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The term “cyborg,” as a combination of “cybernetics” and “organism,” was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 in a paper presented at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conference on space exploration as a representation of a particular challenge of space travel: physically adapting a human body to survive in a hostile environment rather than modifying the environment. Soon after, NASA commissioned “The Cyborg Study” to investigate the theoretical possibilities of incorporating life support–related technologies into future spacecraft design. From the beginning, cyborgs were seen as the realization of a transhumanist goal—liberating humans from the limitations of the body and its environment by means of mechanization. Outside of space exploration, the term “cyborg” has evolved to encompass an expansive mesh of the mythological, metaphorical, and technical. Initially mainly taken up by science fiction writers to create superhumans, the notion entered cultural studies in the 1980s, particularly through Donna Haraway’s feminist “cyborg manifesto,” which argues that we are all cyborgs. Since then, terminology has shifted, and cyborgs are more likely called “posthumans,” “more-than-humans,” “other-than-humans,” or “companion species.” Discussions of cyborg and posthuman subjectivities in educational research have taken two main directions. The first argues that with equipment like tablets, smartphones, and laptops, students and teachers are already cyborgs—hybrids of human and machine—accessing information, resources, networks, groups, personal relations, libraries, and mass media through the Internet. Other research has investigated how the construction of cyborg and posthuman subjectivities changes the relationships between humans and their surroundings, devising new social, ethical, and discursive ways of thinking and representation.

Emeritus Professor Peter James Fensham AO (26 October 1927–23 August 2021), was a major figure in science education in Australia and internationally for many decades. However, fewer people are awar...

This essay responds to Jill Williams and Sara Tolbert (2021) and discusses the similarities and differences in curriculum, classroom, teaching and standards between Arizona, USA, and Victoria, Australia. Williams and Tolbert relate a good news story in a state of neoliberal educational despair. This essay argues that, from a relatively well supported Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education perspective in Victoria, the marginalised story they tell is to be envied. This argument draws attention to curriculum deficiencies, teacher qualifications and testing regimes as sources for concern.

This paper discusses the apparent amnesia with regard to insights manifested in ecofeminist thought and applies a re-collective analysis to thinking on the implications of an ecofeminist new materi...

The environmental education movement developed in the 1970s at the same time as the environment movement, the feminist movement and the ecofeminist movement. However, while environmental ed...

This essay explores the implications for inquiries in sustainability education of Helmreich’s discussions of how human biocultural practices scramble nature and culture, life forms and forms of life, and his ethos of acceptance of ambiguous boundaries and transformative linkages with others. The silences in Helmreich’s arguments around gender and sustainability through looking at Probyn and Merchant, and the possibilities for a more-than-human scientific inquiry curriculum, are discussed, as is how science studies offer an image of a more-than-human anthropology that leads us to reconceive evolution, nature, gender, and sustainability, to which educational researchers need to pay attention.

Similar to much of the world, the Australian Government has a vision for society to be engaged in and enriched by science which has, as its prime focus, building skills and capabilities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Simultaneously, the Government’s policies and projects, including in education, ignore intergovernmental environmental initiatives, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) This article critically analyses the Australian Government’s STEM and climate change education policies and programs, including Citizen Science activities, through an ecological education lens and finds many, and growing, gaps and silences in these areas It compares the Australian situation with STEM and ecological educationrelated developments in several other countries In the context of significant global changes such as the COVID-19 pandemic, this article argues that it is time for the Australian education agenda to take the Government’s international responsibilities seriously, include meaningful engagement with climate change and biodiversity related topics through ecological education in the school curriculum, and discusses what a reimagined school science curriculum could look like © 2021 by the authors Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

The term “Anthropocene” was coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to denote the present time interval as a new epoch of geological time dominated by human impact on the Earth. The starting date for the epoch is contentious—around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1800 ce), at the start of the nuclear age, or some other time, both earlier and later than these dates. The term itself is also contentious because of its humanist and human supremacy focus, and the way it hides troublesome differences between humans (including gender and cultural differences) and the intimate relationships among technology, humans, and other animals. Endeavors such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aim to achieve gender equality by empowering women to participate in society. However, within this goal is the assumption that women and “other marginalized Others” can be assimilated within the dominant social paradigm rather than questioning the assumptions that maintain the subordination of these social groups. The goals also overlook the divergent impacts on women around the globe. Education in an Anthropocene context necessitates a different pedagogy that provides opportunities for learning to live in and engage with the world and acknowledges that we live in a more-than-human world. It also requires learners to critique the Anthropocene as a concept and its associated themes to counter the humanist perspective, which fails to consider how the nonhuman and material worlds coshape our mutual worlds. In particular, education in the Anthropocene will need to be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or cross-disciplinary; intersectional; ecofeminist or posthumanist; indigenous; and participatory.

In the past, women, queer, Indigenous and disabled people, as well as race, class and body size issues, have been overlooked in most environmental education programs through being subsumed into the notion of “universalised people,” the “norm.” However, people in each of these marginalised groups has a distinctive contribution to make to environmental education, as a form of anti-oppressive resistance, which needs to be foregrounded. In this chapter I problematize the relative silencing of queer theory and theorizing in environmental education and discuss the contributions that queer(y)ing perspectives bring to environmental education. In particular, I discuss some possibilities for new directions for environmental education where queer ecopedagogies and research, intersectionality and assemblages are used to listen to, and work with, “queer” voices.

This article explores the changing ways ‘environment’ has been represented in the discourses of environmental education and education for sustainable development (ESD) in United Nations (and related) publications since the 1970s. It draws on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and discusses the increasingly dominant view of the environment as a ‘natural resource base for economic and social development’ (United Nations, 2002, p. 2) and how this instrumentalisation of nature is produced by discourses and ‘ecotechnologies’ that ‘identify and define the natural realm in our relationship with it’ (Boetzkes, 2010, p. 29). This denaturation of nature is reflected in the priorities for sustainable development discussed at Rio+20 and proposed successor UNESCO projects. The article argues for the need to reassert the intrinsic value of ‘environment’ in education discourses and discusses strategies for so doing. The article is intended as a wake-up call to the changing context of the ‘environment’ in ESD discourses. In particular, we need to respond to the recent UNESCO (2013a, 2013b) direction of global citizenship education as the successor to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005–2014 that continues to reinforce an instrumentalist view of the environment as part of contributing to ‘a more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable world’ (UNESCO, 2013a, p. 3).

This chapter traces the association between green and education, noting the similarities in concerns with the four pillars of green political parties and the principles developed by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987). It discusses the emergence of notions of greening education in the late 1980s, and green schools’ movements in the mid/late 1990s. The characteristics of the green schools’ movements in different countries are compared within a broadly shared philosophy of green schools needing to adopt a whole school approach. This is followed by a discussion of the relationship between green schools, the United Nations (2016) Sustainable Development Goals and concerns to develop global citizenship.

This chapter discusses the impact of the various green school programs on education for sustainable development in the countries included in this volume and how this impact needs to be problematised in terms of measurable and unmeasurable outcomes. It also discusses the challenges and opportunities experienced by the various green school programs and the possibilities of a green future for schools.

This chapter introduces the edited collection of stories of green school movements around the world and the impacts they have had on the development of environmental education and education for sustainable development in their respective countries.

© 2018, Ontario Institute for Educational Studies (OISE). This commentary responds to the seven articles in this issue by reading them through lenses of tinkering and tailoring, juxtaposing and extending them with other writings across a range of fields. Disrupting and displacing methodologies in science education is not something new. There are multiple examples from two and more decades ago where science educators and researchers have drawn attention to the need to approach science education research and pedagogy differently. However, the authors in this Special Issue have worked from different theories in their efforts to go beyond tinkering and tailoring and re-de/sign methodologies in STEM education. We are inspired by the contributions and hope that these new approaches will achieve the changes that have eluded many similar arguments in the past.

The Hong Kong Green School Award (HKGSA) is a school award scheme hosted by the Environmental Campaign Committee (ECC) to encourage schools to promote environmental awareness and for students to develop an environmentally-friendly lifestyle. Since its inception in 2000, the HKGSA has undergone several phases of development. Between 2000 to 2008 it took the form of a competition with 3 winning schools and 10 merit schools After an initial review in 2005, it was decided to change the 8th HKGSA from a competition format to a benchmarking process. The successfully accredited schools were given the title of Green School once they fulfilled certain requirements. Another major reform took place in the 12th HKGSA in 2013 to allow flexibility for schools to satisfy the requirements in phases by completing the accreditation to attain the gold award over a period of 3 years, the introduction of facilitators to act as mentors and the enforcing of a maximum validity period for the accreditation. This structure mirrored the sustainable schools program in Victoria, Australia. HKGSA has become a well-received accreditation scheme which can also act as a driving force to promote education for sustainable development in the school sector which in 2020 will be subsumed under the Hong Kong Awards for Environmental Excellence (HKAEE). This chapter describes the development of this initiative in Hong Kong, its framework, implementation, impact and future.

Fifteen years ago we explored the implications of adopting a poststructuralist feminist research methodology in environmental education research and practice. We argued that speaking the world into existence provides multiple ways of thinking about and comprehending environmental knowledge and the way we experience ourselves in space, time, and place. In the intervening years, feminist new materialism has emerged, ecofeminism has had an enlivening resurgence, feminist scholarship in environmental education has expanded, and "nature" seems to have declined within dominant discourses, supplanted by a more anthropocentric agenda. The positioning of body/nature in this scholarship has become a point of contention, difference, and convergence. Here, we explore the "nature" of environmental education as informed by new material feminist, ecofeminist, and other viewpoints, interrogating their similarities and differences, their relationship to feminist poststructuralism, and their implications for environmental education research and practice.

Environmental education has long been recognized as critical for achieving environmental awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behaviour consistent with sustainable development and for effective participation in environmental decision-making. Since the Declaration of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment concerns about marine pollution and ecotoxicology, among other environmental challenges, should be included in environmental education. However, in the more than forty years since this significant environmental Declaration, marine education has struggled to find a place in the school curriculum of most countries, even though issues such as climate change, chemical contamination of marine environments, coastal eutrophication, and seafood safety continue to threaten human and other species' well-being. This viewpoint discusses how marine education is marginalized in school education, and how marine specialists need to embed school education in their action plans. Particular questions include: who should be educated, about what, where and with what goals in mind?

This article traces the shifts in environmental education discourses from the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, to the 2012 UN Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, and beyond through a biopolitical lens. Each of the earlier shifts is reflected in environmental, sustainability and science education policies and curricula—but what of the most recent shifts at Rio+20 and in UNESCO’s (2014) Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development? The article examines how the ecological version of politics emerged and then became integrated into technocentric biopolitics and how this shift affected the shaping of environmental, sustainability and science education policies and curricula. In particular, the article analyzes the shifting biopolitical interfaces that have occurred between “natural environment” and “society”—from a goal of preserving the natural foundations of life to a focus on exploiting these foundations, modifying and transforming the environment through scientific and technological means—and the manifestations of this in Australian curriculum documents.

For the past 30 years or so, a small group of environmental education scholars have attended to gender and promoted feminist theories and methodologies (e.g., Barrett,2005; Barron,1995; Davies,2013; DiChiro,1987; Fawcett,2000; Fontes,2002; Gough,1999a,1999b,2004; Gough & Whitehouse,2003;Gray,2016; Hallen,2000; Harvester & Blenkinsop, 2010; Li,2007; Lloro-Bidart,2016; Martusewicz,2013; McKenzie,2004,2005; Newbery,2003; Russell & Bell,1996; Russell & Semenko,2016; Sakellari & Skanavis,2013; Storey, DaCruz & Camargo,1998; Stovall, Baker-Sperry, & Dallinger,2015; Wane & Chandler,2002; Warren,1996; Whitehouse,2012; Whitehouse & Taylor,1996).1Historically, this scholarship has remained somewhat on the margins of the field (A.Gough,2013,in press; Russell &Fawcett,2013), however, it is time for renewal. This special issue of The Journal of Environmental Education is devoted to the topic of gender and environmental education. The issue brings together an international group of scholars who share a common dedication to promoting social equity and gender equality in environmental education and beyond. Including research reports, theoretical inquiry, autobiographical explorations, and creative assemblages, collectively the articles demonstrate the exciting possibilities that come with bringing gender from margin to center (see hooks,1984).

[Extract] The second special issue of The Journal of Environmental Education devoted to gender and environmental education comes at an interesting moment in popular culture. The #MeToo movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to support girls and women of color who had experienced sexual violence, became a global phenomenon in 2017 when celebrities popularized the phrase as a hashtag when discussing sexual violence and harassment in the entertainment industry. The hashtag took off, with 12 million tweets in the first 24 hours (Mendes, Ringrose, & Keller, 2018), from 85 different countries that had at least 1,000 tweets each (Park, 2017, para. 1). While the movement has been galvanizing for many (Mendes et al., 2018), feminist scholars nonetheless have concerns about its unfolding, including the erasure of Black activist women in many accounts (Emejulu,2018) and lack of awareness of how race, class, and celebrity status are factors that influence why certain testimonies are more likely to be heard and believed (Zarkov & Davis, 2018). Zarkov and Davis (2018) also worry that too much focus on individuals may downplay that sexual violence is a collective problem that requires "grass-roots activism as well as transforming institutions" (p. 5). At this point, as Mendes et al. (2018) observe, "we still know very little about what hashtags like #MeToo actually do; or whether and how they can produce social change" (p. 3).

This chapter reports on a study was part of a larger three to four-year longitudinal study of adolescent leadership for sustainability using social constructivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2008, 2014). The purpose of this study was to investigate how adolescents understandings of sustainability, leadership, leadership for sustainability, capabilities, attributes, leadership styles and motivational factors help shape their identity, emergence and development as leaders. This chapter reports some of the findings of this study, in particular: ‡ Adolescents understandings of leadership and leadership for sustainability and how these changed over time.

Secondary students’ resistance to learning science is nothing new but it has been of interest to me since I started my teaching career in the 1970s and academic career in 1990. Although, that such resistance exists is now widely accepted, in 1990 many were in denial – except for some feminist writers, and it was in feminist theory that I found my initial inspiration for researching this resistance. But feminist critique was not enough to explain the resistance and so, inspired by Sandra Harding, I argued that gender, equality, quality and globalization are political issues that are interwoven into the discourses and practices of science education in my writings and teaching. Integral to these arguments is the need to challenge the gendered, classed and racist nature of the knowledge that constitutes school science curricula. This chapter takes the form of an autoethnography that traces the theoretical frameworks I have used, the arguments that I have made, and continue to make, about the oppressions and injustices that science education in schools continues to reproduce, and explains why I am a woman being disruptive.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Educational Philosophy and Theory on 9 June 2016, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2016.1174099.© 2016 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to (re)interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research.

This chapter is essential reading for understanding the origins and evolution of the much debated and misunderstood concept ‘sustainable development’. It argues that achieving sustainable development requires balancing of economic, environmental and social goals, highlights the lack of international consensus and commitment on these issues, and asserts that global citizenship education is critical for achieving sustainable development, noting that both areas struggle to find a place in the school curriculum. It concludes by arguing that the increasing global inequalities require governments to take a stronger role in promoting education for sustainable development and global citizenship, and achieving Sustainable Development Goals.

This article charts the history of environmental education over four decades - from the 1960s to 2006 - as a rocky road of determined chocolate with the possibilities of rocks (nuts) and easy passage (marshmallow). There were distractions such as suggestions of changing names and new directions (add fruit?) along the way but the road has continued to be well travelled. The article concludes that there is much in common with where we have come from (the 1975 Belgrade Charter) and where we stand now (in year 2 of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development). Where next?

The Australian Journal of Environmental Education, first published in 1984, is a rich source for investigating the history of environmental education in Australia as it has sampled research and writings in the field since the Australian Association for Environmental Education was established in 1980. The Journal captures some of the ghosts that haunt our field, as Mrs Alving says in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (Act II): It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world...

This essay responds to the contribution of Volny Fages and Virginia Albe, in this volume, to the field of research in science education, and places it in the context of the plethora of government and industry policy documents calling for more Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education in schools and universities and the tension between these and students’ declining interest in studying STEM subjects. It also draws attention to the parallels between the silences around sociopolitical issues in government policies and curriculum related to STEM, including nanoscience, and those found with respect to environmental education two decades ago, and relates these to the resurgence of a scientific rationalist approach to curriculum.

Since the earliest formulations of the UN goals for environmental education (EE) at the Belgrade conference (1975), through the reconceptualization of education for sustainable development (ESD) at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002), to The Future We Want (2012), teacher education—at pre-service and in-service levels and across primary and secondary education—has been regarded as being essential for achieving sustainable development. In response, the UNESCO-UNEP International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP) published prototypes for teacher education at elementary and middle school levels in the 1980s, and UNESCO published Guidelines and Recommendations for Reorienting Teacher Education to Address Sustainability (Hopkins and McKeown 2005) and continues to support related programmes. However, despite these many attempts, there is recurring testimony to the almost universal lack of success in introducing coherent or consistent programmes of EE/ESD into teacher education courses. This essay discusses these and other strategies for re-orienting teacher education through pedagogy and whole school system approaches while acknowledging that the teacher education institutions themselves are often the biggest obstacles.

Despite efforts over the past 40 plus years, environmental sustainability is still on the margins of the curriculum in most countries. While there is much evidence that children enjoy learning about and in the environment, many teachers remain reluctant to teach environmental sustainability, and governments frequently marginalise the area. This chapter discusses the need for education for sustainability as part of global citizenship and provides a history of the implementation of environmental sustainability education in schools, with a particular emphasis on Australian and English schools, and the tensions that have been encountered. It also gives some examples of instances where environmental sustainability has been successfully implemented in schools, and concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges for the future. A thread throughout these discussions is the relationship between environmental and science education because these fields have long been seen as related in a schooling context.

This essay reviews the contribution of Rowhea Elmesky in this volume, to the field of research in science education, and places it in the context of the juncture of youth disengagement with science, multicultural education and globalisation, with an underlay of a historical context and critiques of science education from feminist and postcolonial perspectives.

This paper reviews Australian Government actions related to environmental education, particularly in the past decade, and examines the actions forthcoming from two national action plans (Environment Australia, 2000 and DEWHA, 2009), the implementation strategy for the Decade of ESD (DEWHA, 2006) and developments related to the Australian Curriculum. This analysis is inspired by the Australian-ness of the metaphor of the curriculum as a jigsaw puzzle suggested by Robottom (1987), the seemingly constant battle for survival in the formal curriculum that environmental education has faced since the 1970s (Fensham, 1990; Gough, 1997), and the ongoing tensions between science education and environmental education in Australia's formal school curriculum.

In Victoria, Australia, outdoor education has been a legitimate subject in the school curriculum for over 25 years. However its place has been debated and challenged over this period. This paper traces the history of the subject, its current status in the Victorian Certificate of Education, future challenges to its place in the curriculum - particularly from the Education for Sustainable Development agenda - and strategies for using challenges towards defining the subject with its own identity.

All forms of formal education in Australia—from early childhood through the formal years of schooling to tertiary education—are increasingly under the microscope in Australia, and internationally, with all sectors under pressure to transform their practices by better engaging students, improving student outcomes, and teaching smarter, as well as addressing a range of social and political imperatives.