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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is now an abundance of literature pointing to the relationship between the escalating global impacts of climate change and the adverse effects of irreversible ecological destruction on the emotional worlds of children and young people. Contextualised to Manitoba, Canada, this article is positioned as a call for a more relationally accountable and response-able engagement with climate change and (child/youth) emotions, supporting curricular and pedagogical enactments in (western) education to grapple more ethically with social and ecological threats and injustices of these times. Through an anticolonial and posthumanist self-study in collaboration with a middle-years classroom, this article experiments with climate anxiety as anticolonial activism. Such a move seeks to generate different types of relations with Indigenous peoples, Land, and multispecies kin; and (re)imagine curricular and pedagogical enactments that usher open-ended, ambiguous, and indefinite engagement with the emotional politics of settler-colonialism.

This article advances a story-driven, theoretical exploration of how entanglements of agony, exile and Land relations can reconfigure understandings of justice. Opening with autobiographical vignettes of “in-betweenness”, the article illuminates the unfolding of exilic life between Palestine and North America, naming the ruptures of writing about Palestine from afar as an ethical site of dwelling in the middle. Drawing on relational ontology, Indigenous and decolonial scholars, alongside posthumanist and new materialist thinkers, the article highlights convergences and dissonances in conceptualising Land as more than property: as kin, teacher and agentive being. From such relationality, this article argues that Land-bodied rights offer a framework for rethinking justice and education beyond the abstract, hierarchical assumptions of universal human rights, grounding learning in human and more-than-human relations. The final section explores diffractive pedagogies, suggesting that storytelling and more-than-human educational entanglements can foster an ethic of reciprocity and accountability towards the more-than-human justice. In envisioning rights through rupture, environmental education can become a site where ecological and decolonial justice are rethought and enacted through relational, Land-based and story-driven pedagogies.

This article describes how relational processes of telling and listening to stories were central to the establishment of a doctoral project by a Larrakia traditional owner working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous supervisors. The project explores the topic of education about living with crocodiles, a totem animal for the Larrakia people. The first stage of the project involved a week-long visit by the research team to Larrakia Country, Northern Territory, in order to develop relationships with Larrakia people and Country, and to gain cultural permission prior to gathering data. Stories from the visit are recalled and their significance analysed using the Indigenous research methods Thought Ritual and Storying. The stories shared during the trip are shown to involve more than simple capture and retell; instead, through close listening and deep reflection on meaning, stories proved to be the main conduit for demonstrating respect, exchanging knowledge and building relationships. We argue for the value of such story-based approaches to education about crocodiles, including the reframing of crocodile-human relations as part of a web of connections with Country and all that live in/on it – a shift in perspective personally experienced by the research team during their visit.

This research examines the stories and experiences of the Yazidis, the Indigenous population of Mesopotamia. It especially focuses on the intersections of their political resistance, cultural resilience and the impact of long-lasting epistemic and colonial violence. Although the Yazidi community has been subject to external invasion and systemic persecution since the 3rd century CE (Potts, D. T. (2014) Nomadism in Iran: From antiquity to the modern era (Vol. xxv, p. 558). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978 0 19 933079 9; Usman (2021a) Yazidis: A tale of a lost, found and misunderstood legacy in the light of mimetic theory. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture (Vol. 28). Michigan State University Press, (2021b) History of Shia, Sunnis and Yazidi Conflict: A Political, Social or Religious Conflict and its Impact on the Peace Process in the Middle East (Ph.D dissertation, University of Innsbruck, Austria)), they were forgotten by most until they were last attacked in 2014 by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which resulted in abductions, mass murders, forced conversion and using rape as a genocidal tool to demoralise and humiliate the entire community and erase their identity. It is important to understand the voices and stories of Yazidi survivors and experts; therefore, while using a qualitative research methodology, this research gathers data through semi-structured interviews and a thorough literature review, which will then be analysed with the help of thematic analysis. As one of the objectives of this study is to deconstruct the idea of epistemic violence suffered by the Yazidis throughout their history, investigating and identifying recurring patterns of persecution, trauma and violence helps us understand the motives behind such atrocities. It is often observed that deep-rooted colonial legacies lack empathy and hinder the process of understanding the victims’ narratives, and Yazidis have suffered the same. Finally, this research contributes to an already scarce literature on the history of Yazidi sufferings and documents the stories of a marginalised community. It also encourages the international community to understand the complexity of Yazidi sufferings and treat the Yazidi genocide as a resistance of survival.

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.

This article examines the intersection of environmental and testimonial injustice and everyday peace in the lived experiences of 43 LGBTQIA+ individuals in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia). Expanding environmental (in)justice, testimonial (in)justice and everyday peace as Queer individuals of Bosnia establish and maintain shared community spaces, this article argues that increased homophobia in Bosnia reduces queer people’s engagement with socio-environmental spaces, and this leads to testimonial and environmental injustice in everyday spaces and restricts everyday peace opportunities with one another. Drawing on participant narratives collected through interviews that reflect their courage, resistance and personal risk, the article identifies five key findings that illustrate how queer voices are often discredited and silenced. The participants’ stories shed light on how they persist in their advocacy against social and systemic oppression by enacting personalised strategies of peacebuilding with community building, managing self-disclosure and fighting for a future where queer people can be visible, respected and safe from violence.

This article traces encounters with Country to reorient understandings of what it means to be literate. As a settler Australian educator, I am led by the leadership of First Nations voices that seek to challenge the dominance of the European schooling system. I map three stories of teaching and learning on Country, passing through the stories as analytical sites to re/view how students and teachers can reconfigure ways of speaking, listening, reading and writing in order to connect to Country, and therefore community. The research is approached through postqualitative inquiry, understanding stories as entanglements of humans and more-than-humans that surface tensions, possibilities and provocations for literacy in environmental education. This article moves beyond literacy-as-acquisition to that of literacy-as-relationality with/in the places we live and learn. Storied reflective practice of what it means to be Country-literate is proposed as a method of professional development for non-Indigenous educators and their contexts.