This article examines the representation of climate as hyperobject — described by Timothy Morton as something that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press, p. 1) — in fantastique genres (inclusive of fantasy, speculative and science fiction, horror, supernatural and New Weird genres) that arguably characterised climate fiction’s beginnings. By positioning such climate fictions within “the literature of the impossible” (Boucher (2024) The specificity of fantasy and the “affective novum”: A theory of a core subset of fantasy literature. Literature, 4(2), 101–121), I investigate the difference between what might be considered more speculative climate fictions and the increasingly common, more realist and literary cli-fi narratives. In other words, I discuss what, now, is the “use” of the speculative and the fantastic in climate fiction when climate crisis itself is indeed real and far from “impossible.” Discussing N.K. Jemisin’s fantasy series The Broken Earth (2015–2017) and Jeff VanderMeer’s horror/New Weird series Southern Reach (2014–2024), I argue that “climate-fantastic” novels are well-positioned to narrativise climate change as a hyperobject due to the ability of speculative, fantastic genres to exceed the limitations of Western-capitalist-colonial storytelling practices. I also consider the role of speculative climate fictions in education, including the importance of reading, studying and writing into the speculative alongside the realist when it comes to climate crisis.

Education is essential for addressing the global environmental crisis and engaging students through experiential learning is crucial. In physical education, physical literacy offers a holistic approach to sustainable education, with plogging exemplifying this integration. This study investigates the perceptions of Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) students regarding the implementation of plogging in school curricula. Using qualitative interviews with 80 PETE students and analysing responses with NVIVO 12 software, the study reveals mixed feelings about this innovative practice. Participants see plogging as valuable for fostering both physical literacy and environmental awareness. However, concerns about feasibility include the need for institutional support, curriculum flexibility and community involvement. These findings highlight the potential of plogging to enhance educational programmes by combining physical activity with environmental stewardship. The results can inform the development of future educational strategies that integrate plogging to promote sustainability and holistic student development.

Wild pedagogies (WP) are emerging as critical, relational alternative to current, often unsustainable learning practices. WP aim to offer a way of learning in, with, through and for nature, embracing a post-humanist, relational perspective. So far, WP have mainly been explored theoretically. Increasingly, educators both within and outside of formal education, are inspired and apply WP in their education. Throughout the world, examples of learning that fit into WPs’ living definition, are emerging. However, concrete inspiration for how to bring WP theory into practice, is still largely lacking. In this paper, we explore three emerging approaches at Wageningen University (The Netherlands), that are inspired by wild pedagogies. Empirically, we combine formative evaluations of course designs with participant observation in a collective case study setting over three years. The empirical research is embedded in an explorative literature review that led us to four explorative areas of WP, namely (1) Wild and caring learning spaces (2) Learning from self-will and wonder (3) Relational learning with the world and (4) Disruptive learning for the world. Eventually we present concrete inspiration on those four areas for implementing WP in formal higher education.

This article explores the potentials of intergenerational collaboration as a long-term research strategy for shifting social and political imaginaries around climate change. It brings together academics and youth researchers who began working together on the Climate Change and Me project in 2014, along with colleagues who joined them for a public panel, book launch and exhibition ten years later. Climate Change and Me was the first large-scale study of climate change education applying a child- and youth-framed methodology, and has led to numerous exhibitions, curriculum resources, digital platforms, and publications co-created with children and young people. This article gives voice to young people’s reflections on the impact of their involvement with this project a decade on, drawing on the transcript of a public panel conversation at the Design Hub Gallery in Naarm (Melbourne). It explores how young people’s early experiences as child researchers have intersected with political, social and educational change across time, while opening new conversations with intergenerational colleagues working in related areas of climate justice education, activism and research.

Amid profoundly unstable and vulnerable times, conventional education systems continue to reflect the dominant ideology in modernity that has contributed to the current global polycrisis. This study explores how educators engage in vernacular pedagogical practices, locally grounded, relational and often situated outside standard curricula, that act as counterpoints to the conventional constraints using a Place-Based Education (PBE) approach. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 14 educators from the Southeast Michigan Stewardship (SEMIS) Coalition, the research investigates how educators experience job satisfaction, define their roles and navigate tensions between dominant norms and community-rooted learning. Findings suggest that educators embrace indeterminism as a source of creativity, responsiveness and growth, weaving together interlaced strands of personal, cultural and ecological meaning in their vernacular pedagogical practices. Educators carve out alternative ways of knowing and relating, positioning PBE as a cultural stance that enables responsive, locally rooted reform amid today’s complex, uncertain and interconnected crises.

We co-designed a bee sequence with a specialist primary science teacher at an Australian government school. Year 6 students learned about European honeybees and Australian native bees, including through Cli-Fi. In this paper, we explore the pedagogical power of providing students with opportunities to create Cli-Fi about bee futures in the Anthropocene. We present and thematically analyse examples of students’ bee Cli-Fi to argue that they generated these narratives to express how we ought to value bees and how we ought to conduct ourselves towards bees to realise more desirable futures. We propose that these students were futuring as normative myths. Students generated dystopian views of bee futures in adopting a human perspective, but also present were glimmers of hope for a more positive outlook that embraced more-than-human perspectives. We adopt a pragmatist semiotic approach to propose that these young people’s bee Cli-Fi constituted normative claims about the future of bees, as they outlined the aesthetics (how and what we ought to value) and ethics (how and in what way we ought to act) of humans caring for bees in an epoch of polycrisis. We suggest that Cli-Fi ought to be an integral part of climate change education in empowering students to assert their agency.

Western contemporary educational systems tend to re-produce, and thus maintain, the existent non-sustainable social structures, failing to live up to the present critical times. Their aim is confined to preparation for financial “success,” whereas they disregard the imminence of environmental crises and global social shifts and are rooted in the human sense of superiority over nature, that is, anthropocentrism. The present article acknowledges the need for reconsideration of humans’ place and role in the ecosystem and focuses on the importance of a more ecocentric pedagogy. A holistic in-service teacher training was designed and implemented in Greece, inspired by the wild pedagogies touchstones, mainly the notion of nature as co-teacher. Twelve participants met for the course of a year to immerse themselves in nature-centred, affective, relational, “wild” experiences. Changes were recorded using pre/post-semi-structured interviews to inquire into participants’ perceptions of self versus Self (i.e. acknowledging oneself as part of a larger whole) and perceptions of (environmental) education. It appears that deep, relational nature experiences (a) can shift the perception of individualised self towards Self, (b) can shift the perception of teacher identity towards that of a change agent and (c) can set ethics and values education as a priority among trainee-teacher participants.

This article examines how redefining health through the perspectives of One Health, EcoHealth and Planetary Health can enrich Physical Education (PE) by advancing both health and environmental sustainability. While PE and health education are often treated as separate subjects, most PE curricula worldwide emphasise the promotion of an active lifestyle as a key component of health education through PE. This promotion of an active lifestyle is central to the concept of physical literacy (PL), which is a fundamental aspect of quality PE according to UNESCO (2015). This article focuses on how PE, contributing to health education through the promotion of PL, can evolve to incorporate sustainability goals through the recent new definitions of approaches to health. One Health approach underscores the interconnections between human, animal and environmental health, expanding PL to address zoonotic diseases and ecological impacts. EcoHealth highlights the sustainability of ecosystems, promoting PE activities that (re)connect humans with the more-than-human worlds without causing environmental harm. Planetary Health takes a global perspective, encouraging sustainable physical activities that reduce ecological footprints, such as cycling and walking. By integrating these holistic frameworks, PE can nurture not only individual health outcomes but also environmental stewardship and global health awareness. This shift seeks to educate individuals about their PL, but also their responsibility in preserving ecosystems and the planet, fostering a more sustainable and environmentally aware generation through PE.

This article explores how pedagogy focused on affective possibilities of narrative genres can suggest new directions for climate fiction, potentially challenging the dystopian dominance in the climate crisis imaginary. We analyse a corpus of work produced by first year creative writing students. The students were given the task of “mashing” climate fiction with another genre (romance, horror, crime or any other genre of their choice) and asked to reflect on how this changed the emotional affect and tone of their narrative. Many students were still drawn to dystopian visions, reflecting how climate fiction has become entangled with this particular mode of storytelling, but the focus on reader affect resulted in the students adding layers of hope and agency. Many made use of the possibilities offered by genre: the whimsical allegory of fantasy, the critical thinking of realism, the active fear of horror and the comic potential of satire. By giving students the freedom to embed climate change into their preferred genre, and by asking them to consider the affective consequences of their choices, we offer challenges to the dominance of dystopian climate fiction, suggesting a different path to narratively engage with the climate crisis without descending into hopelessness.

This paper shares how a river-walking project in early childhood education created and experimented with two practices diffractively as an effort to do research differently. The year-long study, situated in Western Australia, explored river-child relations while walking with Derbarl Yerrigan/Swan River and was interested in decentring the human and attuning to more-than-human relations through situated practices. Using a feminist environmental framework this project took a non-representational approach to analysing data through two intra-related diffractive concepts: re-turning and re-membering. These concepts grounded the two practices, audiowalking and micromapping, and helped to shape the various forms of experimentation for a diffractive approach to analysis. Audiowalking is a practice that involved creating narrated audio recordings while walking with an intention of layering data from the present with pasts and futures. Micromapping is an embodied and performative practice that reimagined and unsettled place and space through mapping emotional encounters, river relations and the more-than-human. This paper shows how environmental education researchers, particularly those conducting place-based research, can approach research analysis diffractively to disrupt colonial ways of knowing, being and doing research through two practices that take a non-linear conceptualisation of time, embody data and research with worlds.

Wild pedagogies invites educators to engage with more-than-humans as co-teachers and co-researchers. In collaborating with city grass, this paper blends rhizomatic thinking, literary ecocriticism, and the rewilding of pedagogy within severely constrained circumstances. Citing cognitive, emotional, and physical benefits of engaging with free and flourishing nature, this research asks: How can the severe constraints of particular sociopolitical circumstances and disciplines, such as postsecondary literature courses, be creatively encountered to support engagement with flourishing more-than-human kin? It also asks: What would grass do? This paper walks readers through many barriers faced by city college humanities courses and suggests practical, creative work-arounds that, while focused on college literature classes, can be adapted to educators in diverse disciplines and contexts. Because we need playful thinking to think creatively — even on the brink of catastrophes — this paper is written as a choose-your-own adventure game. Educators will be invited to consider the institutional, geographic, academic, political, personal, and social barriers impacting their pedagogical choices. Ecologically concerned educators need pragmatic, creative, and compassionate support to envision how wild pedagogies pathways can be applied to their course loads. Here, these explorations are designed to be experiential and experimental, open-ended, and ultimately mutually liberating.

Robin perches on a branch overlooking small humans below who are sat around a campfire. Robin notices. Robin responds. What happens when we notice Robin noticing us?

I land with a thud on the floor of the school and scurry off behind a chair, climb the walls, move away, camouflaging. I sense in ways intangible, magical, unknown.

This paper contributes to the emerging field of Posthumanist Climate Fiction (Posthuman Cli-Fi) by proposing practice-as-research-as-pedagogy for educational futures. This practice involves a generative, relational process of creative writings with more-than-human collaborators in everyday encounters in educational settings. Situated within the entangled realities and speculative futures of climate change, Posthuman Cli-Fi challenges the anthropocentric tendencies of traditional Climate Fiction by decentring human experiences and foregrounding relational ontologies. Drawing on our research in two distinct educational contexts—an urban forest school in London and a wall-less school in Bali—we explore how creative writing practices can engage with the stormy contours of living and educating with pastpresentfutures. Posthuman Cli-Fi offers a situated practice that creates possibilities for attuning to and attending to our shared worlds, offering pathways towards more response-able educational futures.

In an era marked by mounting global challenges, education is often envisioned as an agent of transformative action towards a more sustainable future. This research seeks to delve into the students’ perceptions concerning competencies for sustainability in Physical Education Teacher Education. Adopting a qualitative approach, a non-probabilistic purposive sample of 57 students (35 males, 22 females, mean age: 21.2 ± 3.2 years) was recruited. Data collection comprised semi-structured interviews. Analysis was facilitated through Atlas.ti v.7.5.18, abiding by established qualitative research paradigms. Participants emphasised the intrinsic value of an interdisciplinary approach. The study discerned a strong inclination towards cooperative and introspective tasks. Moreover, this exploration offers valuable insights for academic institutions, suggesting integrative strategies for environmental education. Therefore, these findings invite to adapt curricular designs, ensuring that educators are aptly prepared to respond the multifaceted challenges of the 21st century, driving our collective stride towards a sustainable, equitable future.

Dear Reader∼Earth,

How can we refuse education as a content machine stream? How can we love our more-than-human-selves out of the dark into education spaces that care? Instigated by a love letter to Earth, the collaborators in this ‘letter to the editors’ enter a correspon-dance with place about co-mentorship and sustenance. As a post-qualitative inquiry this piece resists mining the world for meaning, and instead, the authors (and Earth) creatively compose this conceptual paper with some image and text-rich conversational ramblings alongside poetics of feminist black scholars and poets. The letters meet places, spaces and bodies on the page – data analysed is data again. Four letters emerge informed by contemporary environmental philosophy, wilding pedagogies, and place-based education. They speak to researchers and teachers on unceded, unsurrendered, colonised lands, themselves an act of solidarity from the two settler∼authors. The pile of loving letters tell the tale of two people on Earth, as Earth, re-imagining pedagogical theory and practice in relation to Earth in an exhibition of living with pedagogy. This process of ‘wilding’ your own pedagogies regularly – as loving pedagogies – is offered as worth considering.

Please enjoy this compilation of letters addressed to you, Earth.

Love from Earth.

For Indigenous peoples, all stories begin with Country. And as climate change reveals, all stories will end with Country too. This paper re-examines popular framings of the climate fiction (cli-fi) genre, and the ways ancient and contemporary First Nations realities disorganise colonial and western conceptions of what we call climate stories. For context, I’ll first illustrate how my research project Laying Down the Lore re-organises speculative fiction (spec fic) genre theory more broadly in an indigenous cultural sense.

This study examined the impact of a short-term climate literacy (CL) course on pre-service teachers (PSTs) at a local college in Israel. Thirty-six science and communication PSTs participated. Using a mixed methods approach, pre and post-course questionnaires and assignment responses showed significant improvements in climate change knowledge and environmentally responsible behaviour (ERB) after the course. PSTs’ attitudes were key predictors of their ERB. The qualitative analysis supported these findings, revealing that the participants who were able to express complex climate knowledge also intended to reflect more environmentally responsible behaviour. 52.2% of participants with complex climate knowledge used diverse knowledge types to express ideas, reflecting a real commitment to environmental attitudes and personal behaviour. While 65% raised climate awareness within their families, only 33% discussed it, during their practicum, with students. Overall, the course significantly enhanced PSTs’ climate literacy in knowledge, attitudes and behaviour, even as a limited workshop. According to the findings, courses that promote climate literacy are necessary. The findings of this study indicate that a well-established short-term intervention may affect participants regarding a significant issue like climate change.

This paper reports on a doctoral study that explored young children’s (ages 5 to 7 years) relationships with sticks during their school-based outdoor learning experiences. Sticks (parts of trees) became uniquely contextual agents due to the profound agentic effect the stick-based experiences, which were enacted through Wild Pedagogies, had on the children’s understandings of Place. Sticks were used in physical and symbolic ways throughout the children’s self-guided learning experiences. The children used long sticks to build large structures, houses, and other creations, and selected smaller sticks to represent microphones, brooms, or currency. The use of the Mosaic approach in this study aligns with Wild Pedagogies’ openness to new and different ways of being in and understanding the world, particularly as this approach privileges children, natural objects, and Place as agentic co-teachers and co-learners. The children demonstrated their agency as they made cognitive, physical, corporeal, agentic, affective, and aesthetic connections with Place, which they expressed through their Wild Pedagogical experiences. The study underscores the value of tactile, immersive, and bioregional experiences in helping children connect with nature, build knowledge, develop and share collective agency, and cultivate an ethic of care for the environment in Wild Pedagogical ways.

This submission argues in favour of re-examining the pedagogical role of the microscopic matter of dust as a creative, lively, rebellious participant in an early childhood centre in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on posthuman theories of matter and the social construction of creative agency, this essay shows how the most abject of agents in an early learning educational context have nonhuman agency, and that dust interacts collegially with young children and microscopes, creating (new) playful situations between bodies, atmospheres and spaces. Some educational and western narratives that associate purity, order, and validity with cleanliness propose that dust is akin to dirt. Therefore, dust is seen as maligned. This essay advances an argument that removes the association with dirt and repositions dust. Dust is regarded here as an ordinary teacher, researcher, fellow explorer with children, and a strong agentic collaborator in learning environments. Dust is proposed in our essay to activate children’s connections and relationships to creative ecological microworlds and all forms of planetary lives. Dust also helps rethink some early childhood education practices around the organic bodies that are included and excluded, and the prioritisation of human bodies in discussions about environments and ecologies.

Putting our concepts of dustly microbodies to work, we speculatively explore how the exclusions and expulsions of such microbodies in the early childhood education space can be considered a form of colonising practice, and that re-theorising, re-materialising and decolonising dust allows us to explore concepts of decentralising the human, challenge boundaries of individuality and binaries such as the nature-culture divide and disrupt current educational approaches and frameworks. Additionally, dust invites us to attune to the wildness of microworlds and reimagine more experimental and relational ways of approaching environmental education. Moving away from the dominant stories usually told from psychological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives in early childhood education and applying Harris’s concept of “creative ecologies” (2021) instead.

Reworlding (Haraway, 2016, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, Duke University Press) underscores the significance of Indigenous cosmologies that perceive time and place through circular, recursive and reciprocal relationships. This recognition acknowledges the perpetual regeneration and transformation of the world, which flourishes through novel ways of worlding. Moving away from dystopian-utopian binaries in climate fiction (Cli-Fi), genres of hopepunk and solarpunk align with the collective and affirmative ethos of reworlding and its near-future grounded relationality. Climate Change Education (CCE) is situated in relation to the impacts of climate emergency on cities through urban play, opening up an opportunity for collective and collaborative live-action futuring for better worlds by reworlding together. These methods were developed through the design of a climate action game experienced through live-action role-play in a Carlton street closed for two days in Naarm Melbourne. The game design responds to cascading impacts of the climate emergency on the city in 2050 as it becomes a megacity of 8 million residents. Thematically, this fiction explores how we might live well together while players are invited to experience this scenario by learning how to reworld a neighbourhood together. Through this case study, the capacity of Cli-Fi and CCE to dream alternate social imaginaries are explored via urban role-play.

Our study aims to (1) understand the impact of student-led knowledge dissemination and (2) examine the effects of multimodal interventions — comprising (i) a video on environmental catastrophes, (ii) pictorial reading materials on environmental issues (iii) lab-based simulated eco-tourism trips. This study involved students enrolled in a subject offered at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Malaysia, attended by undergraduates from three different degree programmes. These interventions were implemented to examine their impact on both student advocates and their peers, particularly in terms of raising environmental awareness, shaping attitudes and fostering sustainable behavioural intentions (SBI). We equip students to become environmental advocates by providing them with environmental knowledge in class and assessing their ability to effectively share this knowledge with their peers. We conducted an experimental study using a multimodality intervention approach to assess changes in SBI. Study 1 measures the initial SBI without treatment, while Study 2 measures the incremental SBI after treatment. In our experiment, we requested 124 students (advocates) to reach out to at least three friends, and from this outreach, we obtained 401 respondents altogether. Our approach uncovers the effectiveness of same-level knowledge transfer (students to peers), facilitating the spread of environmental knowledge within peer groups.