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.

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.

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 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.

Impending doom. Fire, drought, floods. This is the image of the environmental future our young people are shown and often set the challenged of “What are you going to do about it.” This is an enormous quest. It is directionless ambition without structure. It is the illusion of agency for change. This article showcases the design decisions of curricula and reflections on using of range of cli-fi and concludes with a set of continua that may help fellow educators in developing cl-fi learning activities including storytelling cards, design sprints, and sci-fi prototyping. They are iterations in the reflective approach to creating experiences that envision positive outcomes. These activities draw on research from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Plants for Space (P4S), which explores sustainable agriculture in extreme environments, like lunar habitats. P4S operates at the intersection of plants, people, technology, and sustainability, fostering critical and creative thinking. By framing sustainable futures in space context, we aim to alleviate environmental anxiety, encourages optimistic, innovative thinking, unconstrained by biological and societal norms. Climate fiction becomes a tool for imagining and realising new technologies, enabling students to create and critique possibilities beyond Earth’s current limitations.

An urban forest school, London, UK: Stegosaurus (self-chosen pseudonym) is crouching and looking down intently at something on the ground. I notice he is rubbing two pieces of chalk in his hands. Chalk gently sprinkles over blades of grass, covering each leaf in a white dust.

A wall-less school, Bali: Paintbrush hails me. I pick her up, stroking her smooth, moist bristles likening them to fur. Between my fingers, I roll her brittle wooden handle backwards and forwards, imagining that this could be a twig, bone or spine.

What if we were to attend to the peculiarities of these material encounters?

How might Chalk and Paintbrush enact wild pedagogies?

Chalk and paintbrushes are everyday objects in educational settings and traditional, dominant pedagogies focus on how humans use these objects to support learning. Drawing on two material-multispecies moments from our posthumanist, feminist, materialist inquiries, we think-with rather than about Chalk and Paintbrush as intra-acting, co-creators of knowledge. These provide ways for becoming-wild that resist the anthropocentric, developmental and civilising processes so deeply imbued in educational approaches. Instead, becoming-wild offers hopeful and generative wild pedagogies that acknowledge the power of the everyday, ignored and divergent that strengthen and expand all our response-abilities.

The signals and consequences of, and currently overall eco-socio-cultural inadequate responses to, the pressing climate and biodiversity crises of the Anthropocene foster a landscape of repression, hopelessness and anxiety among many, not least young people. As young people today seem to primarily encounter dystopian future narratives, this article tells a story about how playing an open-ended, solarpunk, character-driven cli-fi tabletop roleplaying game together with young people might nurture non-dystopic engagements. Designed as both a research and educational playspace, the game invites participants to become co-researchers and co-narrators engaged in imagining life-friendly futures, attempting to push the boundaries of environmental and sustainability education research. In conversation with the theoretical inspirations of the game — post-Anthropocene pedagogy, climate literacy research and SF multispecies storytelling — the article discusses insights from the first prototype playtests. When the game flows, it produces engagements with speculative futures and understandings of hope’s relational and complex character. When it halts, it reveals challenges around participation, social context and setting, pointing to directions for further research and game alterations.

This article explores and discusses the change processes and pedagogical dilemmas ignited by introducing wild pedagogies to pedagogical employees in Danish early childhood institutions. By analysing experiments aimed at developing new play and learning environments, carried out as part of a large design-based research project, we discuss how existing “roots” of early childhood education in Denmark provide a fertile soil for the introduction of wild pedagogies. We identify two “shoots of change” with a potential for pushing the status quo in relations between children, adults, and more-than-human nature. Centreing on altering the place of nature in early childhood education and carving out time for more open approaches, these shoots are in close dialogue with wild pedagogies. By experimenting with these shoots of change, pedagogical dilemmas became more visible, important, and present to the participants. Attending to and exploring such dilemmas are crucial aspects of keeping socio-cultural change processes in motion.

Framed by biological and environmental education, this paper addresses eight questions posed in Wild Pedagogies: Touchstones for Re-Negotiating Education and the Environment in the Anthropocene. These questions ponder more-than-human methodologies, positionality of the natural world, embedded anthropocentricism and research implications for the natural world. Wild pedagogues aim to reclaim and reimagine an educational system toward intentional praxis less reliant on quantifiable learning outcomes, with a move toward active, ‘‘self-willed pedagogy’’ with an agential nature as co-teacher. This bold enterprise challenges dominant Western-colonial paradigms rooted in power and control over nature and learners. My responses explore Tim Ingold’s notion of a ‘‘modest, humble, and attentive’’ science, ecocentric place-based research, questions dissection and animal experimentation, and offers Goethean science and Indigenous philosophy as alternatives to rational-reductionist Newtonian science. Lab-based science is contrasted with natural history, and creative, contemplative practice are suggested as tools of the wild researcher. How can we transform science education through the lenses of deep ecology and philosophical posthumanism? This paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue of ecological and environmental education during the Anthropocene, especially in regard to the life sciences and the often-unquestioned use of nonhuman animals in science teaching and research.

Many young people feel distressed about climate change, and pessimistic about what the future holds. Gaps in education about climate change contribute to limited understanding of opportunities for climate mitigation and adaptation, and to a pervasive “discourse of doom.” Here we describe a “game for change” co-designed by climate and education researchers and young people, that aims to shift narratives about climate changed futures toward an active, adaptation-oriented focus.

The Heat Is On is designed to be played by high school classes. Set in 2050, the game takes place on a fictional island called “Adaptania.” Teams of students play the role of town councillors in communities facing the same challenges that Australian towns are experiencing as the climate heats up, including flooding, heatwaves, bushfires, inequality, health issues and economic challenges. By focussing on decision-making for adaptation and resilience, The Heat Is On enables participants to envision climate-changed futures in which communities can thrive. Students learn how to plan and collaborate to prepare for diverse and cascading impacts of climate hazards. We explore the potential for games in climate education, focussing on The Heat Is On as a case study, and share initial learnings from its development and implementation in schools.

This article explores multispecies climate fiction as a mode of inquiry that speculates-with other-than-humans. To explore cli-fi’s potential in research, I position speculative fiction in the field of research-creation, a praxis that combines artistic exploration with scholarly inquiry. Adopting a research-creation approach, I wrote the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley. The story emerged from the Multispecies City Lab project, a participatory research project that invited participants to imagine multispecies life in urban areas affected by climate change. I engaged creatively with the research findings of the Multispecies City Lab project, using participants’ imaginaries as a proposition to write the cli-fi story. In this article, the story Canopy of the Hidden Alley is presented alongside methodological reflections on speculative fiction and research-creation, as well as theoretical conceptualizations of what it means to speculate-with other-than-humans in climate fiction. This article discusses the potentiality of speculative fiction as a form of research-creation, demonstrating how creative writing enabled deeper engagement with issues of identity and positionality, social and relational hierarchies and the interplay of multiple temporalities, which guided toward new understandings of multispecies entanglements in the context of climate change and speculative climate futures.

This paper begins with crises; environmental, social and democratic. And then it posits that in the midst of these crises there might be an opportunity. One that involves not so much “saving” democracy and sustaining current ways of life but shifting attentions towards potentially creating (re-creating) something different. Something we are calling eco-democracy. There have long been voices, calling for a more environmentally thoughtful form of democracy. After tracing a short discussion of this history including some of the critiques we turn to an exploration of eco-democracy in environmental education. Our argument is that some forms of environmental education are already thinking in more eco-democratic ways without necessarily naming the project as such. In order to do this, we focus on five ‘seedlings’ of eco-democracy that already exist in environmental education. These seedlings allow us to do two things. First, draw connections to Wild Pedagogies and second draw out four key considerations for environmental educators if they are interested in having more eco-democratic practices: voice, consent, self-determination and kindness. The paper ends with a short speculative exploration of what might happen pedagogically if environmental education were to assume an eco-democratic orientation through honouring voice, consent, self-determination, and kindness.

This article explores strategies for rewilding pedagogy through three life-opening arts-based educational practices: nature writing, propositions, and minor experiences. Drawing on wild pedagogies, diverse perspectives on life, and various approaches to arts education, we examine how these practices can be twisted to promote life-friendly education, in support of more-than-human life, disrupting life-forgetful educational and societal norms. By reflecting on the (re)wilding strategies and their actual as well as imagined outcomes, we offer ideas on how to break with dominant conceptions of education and life in the Anthropocene.

This article examines the transformative potential of the 2CG® (Content- and Context-specific Generic Competency Coaching) method in advancing climate education across disciplines, hierarchies, and cultures. Drawing on case studies and theoretical insights, it demonstrates how this multi-method approach deepens emotional engagement through imagination, challenges entrenched behaviours, and supports the development of climate-responsive competencies. By integrating polyphonic storytelling, poetry, the arts, and climate fiction, the 2CG® framework empowers learners to critically engage with ecological issues and adopt climate-conscious behaviours. Central to the approach is the co-creation of climate imaginaries — transformative narratives that interweave human and more-than-human perspectives to foster deep reflection, relational awareness, and contextually grounded action. Overall, this pedagogical model cultivates the cognitive, emotional, and dialogical capacities learners need to navigate complexity and contribute meaningfully to just and regenerative transitions.

In the edginess of our predicament, violences of the -isms (capitalism, colonialism, imperialism) impact life: ecological degradation and inequalities are some matters of concern and care, regionally and planetary. Such crisis accentuates the call for relational education, a worlding process emerging within and being immanent to practice, probing power-relations, decentring the human and highlighting the enmeshment of peoples and environment. Wilding pedagogies is one way of responding to such call. This contribution, a postqualitative assemblage, attends to the formation of wild as a philosophical concept emerging in-practice working the relationality of theory, artmaking and storying. It defamiliarizes domesticated visions of education by mapping the movement of practices of peoples and conditions of life in (and beyond) Southeast Mediterranean. In so doing, it problematises new materialist, Deleuzoguattarian and indigenous philosophies and cosmologies and suggests such frictions crucial for environmental education. I re-visit and re-enliven — in Karen Barad’s discussion — projects with children, communities, and the more-than-human world in Southeast Mediterranean through artistic (urban sketching) and teaching-pedagogical practice probing wildings as dynamic, unfolding process refuting isolation and fixity. Wildings emerges as differentiating process reworking ethical relations, intensifying and nuancing wild pedagogies and re-imagining environmental education.