Abstract Amid growing calls for Australian universities to engage meaningfully with Indigenous knowledges, this article examines how Indigenous-led, place-based inquiry can reorient academic practice toward culturally regenerative possibilities. Drawing on a Cooperative Inquiry conducted with Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar, we follow six Noongar-led experiences involving Country, language, ceremony, deep time, embodiment and more-than-human relations. Through cycles of experiential, presentational and reflective practice, these engagements restructured attention, temporality and conduct, foregrounding relational ethics of permission, reciprocity and refusal. Multimodal forms including movement, image and creative response were treated as epistemic practices, enabling us to register affective and relational reorientations that are not readily accessible through propositional forms alone. Our analysis traces how these reorientations unsettled extractive research habits and repositioned knowledge-making as embodied, participatory and accountable to Country. We argue that culturally regenerative university practice does not emerge through policy statements, curricular add-ons or inclusion alone, but through lived, relational engagements that reconfigure how knowledge is generated, held and shared. The study contributes empirical insight into how such reconfigurations unfold in practice and highlights the institutional conditions required to sustain accountable relationships with place.
The special issue, “Meeting Global Challenges through Families and Community Environmental and Sustainability Education: Generating Action Competence” aims to discover and address ways of meeting global educational and political challenges of sustainable futures from the perspective of families and community involvement. With contributions from multiple disciplinary and multidisciplinary fields it is organised around four thematic areas. Namely, Education for Empowering Communities for Change through Climate and Cultural Heritage; Families and Communities Educating for Sustainable Futures; Interdisciplinary Approaches to Education for Building Resilience in the face of Environmental Complexity and Uncertainty; and Integrating Methodologies for Researching and Developing Action Competence for Environmental and Community Sustainability through Education.
Climate change is threatening humanity’s existence. Youth have the potential and capability to contribute to tackling climate change. The current study aims to examine how school and family environmental education can enhance environmental knowledge, willingness to act, and pro-environmental behaviours among children and young people. The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was utilised on a nationally representative dataset of 2069 Vietnamese primary, secondary, and high school students. The analysis suggests that school- and family-based environmental education is beneficial for improving students’ environmental knowledge and willingness to take environmental action. Notably, the effect of school education is more substantial for cultivating environmental knowledge, whereas family education has a stronger impact on raising students’ willingness to act. Students with better environmental knowledge are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours only when they are willing to act. If students are unwilling, higher environmental knowledge is negatively associated with pro-environmental behaviour. Building on these findings, we advocate for coordinated educational efforts between schools and families to strengthen students’ environmental knowledge, pro-environmental intentions, and behaviours. Furthermore, we emphasise the need for Vietnam’s education system to gradually shift away from didactic, top-down methods toward more experiential, interdisciplinary, and student-centred approaches that support transformative environmental learning and nurture an eco-surplus culture.
This study explores how preservice social studies teachers conceive ecological citizenship and evaluates a curriculum-embedded ecological citizenship model intended to cultivate environmentally responsible citizens. Employing a grounded theory approach, data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, with concurrent coding and comparative analysis guiding model development. Participants articulated ecological consciousness as the core category, supported by related themes of a liveable world, a beacon of hope, future generations' welfare and holistic perspectives on nature. The resultant model identifies families and schools as joint stewards of ecological citizenship, beginning with foundational environmental education at home and extending into targeted social studies activities. The refined ecological citizenship model elucidates how its components - rights, justice, responsibility and participation - progressively foster environmental action and tangible improvements. The study concludes with recommendations for embedding ecological citizenship within teacher education and, school curricula, offering guidance on assessment strategies such as reflective journals and pre-post evaluations to monitor both behavioural and ecological outcomes. This concise framework provides conceptual clarity and actionable guidance for educators and curriculum designers.
Modern Western education has been criticised for its human-centred orientation and for legitimising the exploitation of nature, thereby contributing to the environmental crisis. This article responds by rethinking a specific Northern European strand of the Bildung tradition, namely the modern critical-constructive approach associated with Humboldt and Klafki, as a pedagogical framework concerned with how teaching and educational practices could and should support processes of self-formation. Drawing on reflections from an international Wild Pedagogies (WP) gathering in Sweden, we engage the WP concept of Nature as Co-Teacher to develop three re-imaginations of critical-constructive approaches to Bildung. First, we reimagine Bildung as dialogical co-development in a more-than-human world. Second, we reimagine Bildung as place-specific pedagogical practices oriented towards engagement with, in, and for the living world. Third, we reimagine Bildung within a nature-, place-, and life-centred horizon in which the living world provides the highest context of meaning and value. Together, these re-imaginations contribute to ongoing debates in Environmental and Sustainability Education and related fields about how pedagogical traditions can respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.
