This study examines the evolution of inequalities of opportunity in school access and educational attainment in Morocco between 1998 and 2014. It analyses how individual, household and parental circumstances shape children’s educational trajectories using data from the ENNVM 1998–1999 and RGPH 2014. Two econometric approaches are applied: a probit model to estimate school enrolment and a right-censored ordered probit model to assess attainment levels. Focusing on children aged 12–19, predicted probabilities are used to identify the most and least advantaged profiles. The results show that children from advantaged backgrounds are significantly more likely to enrol and progress, while disadvantaged children face higher risks of non-enrolment and early dropout. Although disparities have slightly declined, they remain substantial. These findings highlight persistent opportunity gaps and the need for targeted, equity-oriented policies. Beyond socio-economic implications, educational inequality also affects environmental education and sustainability learning in Morocco. Unequal access to education may limit environmental literacy, climate awareness and the capacity of vulnerable populations to engage in sustainable practices, thereby constraining progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 4.7.

Insects are increasingly used in environmental education (EE) due to their high diversity, ecological relevance, and presence in urban environments. This study evaluates the use of insects as a pedagogical tool by implementing formal and non-formal EE activities with secondary students living in areas with a high incidence of vector-borne diseases, on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. A total of 118 students participated in theoretical, fieldwork, and laboratory activities, as well as a public outreach event (“Entomo-Expo”). Pre- and post-workshop questionnaires were used to assess changes in knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes. At the end of the workshop, students identified 11 insect orders. They communicated their knowledge using scientific terminology, and negative reactions toward insects decreased, particularly in reports on killing behaviour, while responses associated with observation and the release of insects increased. Participants also recognised key ecological roles of insects, especially pollination. These results are associated with improvements in students’ conceptual understanding and more positive attitudes towards insects following participation in the programme. However, given the pre–post-design without a control group, these findings should be interpreted as changes over time rather than causal effects. To address the persistence of negative behaviours in older students, EE should employ both formal and non-formal teaching strategies to support a sense of responsibility and encourage a cognitive shift toward sustainable development.

This paper examines the cultural, ecological and political dimensions of the contemporary water crisis through a curatorial and environmental humanities lens. Through the watery conceptual epoch of the Hydrocene, it highlights the work of artists and interdisciplinary practitioners whose hydro-artistic methods propose ways to realign human–water relations. Central to this analysis is the role of curatorial care, here understood as a practice of convening, holding and enabling reciprocal encounters between bodies of water, artists and communities. Bringing these diverse practices into dialogue, the paper proposes water not only as subject matter but as a potential collaborator and leaky agent. It argues that such watery approaches are vital to reshaping collective imaginaries and navigating the planetary water crisis. Extending the conceptual framework developed in the author’s monograph, this paper works with curatorial care as a situated methodology. Through a responsive roundtable bringing marine science, acoustic research and documentary filmmaking into dialogue with hydro-artistic practice, it asks how curatorial work can itself become a mode of inquiry and how artistic and cross-disciplinary water encounters might operate as forms of environmental learning beyond the classroom.

In response to New South Wales’ target of eliminating Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) waste to landfill by 2,050, this study investigates how environmental education shapes residents’ awareness and waste-sorting behaviours in multi-unit dwellings (MUDs) across Greater Western Sydney. Adopting an exploratory mixed-methods approach – integrating surveys, bin audits, interviews, and infrastructure assessments – the research reveals persistent knowledge gaps and structural constraints, particularly among culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) households. Guided by the Action Competence Framework (ACF), the findings underscore that effective FOGO participation is not driven by infrastructure alone. Rather, it depends on inclusive, participatory, and culturally responsive education that fosters understanding, builds confidence, and strengthens a sense of shared responsibility. Intergenerational learning emerges as a critical pathway, where everyday household interactions enable behavioural shifts and help reduce contamination at the source. While limited by a small sample size (n = 33) and its exploratory scope, the study makes a meaningful contribution to environmental education scholarship by extending the application of the ACF to informal residential settings. It also offers practical insights for local governments, highlighting the need to embed community-based learning strategies that can drive sustained engagement and support long-term sustainability outcomes in high-density urban environments.

Climate change is threatening humanity’s existence. Youth have the potential and capability to contribute to tackling climate change. The current study aims to examine how school and family environmental education can enhance environmental knowledge, willingness to act, and pro-environmental behaviours among children and young people. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was utilised on a nationally representative dataset of 2069 Vietnamese primary, secondary, and high school students. The analysis suggests that school- and family-based environmental education is beneficial for improving students’ environmental knowledge and willingness to take environmental action. Notably, the effect of school education is more substantial for cultivating environmental knowledge, whereas family education has a stronger impact on raising students’ willingness to act. Students with better environmental knowledge are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours only when they are willing to act. If students are unwilling, higher environmental knowledge is negatively associated with pro-environmental behaviour. Building on these findings, we advocate for coordinated educational efforts between schools and families to strengthen students’ environmental knowledge, pro-environmental intentions, and behaviours. Furthermore, we emphasise the need for Vietnam’s education system to gradually shift away from didactic, top-down methods toward more experiential, interdisciplinary, and student-centred approaches that support transformative environmental learning and nurture an eco-surplus culture.

The study investigates the potential role that films may play in raising awareness and motivation to act for climate change mitigation. The study was conducted amongst middle school children based in Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh, India (n = 135). The selected students were classified into higher and lower exposure groups based on their level of exposure to climate vulnerabilities. All the participants were given an educational intervention through a short film designed to enhance the student’s understanding of climate change issues. Data were analysed using GLMM with fixed effects of time, exposure and their interaction. Knowledge increased significantly from pre- to post-test on all items (McNemar’s tests, all p < 0.001). Although both groups improved, gains were consistently larger in the high-exposure group. Model-predicted probabilities rose from 38.1%→52.5% in the lower-exposure group and from 33.1%→69.3% in the high-exposure group, a statistically significant 21.8 percentage-point greater gain for high-exposure students. The study demonstrates that film-based interventions have significantly improved climate knowledge among the middle-school students, with larger gains observed in those with higher lived exposure to climate vulnerabilities.

This study explores how preservice social studies teachers conceive ecological citizenship and evaluates a curriculum-embedded ecological citizenship model intended to cultivate environmentally responsible citizens. Employing a grounded theory approach, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, with concurrent coding and comparative analysis guiding model development. Participants articulated ecological consciousness as the core category, supported by related themes of a liveable world, a beacon of hope, future generations’ welfare and holistic perspectives on nature. The resultant model identifies families and schools as joint stewards of ecological citizenship, beginning with foundational environmental education at home and extending into targeted social studies activities. The refined ecological citizenship model elucidates how its components – rights, justice, responsibility and participation – progressively foster environmental action and tangible improvements. The study concludes with recommendations for embedding ecological citizenship within teacher education and, school curricula, offering guidance on assessment strategies such as reflective journals and pre–post evaluations to monitor both behavioural and ecological outcomes. This concise framework provides conceptual clarity and actionable guidance for educators and curriculum designers.

Modern Western education has been criticised for its human-centred orientation and for legitimising the exploitation of nature, thereby contributing to the environmental crisis. This article responds by rethinking a specific Northern European strand of the Bildung tradition, namely the modern critical-constructive approach associated with Humboldt and Klafki, as a pedagogical framework concerned with how teaching and educational practices could and should support processes of self-formation. Drawing on reflections from an international Wild Pedagogies (WP) gathering in Sweden, we engage the WP concept of Nature as Co-Teacher to develop three re-imaginations of critical-constructive approaches to Bildung. First, we reimagine Bildung as dialogical co-development in a more-than-human world. Second, we reimagine Bildung as place-specific pedagogical practices oriented towards engagement with, in, and for the living world. Third, we reimagine Bildung within a nature-, place-, and life-centred horizon in which the living world provides the highest context of meaning and value. Together, these re-imaginations contribute to ongoing debates in Environmental and Sustainability Education and related fields about how pedagogical traditions can respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

This study investigates the environmental literacy (EL) and pro-environmental behaviours of urban adolescents in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with a focus on the role of education in shaping their environmental awareness, attitudes, and actions. The research aims to assess students’ knowledge of global and local environmental issues, their attitudinal orientations (biocentric vs. anthropocentric), and their self-reported pro-environmental behaviours. A cross-sectional survey of 403 secondary school students was conducted using structured questionnaires. The findings reveal moderate awareness of global environmental issues like climate change, but a limited understanding of local ecological solutions. While many students expressed positive attitudes toward nature, a significant value-action gap was identified, with environmental awareness and concern not consistently translating into sustainable practices. The study highlights the need for more context-specific, experiential, and community-based educational interventions to bridge this gap. By integrating emotional, cognitive, and ethical dimensions of EL into curricula, the study suggests that educators and policymakers can better equip youth to address environmental challenges. The findings emphasise the urgency of reforming environmental education to foster a generation of environmentally responsible citizens in developing urban contexts.

Feminist environmental educators have been calling for new ways of dismantling traditional separations such as nature–culture for reconfiguring human–environment relations. The Common Worlds Research Collective is an interdisciplinary research network made up of educators and researchers that conduct feminist and anticolonial pedagogical and methodological work concerned with more-than-human worlds. This visual essay takes inspiration from the inventive ways the Common Worlds Research Collective are thinking and practising with concepts. This visual essay introduces commoning, worlding and inheriting as concepts for rethinking practice. It shows how re-viewing photographic documentation taken of a waste project with young children and educators opens up pedagogical possibilities for attending to children’s complex and entangled relations with waste. This visual essay demonstrates how creative, experimental and feminist methods can reconfigure children’s relations with waste and invites educators to apply these approaches in their own contexts.

Global environmental crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss and resource depletion disproportionately affect communities in the Global South, where environmental vulnerability intersects with social and cultural inequalities. In rural North Sindh, Pakistan, these pressures shape everyday livelihoods and community practices through which environmental knowledge is transmitted across generations. Yet formal environmental education often overlooks these informal learning spaces. This study examines how family and community-based environmental and sustainability education cultivates action competence by integrating knowledge, motivation and action skills in a non-Western agrarian context. Guided by the Action Competence Approach as a theoretical and conceptual framework, the research employed a convergent parallel mixed-methods design within participatory action research. Data from 120 participants in Sukkur and Shikarpur were collected through surveys, interviews, focus groups and workshops. Findings show moderate-to-high action competence (M = 3.82/5), with strong environmental motivation and knowledge fostered through intergenerational storytelling, while action skills remain constrained by infrastructural and rural–urban disparities.

This study investigates how rural women’s leadership, grounded in traditional knowledge and daily ecological practices, contributes to environmental education and strengthens both family and community sustainability within the emerging model of rural tourism in Morocco. The research is framed by international environmental commitments, notably the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which emphasise the value of local communities in preserving natural resources and transmitting ecological knowledge. The central question examines the extent to which rural women, through their leadership and embodied knowledge, foster environmental learning and reinforce the socio-ecological resilience of households and communities. The study mobilises theoretical approaches from environmental education, experiential and social learning and socio-ecological systems theory to analyse the interplay between knowledge transfer, community engagement and biodiversity protection. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative design based on semi-structured interviews, participant observation and thematic analysis supported by NVivo software. Conducted in the Taounate region, the study targets women participating in rural ecotourism initiatives. Findings reveal that women act as key agents of informal environmental education, ensuring the transmission of traditional knowledge, promoting sustainable practices and enhancing collective ecological awareness. Their leadership reinforces natural resource conservation and contributes to the long-term sustainability of families and local communities while aligning local practices with global environmental commitments positioning them as essential actors in bridging local practices with global environmental sustainability agendas.

This article examines the growing importance of cultural studies in supporting the increasing development of socio-cultural awareness among students in the higher education sector in the United Arab Emirates. It adopts a descriptive quantitative methodology, which involves conducting two questionnaires. They involved 11 instructors teaching cultural studies and 85 students attending their curricula. A random sampling technique was used in this study, where all instructors and students participated equally. Main findings indicated that 85% of instructors agreed that cultural studies play a significant role in promoting socio-cultural awareness among students. Additionally, the students’ questionnaire highlighted how they perceive cultural studies depending on their ability to foster, appreciate, and understand the value of coexistence, and the role of cultural studies in shaping their communicative and life skills. Finally, the study concludes that the need for the development of cultural studies courses is essential, aiming at adopting more effective strategies that promote students’ awareness in relation to future challenges.

This study investigates how school leaders interpret and mobilize the traits and competencies required to initiate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in school contexts. Using a qualitative single-case study design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight school leaders involved in the Johor Sustainable Education Action Plan (JSEAP). Thematic analysis reveals three interrelated dimensions of leadership practice: a positive orientation towards change, substantive ESD-related knowledge and interpersonal competence. Rather than operating as static attributes, these dimensions emerge as relational and contextually shaped capacities, developed through leaders’ ongoing engagement with institutional constraints, policy expectations and school-level realities. The findings suggest that early-stage ESD leadership is less a matter of technical readiness than a process of situated sense-making, in which leaders negotiate meaning, capability and context simultaneously. This study advances ESD scholarship beyond competency frameworks towards a more complex understanding of how sustainability-oriented change is initiated in schools.

How do young people conceive of their ability to meaningfully contribute to climate change action? Adopting a social-ecological perspective, and situated in the understudied context of regional Australia, this Case Study research explores how students at a Catholic high school make sense of climate change and their agency to respond. Thematic analysis of focus group discussions, involving 37 participants, revealed that place-based and relational factors were key influences that strengthened or diminished students’ developing sense of climate agency. Educational and social experiences shaped how they viewed their agentic potential, and the kinds of climate action they perceived as meaningful. Importantly, participants valued opportunities for dialogue, and for socially connected activities pursuing tangible environmental benefits. These insights contribute a contextualised, youth perspective on climate agency, highlighting a need to support young people in developing a repertoire of action that reflects their values and social realities. Implications for climate change education policy and practice are discussed.

In this paper we argue that performance and the arts invite a deliberate sensorial connection with the body and can support a bodily turn or return, in order to help artists, scholars and communities more broadly, better attune to increasing climate instability, through collaborative, supportive and reflexive storytelling. Drawing on the three “weather” symposia, the paper focusses on the second symposium which featured a keynote presentation by Rachael Swain, co-artistic director of Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous Intercultural Dance and Performance Company. Responses to Marrugeku’s work Cut the Sky are collectively presented to illuminate what Swain argues are, “Dramaturgies of consequence” (2020), that emerge from working and thinking with the choreopolitical platform of Marrugeku’s practice, and how this is felt in the bodies and the actions of audiences. Such a focus on thinking and feeling with and through our bodies, is crucial in preparing to respond and adapt to the myriad evolving political, environmental and social crises we are enmeshed in. By focusing on Cut The Sky we argue that contemporary performance, which foregrounds the body, is an exemplary practice which can ignite visceral and kinaesthetic responses in spectators for activating change through Marrugeku’s choreography of resistance.

This study examines the intersection of climate change awareness and legal literacy consciousness among staff and students in Ghanaian senior high schools (SHS) situated in environmentally vulnerable areas. Focusing on district schools within the Central and Western regions of Ghana, where illegal mining and pollution have severely degraded ecosystems, the research explores how legal knowledge influences environmental advocacy justice. Using a qualitative paradigm, the study employs a multiple-case study design involving 30 participants, including students and staff from selected SHS in these regions. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions, with thematic analysis applied to identify recurring patterns and themes. The findings reveal that while participants demonstrate a growing awareness of the impacts of climate change, their legal literacy regarding environmental rights and regulations remains limited. This gap hinders their ability to advocate for environmental justice and hold stakeholders accountable. The study underscores the need for integrating legal literacy into environmental education curricula to empower communities to combat climate change and environmental degradation. By amplifying the untold stories of these communities, this research contributes to the discourse on climate justice and the role of education in fostering sustainable environmental practices in resource-rich but vulnerable districts of Ghana.

Education for sustainable development requires an understanding of complex Earth system processes with an ethical reflection on global justice. In this context, concepts such as planetary boundaries and the Doughnut model serve as reference frameworks. Their didactic connection to the concept of planetary justice has thus far only been partially addressed. This paper presents the theory-based, design-oriented development of a digitally supported learning module for geography in upper secondary education. The module is based on five conceptually integrated design principles: normative openness; planetary boundaries and Doughnut model as framework; systems thinking; integration of the three justice dimensions (interspecies, intergenerational, and intragenerational); and a problem-based, real-world learning environment. It was implemented using ArcGIS StoryMaps, which visualise narratives based on a case study to illustrate socio-ecological interrelations across local, regional and global scales. The paper contributes by facilitating a conceptually grounded integration of planetary justice into geography education.

This study examines the role of families in preserving cultural identity and moral values amid globalisation, employing a mixed-methods approach, the research highlights how cultural identity and moral values can instil environmental responsibility and help generations to embrace the principle of sustainability. A survey with 208 respondents and 13 in-depth interviews were conducted in the community of the UAE Higher Education, in the United Arab Emirates. The key findings reveal that families remain the cornerstone of preserving values and cultural identity by promoting environmental responsibility. However, globalisation, particularly through social media and globalised education, threatens familial cohesion. Furthermore, the study highlights the duality of globalisation as both a disruptor and a potential enabler of hybrid cultural frameworks, calling for policy interventions to regulate digital content and promote sustainability, environmental responsibility and cultural awareness, while emphasising collaborative efforts across families, educators and policymakers. Through bridging the empirical gaps, this research offers actionable insights for sustaining cultural resilience in an interconnected world.