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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 version of Eastern humanism: Tu Weiming's 'Anthropocosmism'. This idea of a non-anthropocentric humanism embedded in the cosmic order is strikingly different from the anthropocentric separatism typical of Western humanism. Moving beyond a blanket condemnation of humanism, this paper explores what a specific, non-Western form of humanism may have to offer in response to anthropogenic ecological crises. The argument is developed that Anthropocosmism can help us fully recognize humans' exceptional ethical responsibility in light of these crises without falling into the mistake of Western humanism's dominant discourse that connects this exceptionalism to forms of human superiority over and domination of other-than-human nature.

This study delves into the intricate dynamics of controversial issues in environmental education, challenging conventional notions. It explores the relationship between “controversy” and the field of environmental education, elucidating its multifaceted dimensions in and ambitions of teaching practice. In dialogue with previous research and based on our empirical study, we contend that controversy’s existence transcends the mere content of education and extends to its perceived fundamental core and normative underpinnings. We argue that controversy, including controversial sustainability issues (CSIs), is not confined to educational content alone but encompasses the purposes of education. We propose that controversy in educational encounters cannot be neatly categorized as a fixed, predictable social product and is not solely dependent on student interaction. This challenges earlier research positions that linked controversy to the presence of debate or dissensus in a subject area. Our study challenges the traditional understanding of controversy, highlighting its partial spontaneity and unpredictability in teaching. This contrasts previous positions that emphasized the epistemic dimension of controversy. Instead, our findings suggest that controversy plays an active role in the process of self-formation or subjectification in relation to any content.

Knowledge about sustainability problems as it is typically taught does not per se lead to action for tackling these problems. Environmental and sustainability education researchers have argued for teaching more action-oriented knowledge. This article addresses the ‘didactical work’ required for teachers to do so, both in preparing and implementing lessons. The authors employ transactional didactic theory and the analytical method Practical Epistemology Analysis to open-up the black box of teaching and learning action-oriented knowledge on sustainability issues. The methodology, that has a strong focus on classroom observations, allows to empirically investigate the influence of teachers’ actions on students’ learning. It is here applied to a case study in higher education where it is engineering teachers’ explicit ambition for their students to explore and develop a wider area of knowledge about sustainability issues. Our findings shed light on what this requires in terms of the ‘scripting’, ‘staging’, and ‘performance’ of lessons.

In the face of the global sustainability crisis, schools and teachers are called on to transform education and implement educational innovations to strengthen sustainability education. One of these innovations is ‘open schooling’: educational practices that involve students in identifying, exploring, and tackling real-world sustainability problems in the school environment and the local community. Such – often externally driven – innovations can disrupt teachers’ habitual ways of thinking and acting and create what John Dewey calls ‘problematic situations’. This article reports on explorative case studies in Belgian and Swedish schools that establish open schooling practices through LORET - Locally Relevant Teaching. It presents and discusses six different types of problematic situations that were observed as implementing LORET disturbed established teaching habits. Teachers experienced difficulties (1) to plan lessons starting from a sustainability challenge, (2) to take the students along in an authentic quest for solutions, (3) to plan lessons not knowing what the students’ input will be, (4) to collaborate among teachers, (5) to define and coordinate the roles of teachers and non-school partners, and (6) to create lesson plans and teaching materials from scratch.

Investigating learning in ongoing classroom practices involves a number of methodological challenges. One main challenge, identified by scholars in sociocultural approaches, is how to take both the individual and the environment into consideration in analyses. Although the challenge we are addressing are methodological in character, the work of coming up with a transactional methodology requires philosophical and theoretical clarifications and here we use mainly the work of John Dewey. The main ambition of this article is to present and empirically illustrate a transactional research methodology – a package of analytical models and an analytical method – that fully recognize the dynamic relations between the individual and the environmental dimensions – how they interplay in the learning process and how certain learning outcomes result from that interplay. The three models we present concerns the trajectory of learning, how the influence of the individual and environmental dimensions on students learning can be understood and approached transactionally respectively the learning outcome in terms of what the person learn when (re)creating habits. The analytical method presented and illustrated is built upon a first person perspective on language use, which dissolves some of the methodological problems when investigating the individual dimension through in situ analyses.