Through Target 4.7 of SDG4 on 'quality education', Agenda 2030 invites governments to take ownership of progress towards ensuring 'Education for Sustainable Development' (ESD) becomes embedded into all levels of education. However, conceptual analysis suggests an ongoing blindspot related to the significance of systems literacy in fostering the…

University-based curriculum development often involves adding new content. This 'just add' approach has also been applied to integrating the UN SDGs into curricula, reducing them to a checklist rather than embracing their holistic and transformative aims. This is particularly concerning for SDG 4 and SDG 4.7, which require deep, cross-cutting…

Purpose: This viewpoint paper addresses the use of sustainability frameworks in embedding education for sustainability into the curriculum of higher education institutions (HEIs). The purpose of this paper is to explore the paradox that sustainability frameworks must facilitate transformation of existing structures whilst also being well-enough…

This article develops a model of education from Murray Bookchin's social ecology by demonstrating how "the economy," specifically growth and employment, intervenes between the environment and education, impeding the goal of environmental education. By reformulating Bookchin's central claim in terms of power, rather than domination, the…

This paper has two main purposes. The first, more informational, is to introduce, re-introduce, the German-Nordic concept of "Bildung" to Canadian environmental education. This includes a brief attempt to define, a short overview of its history which stretches back to the Eighteenth century at least, and then an exploration of why and…

In the Anthropocene epoch, human activity is ubiquitous on Earth. However, this does not imply that nature is entirely under human control. The growing number of natural disasters that afflict human beings demonstrates the limitations of human abilities. Unfortunately, many of these catastrophes are caused by humans themselves. The adversity…

This paper argues that a proper response to the onset of potentially catastrophic human-induced climate change requires an understanding that is both broader and deeper than that which frequently informs current policies and that focusses on technological solutions and some behaviour modification. Such a technologically orientated response is seen…

This paper explores the potential for extending relational ontologies to include a specific focus on human-plant relations. We theorise the emergence of a vegetal ontology, as a novel way of working and remaking theories around human-plant relations that can be applied to the field of environmental education. A vegetal ontological approach, as…

For teachers to contribute to the development of the environmentally sustainable and wholesome society envisioned in South Africa's Constitution, it was the goal of this paper to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher development workshops designed to equip teachers with environmental and sustainability knowledge and skills in the curriculum. In…

This paper addresses the discussion on the Anthropocene in environmental education research. It aims to enrich and widen the debate about the appropriateness of humanist approaches to environmental education and sustainability. In response to criticism about anthropocentric responses to human-made environmental destruction, the authors introduce a…

Michael Bonnett's highly regarded "Environmental Consciousness" (2021) is an admirable extension of the phenomenology of nature inaugurated in his previous work "Retrieving Nature" (2004). To fully capture the essentials of his environmental thinking, I locate the set of ideas he has developed in his phenomenology of nature…

Through philosophical reasoning, this article will argue for two theses, which function as two sides of the same coin. The first thesis is that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), as a science and in addition to numerous concrete individual studies, must work self-reflexively on a common and tentatively formal theory of ESD. The first…

It is widely acknowledged that anthropogenic climate change is already having severe adverse effects on our planet and poses an existential threat to many species, including our own. National curricula and schools and other formal educational settings have been slow to address the issue of climate change, despite the deep traction that it has with…

Climate change and climate education concern more than climate and the environment, as our social and economic systems both rely upon and are impacted by climate and environment. We cannot address the human impact on our global climate and local environments without several nations reconstructing their social and economic systems to be equitable…

Sustainable development as a subject area and learning objective increasingly finds its way into the curriculum from pre-school to university level, and education and learning are emphasized as key drivers for sustainable development. At the same time, the sustainable development discourse has since its inception been met with critique, not least…