In this communication, the Australian authors – two Indigenous women and one woman with Anglo-Celtic ancestry – take us into Western Australian Indigenous language and worldviews, to help us reach toward a regenerative worldview. Indigenous words such as rinyi, pirlirr, and liyan are explored to point us in a direction unfamiliar to many English speakers, to Land and Country as living and responsive. The authors notice that it is very difficult to describe these terms in English, because English language does not seem sufficiently capacious to describe the depth of relational being-with Country that Indigenous languages portray. This may be changing, as various Indigenous and place-based groups publish their messages to the world. Within a methodology that is poetic and ontological, a storying method is used to illustrate elements of an Indigenous regenerative worldview that highlights the lyrics of life, for hope. It is for change agents who want to be transformative of the ways they participate with Country; and enable children to learn.

Environmental education is never neutral; through what is emphasised or ignored, education shapes how learners understand their relationships with the more-than-human world. This editorial introduces the Special Issue Beyond the Metacrisis: Educating for the Future World to Come, situating environmental education within a planetary metacrisis produced by intersecting ecological, social, economic and epistemic failures. Drawing on critiques of colonial modernity, neoliberal growth imperatives and Enlightenment dualisms that separate culture from nature, the authors argue that the metacrisis is an educational paradox: education systems reproduce normative conditions—like resource extractivism, alienation and technocratic optimism—that threaten collective futures. The metacrisis is conceptualised as an entanglement of multiple polycrises, including climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, international and local violences, toxic pollution, social inequity and public anxiety, whose planetary scale distinguishes the present moment from historic civilisational crises. This editorial synthesises contributions challenging assumptions of progress, neutrality and individualism. Collectively, the Special Issue papers engage with the problematic of modernity, neoliberalism and the marketisation of everything, the alienation embedded in the Enlightenment. Each essay has an introductory synopsis, categorised as an activation about neoliberalism, a response to collapse, and a reworking of the modern alienation between culture and nature. Instead of alienation, the papers foreground Indigenous, place-based, relational and post-growth approaches to environmental education, offering alternative pedagogies, curricula and institutional imaginaries grounded in care, reciprocity and ecological limits. Together, they position environmental education as a site for ethical re-worlding, supporting cultural regeneration, social justice and renewed human–Earth relationships.

Fostering a relationship with the more-than-human world is understood to be crucial in wilding pedagogies. Yet for many, such a relationship is often developed in early life and is limited in complexity and nuance. In this paper, we propose to investigate what a mature relationship with the natural might look like. We do so in three parts. The first part introduces four moments of surprise or pause: “hunh?!” moments. These lead to four associated observations that suggest contemporary limitations on human relationship with place, and in one case, enhancement of it. They are: an idealisation of childhood relationship with the natural world, which is now kept in a separate category, rendering it inaccessible to the adult; an un-knowing of relationality with the natural world through cultural practices that deny or denigrate such a state; the myth of human autonomy, which comes with multiple cultural repercussions; and finally, what we are here calling natural imagination, which pulls in the opposite direction to the first three. An environmentally rooted Haudenosaunee model regards imagination as not simply the purview and possession of humans, but a shared space between people and the natural world. In response to these, in Parts 2 and 3, we propose that a relational ontology — one that enacts relationship between humans and the more-than-human — cannot be reached simply by progressing further in intent, sensitivity or theorising from the current assumed model of the psychological development. The abyss between current ontologies and an alternative must be hurdled, if it is to be crossed at all. This may be done by challenging presuppositions that underpin current ontologies and psychologies and moving from theorising to enacting an alternative model. Such a model, in part informed by the fungal research of Merlin Sheldrake, may lead to another way of being human, an enmeshing with the more-than-human, which we call amalgam-being.

Modern society is under the illusion that calculation and measurement amounts to control. Heidegger’s critique of the enchantment of modernity shows how the machinations of power are inhibiting the course of evolving change. People cannot reflect on the real failures of the many iterations of the polycrisis and learn from them. This failure to notice failure is at the core of the metacrisis. Modern society is under the illusion that progress as continuous exponential growth can proceed with its onward trajectory without having a profound impact on resources, pollution, socio-cultural and ecological well-being. Education remains entrapped within the enchantment of modernity, and continues to prioritise the calculation and control easily imposed on STEM subjects, and the development of rationality as “progress” over and above a more wholistic approach to education. But the pace of planetary cycles and laws of thermodynamics bind humanity as much as they do other species. Understanding how finance supercharges the economic growth cycle will help us to re-evaluate and learn from the failures of the metacrisis, and transition to a calmer, slow economic system and more egalitarian future.

Following inter-/transdisciplinary ideas, environmental education inherently collaborates with other subjects, including physical education. As the work with other subjects might be jeopardised by differing worldviews and paradigms, it is worth illuminating compatible and incompatible positions for inter-/transdisciplinary work. In physical education, the concept of physical literacy (PL) has recently gained considerable attention and adopts a student-centred perspective on human existence and learning. Therefore, the goal of the present narrative integrative review was to review the existing literature at the nexus between physical education and environmental education through a PL lens (five pre-defined concept assumptions). After screening for eligibility, a total of 129 articles were assigned to five different thematic categories: (a) conceptual discussion/argumentative patterns, (b) curricular discussion and international comparisons, (c) programming/intervention content, (d) teacher and enabler perspectives and (e) student outcomes/perspectives. The synthesis revealed that PL can harmonise with the educative work when respecting the disciplinary interests of both physical education and environmental education. However, few intervention studies translate the holistic PL claims into interventions. Accordingly, evaluations with teachers or students less frequently integrated holistic learning experiences in line with PL. In summary, previous research at the nexus has not yet exhausted its full inter-/transdisciplinary potential.

This essay begins by reviewing the theoretical debates within literary-critical “ecocriticism” over what Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer termed the “anthropocene” and what Jason Moore terms the “capitalocene.” It explains how those debates are implicated in recent climate fiction, which Daniel Bloom dubs “cli-fi.” These debates have direct implications for the possibilities and prospects for environmental education, insofar as both “high” literature and “popular” fiction remain important objects of educational practice. The essay proceeds to a critical account of the climate fictions of the Californian science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, arguably the leading contemporary Anglophone cli-fi writer, whose work regularly features in environmental education programmes.

This paper shares a heuristic to support thinking about meaningful transformative education within the context of the contemporary environmental and social crisis. We describe the context of this work and explore the epistemological foundations for this model, which has been evolving and guiding our research and teaching and which underpins the six qualities of meaningful transformative education. The qualities are being open to alternative visions of the future and alternative approaches to education, accepting and embracing complexity, incorporating multiple types of knowledge, reorienting towards justice, developing ecological worldviews and supporting students to bring about systemic change. We also present a series of illustrative vignettes, informed by real-world practices of schools in England, which bring these qualities to life. The vignettes and subsequent discussion highlight possibilities and challenges for enacting a meaningful transformative education in schools.

Climate fiction (cli-fi) is widely assumed to have cognitive value for student and teacher understanding of climate change, often attributed to automatic mental processes based on trial and error. This study argues its cognitive value lies in systematic mental actions that transform cli-fi into school science problems for educational benefits to students and teachers. A guide, grounded in agentive activity theory, was developed to orient these actions and tested with three secondary school biology teachers. The participants worked with two excerpts from “The Ministry of the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson and another adapted from the article “Scientists at odds over wild plans to slow melting glaciers” by Hannah Richter. Think-aloud and retrospective interviews were used. Three key stages emerged: narrative immersion in cli-fi, problem structuring and editing/correction. The findings indicate that the guide supports teachers’ agency and self-regulation during the transformation process, although there is a limitation related to teachers’ content knowledge. It is concluded that the guide enhances teachers’ control over cli-fi transformations, and the educational cognitive value of cli-fi may reside in agentive activity.

This essay develops the notion of Dark Pedagogy as a framework for responding to climate and ecological disruption. It begins with the claim that climate breakdown exemplifies the metacrisis: a structural condition in which the very knowledge of ecological catastrophe coexists with inaction, denial, or disavowal. Climate disruptions thus reflect not only material devastation but also the erosion of social, political and cognitive frameworks that normally enable collective response. Dark Pedagogy foregrounds the parallel between the metacrisis and the psychological dynamics of disavowal, showing how familiar narratives of progress, harmony and control both obscure ecological realities and perpetuate ineffective responses. Against educational approaches that rely on hope or reassurance, Dark Pedagogy emphasises dwelling with unsettling affects as a means of confronting the uncanny instability of the world, using Giacomo Leopardi’s reflections on nature as an exemplary case. Anguish, in this context, is treated not as a symptom to be overcome but as a critical signal: it reveals the fragility of our assumptions, alerts us to the limitations of familiar frameworks and opens a horizon for education rooted in reflection, ethical engagement and attentiveness to the unpredictable, often hostile realities of the current geological era.

This article contributes to Wild Pedagogies by foregrounding love as an emergent, affective practice that takes shape through embodied, affective encounters with the more-than-human (Whatmore, 2006) and material world. Engaging post-qualitative sensibilities, it approaches walking and writing not as fixed methods, but as entangled, responsive practices that invite ethical attunement to the unfolding rhythms of the living world. While Wild Pedagogies emphasise relationality, they have yet to fully account for affect as a pedagogical force. Addressing this gap, the article traces how love moves through diverse encounters, shaping perception, responsibility, and responsiveness. Love is conceptualised through three interwoven affective pathways: shimmering rupture (moments that unsettle habitual perception), relational resonance (the affective flow that binds beings in co-becoming), and cyclical attunement (the rhythmic deepening of ethical engagement). These pathways reframe love as a material practice of staying-with (Haraway, 2016)—a commitment to returning, noticing, and responding to the world’s ongoing entanglements.

This article explores the extent students’ environmental values are informed through a socioecological learning framework when a deep-time universe hi/story is integrated with environmental education and local cultural origins in the primary school curriculum. The research concept grew from teacher observations that students addressed sustainability from a fragmented action approach, rather than incorporating a lifelong learning and wider worldview of past, present and possible future environmental changes. The research was conducted with 8–9-year-old students during a 17-week transdisciplinary pedagogical intervention, adapted for primary-aged students, from an educational evidence-based, online Big History Project, empowering young learners to engage in transformative thinking and to add their voices as co-researchers. Additional data was collected from the same co-researcher and student cohort two years later. The research findings over the two years remain significant, where students continued to discuss the environment and sustainability in the context of a child-framed deep learning pedagogy framework of the changing 13.8-billion-year universe story. If this original research is to remain significant, further research and programming need to be undertaken with students and educators, to ensure that the value of deep-time hi/story is embedded at all levels of the education continuum, including primary-aged students.

Traditionally, physical education has focused on movement competency to develop skills for successful performance in different physical activities. Recently, however, the focus of many physical educators is shifting to notions of physical literacy to promote human flourishing through embodied experiences across multiple and diverse movement contexts well beyond physical education. While this shift is a welcome corrective to more traditional approaches to physical education, mainstream conceptions of physical literacy remain unduly narrow as rooted in colonial logics that continue to separate humans from the Earth while locating dominant categories of the human in hierarchical positions of power. In response, this article is an entanglement of Western and Métis embodiments of physical literacy. Deconstructing universalising models and modes of physical literacy set in dominant Western constructs, we seek to foster culturally relevant and meaningful physical literacy to promote physical activity and the wholistic health and well-being of Indigenous, or specifically, Red River Métis teachers and learners in Winnipeg, Canada. In doing so, we seek to provide a (re)visioning of human/Earth relationships as cultivated through movement-with Land; and thus, strengthen physical educational practices that more adequately attends to social (human) and ecological (Earth) flourishing in the context of global climate change.

This theoretical paper responds to concerns surrounding the fracturing and opaqueness of the term “sustainability” and the related metaphysical crisis that underpins an existential polycrisis. Drawing on Nietzsche’s work on order and disorder (1873, 1901), Latour’s (2013) philosophical anthropology of modernity and Rosa’s (2019) theory of resonance, the author proposes a way of considering sustainability pluralistically, as a crucial mode of existence amongst others. Revisiting the dualism of subject/object, the author proposes a more implicated, associative way of viewing how humans and non-humans relate, introducing the term sobject: interpolated, entangled being(s). As this mode of existence is explicated, the paper articulates how this could be useful in an educational sense. What is proposed is a way to “zone in” to sustainability with students; a mode through which we can learn to see our connections to and within the world, through which we can actively renew the many-pronged path of Earthly existence. Authentic transformation of dysfunctional existence on Earth, this paper argues, will not arise from harmony or consensus but from engaging the generative dissonances through which we might move beyond perpetual reconsideration of “sustainability” towards the active reconfiguration of how we live, learn and co-create a more inhabitable world.

Recent scholarship has explored the concept of “wilding pedagogies” to more deeply engage the more-than-human world in environmental and outdoor adventure education. Thus far, the scholarship around wild pedagogies has been primarily epistemic and pedagogical, focusing on epistemological principles that can guide pedagogy. There has been less focus on ontological considerations for wild pedagogies. This paper offers a theoretical exploration into such ontological considerations that can further inform the practice of wilding pedagogies in outdoor adventure education. The emergence of (new) materialism coupled with an increasing awareness of Indigenous philosophy has problematised many of the ontological assumptions embedded within Eurocentric philosophical ideals. Challenging dualisms and the traditional boundaries of substance, these philosophies consider relations as ontologically primary. From this ontological posture, we can engage with the phenomenon that exists in the space between humans and nature, thinking with nature rather than about nature and recognizing the agency of the more-than-human world.

Within environmental education research, there is an ongoing interest in trying to understand what factors might lead to pro-environmental action and pro-environmental behaviours. This study explores the relationship between environmental attitudes and self-perceived action competence for sustainability by combining a questionnaire measuring self-perceived action competence for sustainability (SPACS-Q) with a questionnaire measuring environmental attitudes, the 2 factor Model of Environmental Values (2-MEV-Q), among 236 primary school student teachers in France. Our results show that the SPACS-Q adapted to the French context is largely valid within this sample and that the factor Preservation in the 2-MEV model is a predictor for SPACS. This connection is strongest for the factor Willingness to act. Likewise, we conclude that age impacts the SPACS factor Confidence in one’s own influence, whereas other variables such as training in sustainable development issues do not impact any of the SPACS factors. The study provides some insights into how self-perceived action competence and pro-environmental attitudes might be promoted through education.

Braidotti describes the world as gasping for air as collectively we face a range of socioecological challenges. Young people are important actors in these challenges, making schools a critical space for this work. Physical education (PE) can contribute through promoting relevant embodied encounters that develop students’ physical literacies (PL). Noting the recent moves to extend the notion of a physically literate individual to include the ecological, alongside the Australian Curriculum that requires teachers to attend to their learning area, cross-curriculum priorities and general capabilities including sustainability and ethical capabilities, there are exciting possibilities for developing students’ PL to confront these challenges. Despite these opportunities, for PE to contribute meaningfully, teachers must progress from PE represented by sport techniques, linear pedagogies and driven by competition to PE that engages students to think and act differently in the world, ethically, ontologically and epistemologically. Using autoethnography, this paper presents vignettes to outline current issues and possibilities for PE. Through a posthuman lens, positioning teachers and students as learners who are always becoming, with the capacity to affect and be affected, it is possible to achieve the intended curriculum and develop young people’s capacities to make a meaningful contribution to the socioecological challenges we face.

In this paper we theorise climate fiction in the context of Dirrayawadha: Rise Up, by Anita Heiss (2024). Dirrayawadha: Rise Up is a literary novel that narratises historical truths in a dialogic encounter. Through an exploration of love, resilience and resistance, the novel recounts early moments of invasion while simultaneously revealing the links between colonial violence and environmental crisis. We examine four excerpts from the novel to illustrate how the narratisation of historical truths and usage of literary devices and language works. We also show how the translanguaging in the novel, where some sections shift between English and Wiradyuri, enable the text to transcend some of the limitations of English. The novel reveals how the genesis of environmental crisis in so-called Australia begins in the first moments of invasion. Heiss (2022) argues the need for settlers to read more First Nations writing as a form of truth-listening (Kwaymullina, 2020).