Engagement with nature is crucial for child development and kindergarten educators' pedagogical beliefs about nature play significantly affect children's access to and experiences of nature in kindergarten. This study examines the role of nature play in children's holistic development, engaging 12 Chinese kindergarten educators through in-depth…

In 2022, Staffordshire University completed the build of the new £4.4 m award-winning Woodlands Nursery and Forest School building, designed to contribute to the university's net zero status. The Woodlands Forest School (WFS) and Nature Reserve, separate to the Woodlands Nursery, is an initiative to formally bring outdoor education into the…

This paper seeks to bring together two seemingly disparate conversations, design and environmental education, with the intent to offer an interesting, new, useful approach to developing educational responses to the climate and ecological crises engendered by the Capitalocene. Beginning with observations on the relevance of design to the creation…

An increasing body of literature continues to highlight the relationship between our connection with nature and the positive effects on our physical health and psychological well-being as well as enhancing our motivations and engagements within learning contexts. However, with more time being spent indoors and free time increasingly structured by…

This study emphasises the need to empower spirituality within the framework of environmental education, and demonstrate its value as a vital component in the human-nature relationship. This is proposed through utilizing the meaning, content and practice of mindfulness. The examination of mindfulness, as a pedagogical philosophy as well as…

The loss of relational networks and life-sustaining capacities of the Earth resulting from the Anthropocene/Capitalocene provoke ambiguous pedagogical experimenting with the limits of the known. The Akokisa River of Texas is more than its extractive use-value based on humanist rationality. Water connector Ángel Faz approaches the River as more…

Environmental stewardship and leave no trace educational programming promote a message of "nature/wilderness/outdoors" for all while also urging recreationists towards specific, responsible (i.e. permitted), and voluntary behaviors in outdoor public spaces. Yet notions of nature and wilderness, as well as the strategies employed to…

Children and young people today are growing up in an increasingly urban, technical, virtual and ecologically precarious world, leaving many feel disconnected from nature yet anxious about its degradation at the same time. Two distinct bodies of knowledge -- namely youth human-nature relationships and youth eco-anxiety -- are concerned with the…

Weedon Island Nature Preserve in Florida houses an educational center, which displays a visual and rhetorical narrative of local ecology and the lifeways of the region's Indigenous inhabitants. We conduct rhetorical and narrative analysis to examine how the exhibits construct the relationship between Indigenous people and the land. We conclude…

Purpose: The purpose of the research is to substantiate the possibilities of the development of ecological design in the process of future designers professional training and the implementation of student projects in practice. Design/methodology/approach: This article offers one of the possible ways to solve the problem of rational use of wastes…

By virtue of their innate curiosity and the fact that they are often surrounded by novel experiences, children commonly experience awe, which can prompt them to consider their understanding of the world and their place in it. Nature can be one of these awe-eliciting wonders of life. Maria Montessori understood this well, especially when it came to…

The increasing popularity of outdoor learning (OL) amongst researchers and practitioners highlighted the need to further investigate primary teacher trainees (PTTs) perception towards it and how this may be related to their nature connection. Participants were PTTs who were considering attending Forest School (FS) Training Level 1 as part of their…

Purpose: This study aims to diagnose the perception, knowledge, awareness and position of the bioeconomy in university education and research. Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on a questionnaire survey conducted at universities in Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain and Portugal (n = 464). The questionnaire consisted of open-ended,…

Nature connection has been found in previous research to be a predictor of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. For this reason, efforts to build children's nature connection through a variety of avenues, including environmental education, have been explored by practitioners and researchers alike. In this paper we undertook a purposive…

With the "pictorial turn", the picture has gained a new significance as a medium. It is impossible to imagine a digitalized world affected by mass media without pictures. While there are several studies on the impact of pictures in the discourse on climate change in the media, there has been no analysis of the visual representation of…