures. While drawing back on memories and experiences of wetlands in Southern China and Southeast Europe, the authors incorporate poetic mappings and autoethnographic interviews in exploring the reminisces and encounters living with more-than-human pasts and presents. Following the way of wetlands, the authors seek to foster unexpected ecologies between water, land, species and a multiplicity of ontologies in the abundance of in-between spaces as a generative learning-creation site.

In an era of accelerating ecological degradation, how might experimental art practices help audiences foster deeper, more empathetic engagement with the intelligence of living systems? This paper explores the potential of contemporary art, when aligned with ecological science, to reframe forest regeneration as a site of aesthetic and ethical inquiry — by regarding the forest as a primary composer within artistic and ecological frameworks. It asks: how might this approach underpin a novel form of “Critical Forest Pedagogy” capable of deepening our understanding of the collective natural intelligence of the living world and encouraging long-term conservation?

To test these ideas, a new art-science project, Forest Art Intelligence, was initiated, framing a regenerating forest as an evolving, living artwork. Because forests evolve through stages mediated by life, death, regeneration and human influence, those stages of growth can also be framed as “process art” — a practice that values each stage of an artwork’s transformation. Collectively therefore this approach proposes a form of art-led “Critical Forest Pedagogy” suited to engaging communities traditionally unaligned with conservation, while remaining relevant to ecologically cognate audiences. It further asks whether this framing might promote a rethinking of restrictive, human-centred definitions of intelligence that underpin generative AI.

This Special Focus interrogates the intersection of colonial land relations, social consciousness and ecological justice within the field of environmental education. Contributing authors to this volume provide diverse narrative inquiries grounded in anticolonial activism, Land as kin and teacher, Indigenous perspectives in Canada and Australia, Asian Critical Race Theory, Yazidi resilience in Mesopotamia and LGBTQIA+ spatial justice in Bosnia to collectively subvert Eurocentric hierarchies of knowledge. In hacking paradigms of Whiteness and coloniality, this Special Focus reimagines storytelling not as a cathartic cure for the Anthropocene∼Necrocene but as a radical method of intergenerational accountability. Through these diverse narratives, this Special Focus advocates for a pedagogical transformation rooted in becoming-and-belonging-with, offering new worldings for still-possible futures.

Climate scenarios are produced through modelling, scientists draw on previously collected data and directions retrieved from governmental reports. In this article, an environmental data scientist and an artist-researcher reflect on their long-term art/science collaboration. They examine how certain models operate in forest ecologies. The concept of the “possible” by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) accompanies them in questioning the idea of a future that would be already predetermined or resolved. This is to offer alternative views of the climate emergency, notwithstanding its unprecedented importance and scale. Climate modelling remains open to change, as does the experience of various types of imagery in art. With the notion of the “data-image”, the authors delve into a local/micro incursion about tree carbon quantification visualisation techniques. This is discussed through an immersive outdoor art installation, according to experiential learning in place-based and arts-based interdisciplinary collaboration with digital media. The process of questioning how these images are produced and disseminated are ways to support visual literacy as it moves towards ecoliteracy. A thematic overview of responses by publics who experienced the art installations is included, to highlight the role of creativity and imagination with art in environmental education.

Our work brings together three educators – a doctoral student and sessional instructor, a middle years teacher and master’s student, and a university professor – who come to this project from divergent positionalities, ancestries and educational geographies. Across the span of one summer, we engaged in critically reflexive dialogue, sharing field texts including teaching artefacts (syllabi, assignments, lesson plans) and personal writings that map our entangled pedagogical transformations. These stories are not linear narratives of improvement, but rather messy, layered accounts of yearning, grief, contradiction and co-becoming in entangled relational worlds. As we story our experiences, we ask: What does it mean to teach science in ways that resist colonial erasures? How might we reimagine science education as a site of ethical response-ability, rooted in Land, story and ancestral relation? Our inquiry is situated in the Canadian education system, but it resists nationalistic framing by foregrounding Indigenous sovereignties, spiritual geographies and the deep affective currents of learning in stolen land. With the reminder that locating ourselves – through ancestry, land, language and community – is an act of relational accountability; we delve into situated, plural stories that trouble the singularity of “Science” itself.

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.

The emerging field of critical forest studies necessitates more-than-human approaches to knowledge creation with forestscapes that makes their complex and expansive relationships sensible. This calls for a new ecological reading of the research image, and in turn, a new image of research which attends to Indigenous and place-based connections across bodies, geographies and temporalities. This paper explores this new political ontology of the image as a process of ecologisation that works towards decolonising ends. By putting machine imaging technologies such as drone footage, thermal imaging and spectrograms into conversation with Indigenous painting and storytelling practices, we endeavour to express ecological processes which often go unseen within forests. Our speculative analysis of these images disrupts modernist separations of difference from sameness, body from environment, myth from science and imagining from empirical fact, proposing pedagogies which connect material and metaphysical dimensions of sensing and learning with forests.