This article strives to open a window on ‘eco-humour’, an umbrella term for diverse forms of humour targeting ecological and environmental issues. It encourages readers to consider eco-humour as a valuable, pedagogical toolkit for environmental education and communication. To this aim, eco-humour is, first, put into perspective of humour scholarship. In particular, I discuss the critical and corrective potential of humour to address and possibly redress environmental issues. Pedagogical benefits of humour are, then, touched upon to pave the way for a discussion of ‘humour-integrated environmental education’. The paper also addresses UNESCO’s 2030 roadmap of education for sustainable development and the ‘sustainability’ component of Australian Curriculum to further justify and contextualise the use of eco-humour. Moreover, several university-based initiatives to integrate echo-humour into environmental education are considered. Likewise, I briefly address ‘humour-integrated language learning’ as an emerging approach in language education that may offer valuable insights into eco-humour curriculum integration. Finally, the article points out several practical considerations and future directions in humour-integrated environmental education.

The purpose of this communication is to explore possibilities for children’s literature to enable futures learning. It introduces the ways in which two different frameworks might be used to analyse children’s literature. The first framework draws upon the Earth Charter Principles (ECP) (Auld et al., 2021). The second framework brings together the pillars of sustainability with the principles of Education for Sustainability (EfS) in a framework for ecological sustainability of children’s literature (White et al., 2020). The communication starts by introducing a text – a recent example of ‘awarded’ and therefore high-quality children’s literature. We then outline the two frameworks and explore the possibilities of applying these frames for analysing this text. We conclude that the sustainability frameworks are useful tools and resources for analysing children’s literature to determine the quality of the text and how the experience of reading the text may impact children, their learning and their environmental consciousness and practices.

While the history and practices of collecting have received considerable attention over the past few decades, the notion of erasure – of the deleting, removal or destruction of material, whether deliberate or otherwise – has remained largely in the shadows. We challenge this neglect by placing erasure centre stage and treating it as a productive phenomenon in its own right. Indeed, we suggest that it forms a significant precondition for the very possibility of memory and collections. This article draws upon a recent turn to consider questions of forgetting, ignorance and ending to lay out the grounds for analysing the various roles played by erasure in making and unmaking our world. Inspired by Paul Connerton's discussion of different types of forgetting, we present five distinct forms of erasure that we regard as principally important: (i) repressive erasure, (ii) protective erasure, (iii) operative erasure, (iv) amending erasure and (v) calamitous and neglectful erasure. In each case, we discuss the characteristic logic of the erasure at hand and provide examples of the historical and media-specific forms in which it has been enacted. Our aim in doing so is to provide future researchers with some of the analytical tools and perspectives necessary to engage in further erasure studies. For if we are interested in making sense of the shifting and complex world we inhabit, then the interdisciplinary study of the compelling yet elusive phenomenon of erasure is an excellent place to start.

As scientific literacy plays a contributing role in identifying, analysing, and solving environmental matters that our world is facing, there is growing consensus to mandate environmental matters in science classrooms following five decades of efforts in promoting environmental education. However, much remains unknown about the relationship between students’ awareness of environmental matters and their science literacy scores on standardised test. Using data drawn from the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) science performance assessment, this study investigates the relationship between students’ awareness of environmental matters and their science literacy scores in the context of established predictors for science learning. In all the regions’ multilevel models ranging from medium to large effect sizes, a significant and positive relationship emerges between students’ awareness of environmental matters and science literacy scores. Among the well-known predictors for science learning, student science self-efficacy associates positively with student science literacy scores across the regions. In contrast, inquiry-based science instruction associates negatively with the scores. Except for these two well-known predictors, variations exist in the relationships between other variables among the regions. Given all the regions’ evidence showing the positive linkage between students’ awareness of environmental matters and science literacy scores, the present study signifies the importance of integrating environmental issues into traditional science classrooms, suggesting that there should be systematic supports that enable both environmental and science educators to collaborate towards the development of an interdisciplinary environmental science curriculum.

Learning pragmatics involves learning linguistic forms and their communicative functions as well as the context where the form-function relationships are realized. Given its socially grounded, context-sensitive nature, pragmatics may be best learned in a technology-enhanced environment that provides direct access to contextualized communicative practice. Technology can help produce rich multimodal input, opportunities for interaction with consequences, and experience-based learning, which are all important elements of pragmatics learning. This lecture highlights these benefits of technology-enhanced pragmatics learning using a digital game as a sample platform. We created a digital game to teach request-making in English by having participants experience interpersonal consequences of their request as feedback (observing their interlocutor's reactions to their choice of request-making forms). Using the digital game with Chinese learners of English, a series of studies were conducted to investigate a variety of topics, such as the effects of different feedback conditions on learning outcomes, role of metapragmatic knowledge in learning, and transfer of request-making knowledge to a novel speech act. This lecture presents findings from these studies and concludes with future research directions on technology-enhanced pragmatics learning.

The idea of translanguaging has disrupted much of the thinking in bilingual education. A common misunderstanding, however, is that translanguaging was intended to be a language teaching strategy. This article seeks to explore what a translanguaging approach to language teaching entails, with specific reference to the education of minoritized and racialized bilingual and multilingual learners in the school systems in English-dominant countries such as the UK. In particular, I highlight the connections with and contributions to the inclusion and social justice agenda that the translanguaging project aims to make. Translanguaging takes one step further from multilingualism in challenging the raciolinguistic ideologies that view bilingual learners as having separate languages and languaging lives. It instead views their racial/ethnic identities and linguistic practices together, that is, their translanguaging being. My main argument here is that to use translanguaging as a pedagogy for inclusion and social justice requires a change of mindset, not just practice – that is, translanguaging pedagogy rather than pedagogical translanguaging – which can be achieved through processes of ‘co-learning’ and ‘transpositioning’.

A number of studies have examined the effects of reading interventions for younger readers; however, there does not appear to be any existing syntheses examining the effect of reading interventions on students in Years 7–12. The purpose of this study was to establish whether such a synthesis is feasible by reviewing the methodological quality of randomised controlled trial studies examining the effect of reading interventions for secondary students, using the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) standards. A total of 17 studies were identified and reviewed. Overall, only two studies met all eight CEC quality indicators. All studies met the quality indicators for intervention agent, and context and settings. Findings, limitations and recommendations for future directions of study are discussed.

This article argues that the “airlift” language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the world—even though it was colonial education intended to inculcate in them British cultures and mores. The students took this education seriously because they knew it would help improve their economic status as well as that of their families. These elite students were not necessarily concerned with the politics of decolonization or the nation-state, as most studies of colonial elites at the end of empire have tended to claim. They were interested in uplifting their economic status. This uplifting was in and of itself a political act—even though it was not politically motivated.

This study investigates nature connection practices in a nonformal place-responsive programme for primary school-aged children in Brisbane, Australia. The practices are explored in terms of their role in making visible the interconnectedness of humans, place and the more-than-human, drawing on posthuman educational theories and practice, in particular common worlds approaches, as well as place pedagogies. The project explores the practices of sit spot, solo wander, journalling, gathering, story-sharing and nature names with a group of children participating in an outdoor homeschool programme. Children’s representations of their experiences in place through story, writing, drawing and the collection of items from nature are analysed to create narrative summaries, which are reflected on and presented with some of the children’s journal entries. The study finds that when integrated together, the nature connection practices: foster embodied and generative place encounters; enable relationships with place and the more-than-human to emerge; cultivate learning with place and (re)story place relations. The paper recommends the use of these nature connection practices in programmes that focus on or integrate outdoor learning in order to generate new understandings about place that recognise the entanglement of humans, place and the more-than-human world.

Multimodal composing, which has sometimes been referred to synonymously as multimodal composition or multimodal writing, is the use of different semiotic resources (e.g., audio, visual, gestural, and/or spatial resources) in addition to linguistic text for making meaning. Notably, multimodal composing is neither a new type of writing nor a new area of research, with studies dating back to the early 2000s. In the domain of second language (L2) research, Tardy's (2005*) study on multimodal composition in academia was one of the earliest to bring attention to the nonlinguistic features of L2 written output. Even after this pioneering study, in the few years that followed, only a handful of studies further explored aspects of L2 learners’ multimodal compositions. However, over the past decade, the fields of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) have witnessed an explosion of interest in both its study and classroom applications, with teachers’ adoption of multiple modes becoming an indispensable part of their pedagogical toolkits (e.g., Kessler, 2022; Li, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021).

Team participation in whole-school action research can assist the educational reform required for autistic students. Little is known about the experience of school community stakeholders engaged in the first stage of an implementation science process: evaluation of current practice. This study was designed to explore stakeholder experience and knowledge gained following a process of evaluation of whole-school practice related to the education of autistic students. A collective case study was employed across two Australian secondary schools, with team meetings designed to provide an opportunity for the self-evaluation process to take place and the data for the study to be generated. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the dialogue between participants during focus group discussions with each team. Findings are represented through six themes that provide insight for future practice. Both stakeholder teams reported that the evaluation process was a positive experience to engage in and resulted in a strengthening of knowledge about good practice for autistic students. Findings provide encouragement to other school teams engaging in a similar process; however, future teams may need to feel ready for this work and might benefit from the structure of a wider action-research cycle aligned to implementation science processes.

What would it be like to learn to live in and experience a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How can we learn to awarely participate in a world of communication and interaction, in which trees, crows and rivers may grace us with a response to our attention and our call? How do we learn not just to know this intellectually but ‘proved upon our pulses’, as John Keats put it. As artist and writer, we reflect on the contribution our practices can have to the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on living cosmos panpsychism and examples from our practice.

Mentored online intercultural interaction offers foreign language learners the opportunity to develop different competences, including intercultural, linguistic, and digital competence (O’Dowd, 2021). Such virtual exchange (VE) projects typically involve computer-mediated communication via, for example, Zoom. However, the use of high-immersion virtual reality (VR) for synchronous online collaboration in VE projects has received little attention. This study investigated the effect of VR on students’ levels of presence and engagement, on students’ communication and on students’ views on using VR for intercultural encounters compared to traditional videoconferencing tools. Twenty-seven university students from the Netherlands and Germany utilised VR to carry out intercultural learning tasks using English as a lingua franca during a four-week implementation period. Participants responded to pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, completed reflection journals, audio- or video-recorded their VR meetings and participated in interviews. Results showed that the levels of presence and engagement and preferences of social VR compared to videoconferencing for intercultural encounters depended on students individually. A VR immersion experience and comfortability scale was created based on the data which showed mixed experiences. VR influenced participants’ interactions, topics of conversation and communication strategies when they explored their spaces together. The results showed that students’ attitudes towards VR and their subjective experience of VR seem to play an important role in the VE-VR setting. VR provided a safe space for many participants. Positive attitudes towards communicating in the VR environment are highly correlated with positive attitudes towards meeting students from other countries in VR. Implications for language education are provided.