In the context of an overwhelming global scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the rapidity and severity of its impacts—as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change/IPCC (2021)—, young people across the globe have been at the forefront of calls for greater access to high quality environmental education that equips them to act for the environment rather than simply learn about the environment, as recently highlighted by Susanne Borner and colleagues (2021) in the Brazilian context and by Melissa Glackin and Heather King (2020) in the English context. Within this area, it is then important to note that the way environmental education is conceptualised shapes the way it is enacted, including within teacher education, which is the focus of this paper. In this article we acknowledge, for instance, that different kinds of environment-related pedagogies have emerged in the past decades across global North and South contexts, resulting in a widely diverse area with different terminologies (and their associated perspectives, foci, proposals), such as environmental education, education for sustainable development, and ecopedagogies. Here we position our different engagements with environment-related pedagogies across these terminologies and framings, instead of adopting a specific collective position for the whole authorial team. As such, we use environmental education across this article as an umbrella term for all our diverse engagement with this field.

More than 50 years ago, for instance, Arthur Lucas (1972) articulated an often-employed tripartite delineation of environmental education: (1) education about the environment with a focus on understanding and skill development; (2) education for the environment with an emphasis on developing individual’s understanding and attitudes in relation to the preservation of the environment; and (3) education in the environment (such education in the environment includes teaching outside the classroom, but such pedagogies alone do not constitute environmental education). William B. Stapp and colleagues (1969) similarly sought to highlight core constitutive elements of this intersection between environment and education, which can be summarised as: (1) understanding that humans are inseparable of a human-culture-biophysical system; (2) developing knowledge about the biophysical environment itself and its role in society, and about (3) the problems related to the biophysical environment and how they can be solved; and (4) developing attitudes of concern around such problems to motivate citizens in engaging with actions to solve them (adapted from Stapp et al. 1969).

Lucie Sauvé’s (1996) work also focused on developing typologies of conceptualisations of the environment that have been widely recognised as a theoretical framework through which to analyse discourse and practice in the field of environmental education, as argued by Ana Benavides-Lahnstein and Gonzalo Peñaloza (2022). Sauvé (1996) identified six ways (adapted below) that society understands or frames the environment, arguing that these conceptualisations shape how people respond or approach the environment (including within educational practices), as outlined below. These six understandings or conceptions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and those working in educational contexts, such as teachers, teacher educators and associated policy contexts may incorporate more than one of these conceptualisations at the same time.

  • The environment as nature, to be preserved and respected

  • The environment as a resource, to be managed

  • The environment as a problem, requiring a solution

  • The environment as a place to live

  • The environment as a biosphere for all species now and in the future

  • The environment as a community project

In the particular case of England, however, research underlines the inadequate provision of environmental education, where it is mainly restricted to superficial (add-on) and technicist approaches within subjects such as science and geography (Glackin and King 2020), with Lynda Dunlop and colleagues (2021) concomitantly noting the key, but widely absent from English education, role of schools and teachers in providing spaces for youth participation in climate change activism. The recently published Department for Education (DfE) strategy for sustainability and climate change for education and children’s systems services (DfE 2022), for instance, continues the over-reliance on technicist and science-only knowledge and skills in the context of climate change and sustainability education, and the marginal and under-resourced role of teacher education around this area persists in such policy-making initiatives (Dunlop and Rushton 2022). Brazil, on the other hand, has had a long-standing tradition in teacher education for environmental education, as argued by Luiz Marcelo de Carvalho and colleagues (2018), with several curricular reforms implemented across the 1990s and 2000s that foregrounded this area to different extents. Nevertheless, more recent neoliberal educational policies have been diminishing the space for environmental education in curricula and teacher education programmes in the country, as recently reviewed by Emerson Branco and colleagues (2018), and by Silvana Silva and Carlos Loureiro (2020).

As a result of this landscape, whilst there is widespread recognition of the need to support and enable teachers within the context of environmental education—such as in the works of Elizabeth Rushton (2021), and Nicola Walshe and Victoria Tait (2019) in England; and of Dalva Bonotto and Maria Bernadete Carvalho (2016), and Danielle Leite and Luciano Silva (2020; 2021) in Brazil—the realities for teachers and teacher educators working in this area in both countries are challenging. Common to these contexts is the need both for environmental education to be conceptualised as an interdisciplinary endeavour such that teacher educators of all subjects can draw on their disciplinary and subject expertise, and for sustained and meaningful continuous professional development. In particular, teacher educators like us who wish to explore the specific conceptualisation of environmental justice within our educational practices also experience this challenge, as highlighted by Thaís Angeli and Luiz Marcelo de Carvalho (2019), by Borner and colleagues (2021), by Silva and Loureiro (2020), and by Laísa Freire and Cae Rodrigues (2020) in Brazil; and by Dunlop and colleagues (2021) and Haira Gandolfi (2023a) in England.

Drawing on different scholarship and perspectives that centre environmental justice as essential to the establishment of justice for all, such as the work of David Schlosberg (2013) in the global North and of Henri Acserald (2010) in the global South, we argue that environmental justice needs to have a central role in environmental education if we aim to support young people in navigating the spatially diverse and unequal impacts of environmental emergencies and injustices in global North and South communities. More specifically, we propose that environmental education without environmental justice restricts environmental education to that which is about or in the environment and does not encompass education for the environment, as asked for by critical scholars working both across the global South, such as around ecopedagogies (e.g. Gadotti 2009; Gutiérrez and Prado 2000; Misiaszek 2018; Misiaszek and Torres 2019), and the global North (such as the scholars mentioned at the opening of this paper). Furthermore, we believe, as do these other colleagues, that the concept of environmental justice is fundamental to conceptualisations of the environment which understand planet Earth as a biosphere for all species and more-than-human elements (e.g. land, water, aim, etc.) everywhere across the world, now and in the future (Sauvé 1996).

It is in this landscape that we, four teacher educators from England and Brazil, have collaboratively reflected on our visions and practices around environmental justice as a core facet of environmental education and teachers’ professional learning and practice. In this article, we aim to explore—through a reflective conversation emerging from our different cultural, geographical and disciplinary contexts—the challenges and affordances of engaging with environmental justice as part of our work as teacher educators, including in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). This consideration encompasses the impact of recent restrictive educational reforms in our countries, while also reflecting on the consistencies and divergences of our experiences as teacher educators in contrasting global North and South contexts, with their different views of teacher education and professionalisation—e.g. as intertwined with socio-political reflections and praxis in Brazil; or as focused on skills around classroom management and curriculum delivery in England -, and of environmental emergencies—e.g. as a community-based issue with past and present implications related to social injustices in Brazil; or as an issue grounded on distancing, futurity, and science-based only discourses. Whilst acknowledging that our specific global North (England) and South (Brazil) contexts are also diverse from other global North (e.g. USA, Europe) and South (e.g. Africa, Middle East, South Asia) contexts, here we hope to offer some considerations around future directions for research and collaboration across national, global North–South, and disciplinary boundaries within the landscape of environmental justice in the context of teacher education.

Methodology, methods and collaborative writing

In this article we report on our individual and collective reflections around our experiences as teacher educators and researchers with a science or geography subject specialism working in secondary school ITE programmes based in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in England and Brazil. In doing so, we position ourselves as both the participants (objects) and the writers (subjects) of this study, and an overview of our backgrounds can be found in Table 1.

Table 1 Overview of the four teacher educators who contributed to this conversation
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The methodology employed to design this study is inspired by self-study inquiry, which has become more prominent in the field of teacher education across some global North contexts (such as Canada and the USA) over the past two decades through the works of, for instance, Stefinee Pinnegar and Mary Lynn Hamilton (2009). According to Todd Dinkelman (2003, p. 8), self-study is generally understood as an “intentional and systematic inquiry into one’s own practice”, which can be positioned within the same landscape of teacher research and action research proposed by seminal global North scholars such as Lee Shulman and Donald Schön, and by global South Critical Pedagogues such as Paulo Freire (e.g. Teachers as Cultural Workers, 2005). Self-study inquiry is often seen as serving a dual purpose within the field of teacher education and practice, both of which we seek to explore in relation to ourselves throughout this article: promoting systematic reflection by educators on their own practice, and generating new insights and knowledge about the wider fields of teacher education and educational practice (Dinkelman 2003). Self-study has indeed been used as a methodological approach to support collective reflections among teacher educators, as we seek to do in this article, such as in the works reported by Cheryl Rosaen and Ann Ruggles Gere (1996) and by Elizabeth Finlayson, Erin Whiting and Ramona Cutri (2021). As a result, we consider it to be a relevant methodological perspective to inspire our collective study, through inquiry, of our own experiences and practices as teacher educators and researchers working within the field of environmental education.

In addition, this study is inspired by the acknowledgment—within a constructivist/interpretivist philosophical framework—of the role of personal and professional subjectivities and lived experiences in the work and viewpoints of teachers and teacher educators. Within this interpretivist landscape around peoples’ experiences and practices, Sidsel Germeten (2013), and Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes (2001) argue that exploring experiences of a diverse group of people can help us better understand contemporary social issues and their roots, what their effects might be, and what alternatives we might look for around those issues to build a different future. Here, as also proposed by Michael Peters and colleagues (2022, p. 49), we see this approach as: “individual contributions driven by the collaborative desire to innovate beyond each individual’s ordinary capacity in here in and arise from the collective give and take, working towards and working through, the issues arising in such collaborations”.

In this study, our personal/professional subjectivities and histories were then brought together under the notions of collective subjectivity put forward by Félix Guattari (2000) and of emancipatory praxis proposed by Paulo Freire (1968/1972), seeking to construct new knowledge about teacher educators and environmental justice through conversations—or collective reflections—around our multiples histories, perspectives and professional practices. In particular, through such a process of pedagogical learning/unlearning with each other—in the spirit of Freirean dialogue and emancipatory praxis, as proposed by Walsh (2018) -, we hope to challenge the current trivialisation of our work as teachers educators for environmental justice by rejecting our roles (at university and school levels) in reproducing particular discourses and practices around environmental education devoid of social justice concerns, as recently asked for by Sonia Nieto (2019) in her reflections on the potential lessons of Paulo Freire to teacher education today.

These collective reflections were grounded on two main methods of data generation: reflective writing and group conversations, in a similar manner to that recently reported by Wonyong Park, Alison Cullinane, Haira Gandolfi, Sahar Alameh and Günkut Mesci (2023). This study started in 2021 with our initial individual written accounts—each with around 2,500 words—about a series of different prompts around teacher education and environmental justice, which can be summarised as:

  • Our views on the role of education—and of our subject specialisms—in environmental emergencies;

  • Our understandings of the term environmental justice;

  • Our experiences as teacher educators attempting to address issues of environmental justice as part of our practices;

  • Current and future challenges and concerns around the place of environmental justice within our national curricular contexts.

After reading each other’s written accounts, we engaged in a series of email exchanges and annotation exercises on each other’s accounts, and on online discussions and paired conversations across 2021/2022. Paired conversations happened in English between Lizzie and Haira; in Portuguese, between Luciano and Bernadete; and in Portuguese between Haira and Luciano. In addition, one whole-group conversation of 60 min was carried out half-way through this study, with exchanges varying between English and Portuguese.

In the spirit of the interpretivist underpinning to this study, reflexive and inductive thematic analysis—as outlined by Victoria Braun and Virginia Clarke (2021)—of materials produced synchronously (written notes from online paired and group discussions) and asynchronously (email exchanges and individual written accounts) was completed iteratively during a 12-month period to organise, reorganise and reflect on our perspectives and experiences of being teacher educators concerned with issues of environmental justice in our own national education systems. Afterwards, in order to refine initial themes and sub-themes generated through our first round of thematic analysis, we undertook a process of collaborative writing (in a shared online document)—as also recently done by Wonyong and colleagues (2023)—towards those initial themes, which allowed us to revisit and rethink themes, with the occasional collapsing and/or separation of themes/sub-themes emerging from that exercise. Through this collaborative writing approach, we then engaged with both analytical and generative steps: by attempting to refine our themes, new ideas (or data) emerged from our own histories, experiences and further reflections—in line with, for instance, the collaborative self-study inquiry outlined above. Final themes which will be explored in the following sections, include:

  • Our socio-cultural perspectives of environmental justice, including legal framings and, the interwoven nature of environmental and social justice;

  • The place of environmental justice within environmental education, including challenging economic framings and embracing socio-political framings; and

  • The place of environmental justice in teacher education, including critical thinking in teacher education, interdisciplinary approaches to environmental justice, and school and university teacher education structures.

Through this collective reflection and collaborative dialogic writing, we identified a shared understanding of the role and purpose of a teacher educator that seems to ground the themes listed above: a teacher educator whose aim is to embed issues of environmental justice in their practice, including a focus on supporting and enabling the professional development of teachers for being both agents of social justice and actively engaged with research. Haira, for example, foregrounded ideas of social justice in her role as a teacher educator interested in environmental education: one who supports teachers to develop “critical consciousness… as agents of social justice”. In addition, for Lizzie, Luciano and Bernadete, teacher educators’ engagement with research should be a dynamic endeavour deeply ingrained in our work with the issue of environmental justice and emergencies: “Research allows for a reasoned analysis of praxis; it allows theory to illuminate practice, and it allows practice to reconstruct theoretical knowledge and construct new understandings about the professional field and about the teaching of a certain knowledge.” (Bernadete).

In the following sections we expand on these ideas by presenting the themes from our thematic analysis, which are initially introduced and summarised in Table 2. And keeping with the spirit of our collective reflections outlined in this section, we choose to write these next sections in the form of a collective conversation, presenting both the data and the analysis grounding these themes through a dialogic format. Firstly, we believe this enables the presentation of data from our ongoing collaborative work as teacher educators in our own original voices, as usually done by traditional qualitative research grounded on conversational methods such as interviews (Yin 2011). This approach also preserves the plurality of views, practices and histories that pervaded our collective reflections throughout this project. Secondly, this writing strategy also enabled us to position ourselves more clearly as both subjects and objects of this reflective process about our lived experiences as teacher educators striving for engagement with environmental justice, a strategy we believe to be well-aligned with our overall methodological approach inspired by self-study and based on our personal/professional subjectivities and experiences.

Table 2 Overview of the key themes and their emergent sub-themes from our collaborative reflections
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Findings and discussions

Table 2 presents an overview of our findings across three themes that centred our collective and dialogic reflections, namely: (1) Environmental justice—our socio-cultural perspectives; (2) Environmental justice within environmental education; and (3) Environmental justice in teacher education. In the subsections that follow, we present our collective reflections and discussions around these themes and their sub-themes.

Environmental justice: our socio-cultural perspectives

To ground our collective reflection on the issue of environmental justice within teacher education, we began by sharing our understandings and perspectives on the term environmental justice itself. Coming from different socio-cultural and academic backgrounds, it was important for us to establish our common and divergent conceptualisations of this concept, in a similar vein to what has been done in other recent global North–South collaborations around environmental education, such as a recent Special Issue at the The Journal of Environmental Education organised by Cae Rodrigues, Phillip G. Payne, Lesley Le Grange, Isabel C. M. Carvalho, Carlos A. Steil, Heila Lotz-Sisitka and Henriette Linde-Loubser (2020). Such acknowledgement of both our shared and our different socio-historical and geo-epistemological landscapes was especially relevant because these transnational conversations were happening between teacher educators working in a global South country with a deeply complex history of being (neo)colonised for occupation and environmental exploitation of indigenous land and knowledges, and teacher educators working in a global North country historically involved in driving that kind of land occupation and exploitation in the first place, as outlined by Eve Tuck, Marcia McKenzie and Kate McCoy (2014), and by Jason Young (2021) in their works around land and colonialism. In this conversation, we identify two specific aspects (or sub-themes) within environmental justice which we found to be relevant to our socio-cultural contexts and work as teacher educators: (1) legal framings, and (2) the interwoven nature of environmental and social justice.

Legal framings of environmental justice

Bernadete: Often, the term justice refers to the field of law and involves knowledge of legal aspects, guaranteeing to social subjects equity in access to rights and legal procedures in cases of violation of the law. In the case of the environment, that could then be understood as a legal framing around people’s access to and lives in said environment, as proposed by Agni Santos (2018).

Haira: That is a very important starting point, Bernadete. I think this is especially important in a country like Brazil, where occupation and exploitation of land—related to your point about ‘access to’ and ‘lives in’ the environment—has been intrinsically linked to our colonial history. As argued by decolonial scholars like Anibal Quijano (2007), the colonial matrix of power in what we call today the Americas involved, among other aspects, the direct control of economy, which in turn included the appropriation of indigenous’ lands and control of natural resources through displacement, bondage and genocidal strategies. One legacy of such socio-historical process has been an extremely high level of land concentration at the hands of very few people in the country—often with close historical ties to the original colonising powers—and the constraining of local and marginalised communities’ rights to that land, such as in the case of indigenous and quilombolas (quilombolas are the residents of the quilombos, a denomination for communities formed by Afro-Brazilian descendants of escaped enslaved people during Brazil’s colonial period). Environmental justice in this case has then strong links to a ‘legal right’ to good life in the environment, that is, on that land that has been historically occupied and removed from the lives of local, indigenous and quilombola communities, as Paulo Freire also highlighted in his first writings decades ago (Gadotti and Torres 2009), particularly in Education, the Practice of Freedom (1967/1976) and in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1972). It is then interesting to see how recent discussions about constitutional rights to land have been permeating debates about environmental justice in Brazil (Santos 2018), something that I would link to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012) argument about the importance of land rights to discussions about decolonisation within a justice-centred framework.

Lizzie: This framing of environmental justice, rooted initially in ideas of law, is also the case in England, Haira. However, your point about Brazil above reminds me of Marion Fourcade’s (2011) argument about how nature-related elements linked to this kind of framing of justice, such as economic elements, will also have a degree of socio-historical specificity; that is, links between socio-cultural contexts and, for instance, the legal-financial value of nature will have different meanings across different landscapes. As such, in England, such legal framing on environmental justice will be less connected to issues of decolonisation, land and community-based rights as in Brazil, and more to an individualised approach to justice grounded on individual benefits and rights. For instance, ideas of justice, equity and inequalities have been more specifically linked to the environment in England through the way some people, for example in urban centres, do not have access to good air quality and the health and individual wellbeing implications of that. In 2019, the government body, Natural England, published a report by Gordon Mitchell (2019) which explicitly links improvements in social justice with improvements to the natural environment. This report draws on framings of justice originating from the USA which focus on ideas of fair access to a ‘clean’ environment, no group bearing a disproportionate share of environmental harms, and equal participation in decision making which are grounded in legal rights and responsibilities. But my sense is that in England, framings of environmental justice beyond these more specific ‘individual rights' legal framings have yet to happen.

Luciano: I think this idea of environmental justice based solely on a legal framing needs to be further problematised in Brazil as well, Lizzie. An example of this in the Brumadinho tragedy, in Minas Gerais, which involved the collapse of a dam owned by the mining company Vale do Rio Doce in 2019 (see more here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-51220373 and https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/30/trail-death-after-another-dam-collapses-brazil). This event caused the death of dozens of people and left a trail of incalculable environmental impacts. However, the idea of environmental justice here cannot simply be related to applying fines and/or sanctions to the company from a financial point of view, as these kinds of companies profit too much from their business grounded on large environmental impacts. In this sense, these companies can very well predict this type of ‘additional cost’ related to environmental fines and short-term, low-impact sanctions within its annual balance sheet. It is as if there were a ‘financial externality’ of how much certain kinds of environmental impacts are worth—economies of worth, according to Fourcade (2011)—which can be simply foreseen in the company's balance sheet, and which also rarely includes more complex monetary evaluations of intangible impacts of such environmental tragedies (Fourcade 2011).

Bernadete: I agree with that, Luciano. From the perspective of the human right to the natural environment, environmental justice should go beyond this delimitation to what is of the legal scope, to place the notion of justice in dialogue with other fields of knowledge related to the protection of life, the natural environment (including more-than-human elements, such as land, animals, plants, water, etc.), culture and citizenship. Environmental justice is, therefore, more than an individualised and anthropocentric legal framing and should be re-signified, as proposed by Acserald (2010), to include diverse socio-political voices (e.g. social movements, indigenous and other marginalised groups, such as quilombolas and Black communities, etc.) and dynamics (e.g. horizontal and participatory community-based decision-making; southern and other non-mainstream systems of knowledge, practice and cosmovisions) traditionally concerned with building wider social justice.

Lizzie: Across these varied ideas of ‘value’ (legal, financial, individual, collective, intrinsic) we can see visible negotiations between different conceptualisations of the environment, including those identified by Sauvé (1996). For example, those ideas of the environment which focus on individual rights and benefits are consistent with notions of the environment as a place to live or as a resource to be managed, whereas ideas of community-based rights are linked to the environment as a community project (Sauvé 1996). Arguably, an emphasis on the collective rather than the individual pays greater attention to the social justice dimension and it is to this idea, of the interwoven nature of environmental and social justice, which we now turn.

Environmental and social justice as interwoven

Haira: Those are indeed important summarising points, Lizzie. I view environmental justice very much along this latter point you raised with Bernadete: thinking about land concentration and environmental degradation not only from a purely legal and/or scientific perspective, but also from the socioeconomic, political and historical perspectives of communities that have been severely impacted by environmental issues, land concentration and other kinds of environmental restriction (e.g. access to water) for centuries. For instance, it is no coincidence that the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA) in relation to measurements of environmental impact (Young 2021) generally coincide with groups facing historical marginalisation, such as communities in the global South, and Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities, women, LGBTQIA + people, etc. living anywhere in the world, as recently noted by Daniel Voskoboynik (2018) and by David Eckstein and colleagues (2021).

Drawing on Acserald (2010), environmental justice then asks us to approach environmental questions and issues through intersectional lenses, acknowledging: (1) the unequal exposition of already marginalised communities to the impact of environmental degradation resulting from land, knowledge, labour and monetary exploration; and (2) the widespread restrictions imposed onto certain groups within our neoliberal and neo(colonial) societies around their connections with more-than-human entities and flows within the environment, such as land, water, animals, plants, and air; which is also a key element of environmental (in)justices, as recently noted by Irus Braverman (2021).

Lizzie: I agree Haira, and drawing on Schlosberg (2013) environmental justice, including access to more-than-human elements, such as clean water, air and secure food supply, is not an aspect of social justice, but this kind of equitable access to the environment is integral to justice for all.

Luciano: For us in Brazil, environmental justice is similarly generally linked to these ideas emerging from the field of Critical Theory, including in the work done in the field of Environmental Education, as recently reviewed by some Brazilian colleagues (Angeli and de Carvalho 2019). But I believe that this term appears less in our literature than in publications in English and I think this is because, as Bernadete mentioned above, we already tend to associate environmental issues with a broad context in which political and social issues have to be addressed, of which environmental questions are an integral part. Within this framing, it is not possible to talk about environmental justice without social justice and without a socio-political engagement with the links between environmental degradation, human and more-than-human connections within the environment, and socioeconomic, racial, gender and other axis of marginalisation in our contemporary capitalist systems, as put forward by the Brazilian Network of Environmental Justice in its launching manifesto almost 20 years ago (RBJA 2011). As our colleague in Brazil Philippe Layrargues (2018) argues, the central point of working on environmental issues is intrinsically related to addressing broader social issues.

Haira: That is an interesting point, Luciano. I think this is an important 'difference' between the field of Environmental Education across our global North and South countries. Expanding on that, I would argue that for those living in MAPA, environmental education seems to be more often intrinsically grounded on notions of social and land-based conflicts, disasters and injustices happening locally, at their doorsteps, as outlined by Angeli and de Carvalho (2019) in their review of Brazilian scholarship around this area. And, generally speaking, I think the resulting difference from these diverse socio-historical and geo-political landscapes to environmental education in our professional contexts revolves around how environmental issues and their associated injustices are framed as a concern ‘about the future’ in most global North scholarship, while in the global South these are concerns ‘of the present’ and intergenerationally connected with ‘the past’.

Environmental justice within environmental education

So, what do these diverse perspectives around environmental justice, intertwined with our own educational trajectories and socio-cultural backgrounds, mean to us as science and geography teacher educators working in global South and North countries? In the spirit of our collective reflection, we now discuss two specific elements within current environmental education, and our views on their relationships with environmental justice work: (1) challenging economic framings, and (2) embracing sociopolitical framings.

Challenging economic framings

Bernadete: On the point of possibilities for environmental justice within education you started to raise above, Haira, I am particularly concerned with the over-emphasis on an economic framing of discourses around this area. As argued by some colleagues in Brazil such as Layrargues (2018) and Eunice Schilling Trein (2018), these discourses—such as those positioning environmental education ‘for’ the green market, for the development of green technical knowledge and skills, etc.—seem to have been occupied by neoliberal terms like development, opportunities, green careers and net zero, without recognising the impacts resulting from our current hegemonic economic model (capitalism) in the process of appropriation of nature by certain parts of society, which also incurs in dispute over territories and the resulting conflicts of socio-environmental nature.

Luciano: Very good point, Bernadete. In our Brazilian context, I am particularly concerned about the setbacks we had in recent years around issues related to nature, environment and socio-environmental justice within schooling. This is more prominently illustrated by recent educational policies, such as the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), that are grounded on a neoliberal perspective of the organisation of society and civil participation, as further explored by our colleagues Silva and Loureiro (2020). My perspective as an environmental educator is that engaging with environmental justice within education should be about challenging these neoliberal economic framings around progress, growth, etc. and their links to environmental injustices, embracing more nuanced and complex discussions. For instance, I am concerned that a significant part of the practices of teachers who work in state education in Brazil are guided by a conservative pedagogical approach (Layrargues 2019). That is, by teaching discourses and practices that reproduce a conservationist and pragmatic continuum around environmental education that leads to the reproduction of a reality around our engagement with the environment that has actually been constructed by a hegemonic neoliberal rationality. In this case, a fragmented and simplistic paradigmatic vision around environmental education prevails in state schools in Brazil (Layrargues 2019), which results in educational activities focused on environmental issues that can be considered naive, fragile and superficial, such as through reproducing environmental education practices focused exclusively on changing consumption habits and/or on recycling, without calling into question the core drivers behind our key environmental challenges and injustices, which go way beyond individual consumption habits.

Lizzie: This challenge to current economic framings of environmental education is a very important one for us in England as well, Luciano. And I would go further to argue that it is an imperative for environmental education happening in global North countries where there has been a historical world-Earth distancing, as highlighted by Greg Misiaszek (2018) and by Bruno Latour (2020), between ‘living in’ and ‘living from’ the natural world. As Haira mentioned above, social and land-based conflicts, disasters and injustices happening locally in relation to environmental degradation and access to the environment (including engagement with more-than-human elements) are often less visible to those living in the global North, especially in more privileged communities.

In addition, global North educational discourses around, for instance, social progress (and development) are often underpinned by an overarching ontological perspective of what a flourishing, good life, and even social justice should look like, and still very much framed within consumerism and foregrounding participation in capitalist systems, as I argued elsewhere with my colleague Lynda Dunlop (Dunlop and Rushton 2022), and as Misiaszek (2018; 2019) explored in relation to the notion of Development found within certain environmental education discourses, which he identified to be grounded on:

“(1) neoliberal economics as the sole factor of development analysis; (2) deprioritising economic justice concern by ignoring how development processes sustain/increase hegemony; (3) deprioritising planetary sustainability for Earth’s balance; and (4) local framings of development are disregarded for globally constructed ones ‘from above’ (e.g. Western Development models).” (Misiaszek 2019, p. 616)

We know that these Development-based systems were built, and are currently based, on (neo)colonial endeavours of exploitation of land, natural resources and people around global South and BIPOC communities (Tuck and Mackenzie 2014) and, as a result, educational endeavours based on them cannot properly allow for an exploration of issues surrounding environmental justice. That is, such type of environmental education will find it difficult to go beyond the restrictive legal-economic framings around environmental justice we mentioned earlier if they remain grounded on global North capitalist views that disregard both the socio-political and the non-anthropocentric aspects of environmental justice, such as human-more-than-human connectedness, which are central to diverse southern epistemologies, as seen, for instance, the work of: Indigenous scholars such as Jennifer Redvers (2020) and Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie (2014); ecopedagogues such as Greg Misiaszek and Carlos Alberto Torres (2019); and more-than-human environmental educators such as Isabel Cristina de Moura Carvalho, Carlos Alberto Steil and Francisco Abrahão Gonzaga (2020). In this scenario, like you Bernadete, I am indeed wary of certain framings of environmental education based on notions of development and growth, green skills, net zero and their implications to our pursuit of environmental justice: ‘growth’ for whom? At the expense of whom and of what?

Haira: Very good point, Lizzie! It reminds me of recent work done by Emily Eaton and Nick Day (2020) in Canada about the ‘occupation’ of environmental education provision in the global North by private companies and, more widely, by global North epistemologies and practices which place the environment as key to Development (Misiaszek 2019), but not to human-more-than-human connectedness. I am particularly interested in what these authors—including Dunlop and colleagues (2021) and Stuart Tannock (2020) in the English context—have found about the pervasive presence and influence of oil companies as providers of environmental education initiatives, resulting in what they named petro-pedagogies: “[recurrent teaching practices and resources that] work to centre, legitimise, and entrench a set of beliefs relating to climate change, energy, and environmentalism that align with the interests and discourses of oil industry actors” (Eaton and Day 2020, p. 458). These petro-pedagogies promote specific views on environmental issues that are dissociated from global, socio-political and systemic perspectives, such as the role of corporate power and geopolitics in the climate crisis. That ends up restricting our understanding of the links between environmental issues, social concerns and inequalities, and political decision-making processes, thus preventing the wider society from re-imagining and taking action towards a different, more environmentally just, world on a large scale.

These strategies of restriction of imagination and obstruction of socio-political praxis are classic tropes of (neo)colonial endeavours—as noted by Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) and by Quijano (2007)—including through how they deal with and justify exploitation of natural and human resources for the sake of scientific, technological, and social development (Tannock 2020). In this scenario, instead of framing environmental education as one that engages with social justice and action around, for instance, exploitation of peoples and of the natural world, what we see is the framing of our current scenario of environmental emergencies as one purely linked to a technicist and individual choice-based perspective, as you have argued in your recent review of English policies in this area with Lynda Dunlop (Dunlop and Rushton 2022), Lizzie.

Luciano: This occupation of environmental education by companies, including (but not only) those involved in the exploration of natural resources, is certainly a growing concern of ours in Brazil too, Haira. On the more general case of the approximation of the financial and industry sectors to the environmental sector in Brazil, Maria Sartore (2012) provides a particularly interesting overview of some pivotal moments in this landscape, especially around the incorporation of notions such as social responsibility and corporate sustainability into the financial and industry sectors in the country (including in its stock market). This scenario seems to have been driving the interest of these sectors in engaging with environmental education, all framed under social responsibility and corporate sustainability discourses.

For instance, there are several environmental issues related to the sector of energy production and mineral extraction, such as iron, in Brazil. And within this, I find it outrageous that some of these large companies actually have departments specialising in environmental education. For example, Itaipu—the second largest hydroelectric provider in the world—has a special program of environmental education, which promotes a series of initiatives involving communities, educators, students, and farmers (see more in: https://itaipu.energy/#esg and https://itaipu.energy/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/itaipu_case_study_4.pdf). As outlined by our colleagues in the global North working on this topic whom you mentioned above, it is important to highlight that these kinds of educational programs are sometimes the only ones around environmental education available in local educational communities. That is, the only local initiative assisting teachers in their work around environmental education often comes from companies with specific interests in this area grounded on economic framings and, as I have been seeing more and more in my research with schools and educators in my local area, on restriction of imagination and obstruction of socio-political praxis.

Bernadete: Indeed, Luciano. And this kind of work on environmental education certainly does not approach it with the aim of transforming, revolutionising our relationship with nature and with other communities locally and globally. That is, environmental education, within this framing, is not explicitly presented as a socio-political and transformative project, which I believe should be, as argued by Running-Grass (1995) a couple of decades ago, one of the core aims of environmental education for social justice.

Embracing sociopolitical framings

Lizzie: Following from your comment above, Bernadete, environmental education in England indeed deals very little with more political and social issues related to environmental emergencies. The most common approaches to environmental education around here—as seen in policy-related documents such as the newly launched sustainability and climate change strategy for the education and children's services systems in England (DfE 2022)—tend to focus on the ‘scientific facts’ about the environment, usually technical ones (e.g. levels of CO2 in the atmosphere). Meanwhile, as I argued elsewhere with other colleagues (Dunlop, Rushton, Atkinson, Ayre, Bullivant, Essex, Price, Smith, Summer, Stubbs, Turkenburg-van Diepen and Wood 2022), they shy away from what teachers and young people have recently asked for around more in-depth engagement with the complex nature of environmental issues, such as ideas around consumption, capitalism and extractivism and their impacts on diverse communities and natural world; the links between environmental policy-making and the private sector, as raised by the work on petro-pedagogies mentioned earlier; among many others.

This is not to say educators in the global North have not previously highlighted the importance of this socio-political framing; indeed, colleagues have been advocating this for decades now, such as Larry Bencze (2017), Glackin and King (2020), Ralph Levinson (2006), and Running-Grass (1995). But my concern is that the greatest need for those voices and framings is that they are embedded in our approaches to environmental education at a systematic and national level, especially given our growing environmental challenges and injustices. And yet, the tide of national educational policies and discourses seems to be looking the other way (Dunlop and Rushton 2022).

Luciano: I think you are right about this difference between our contexts, Lizzie. As I mentioned above, in Brazil we are used to seeing environmental issues much more in terms of social and political issues, as Bernadete and other colleagues we cited earlier have recently written about (Angeli and de Carvalho 2019; Bonotto and Carvalho 2016; de Carvalho, Neto, Kawasaki, Bonotto, do Amaral, Fernandes and Cavalari 2018; Gadotti 2009; Freire and Rodrigues 2020); this is perhaps due to important unresolved social issues in the country related to our colonial history, which has heavily impacted our relationship with land and natural resources, as we discussed earlier. For us, socio-political issues are central to environmental education, with many projects, initiatives and publications being actually grounded on Paulo Freire, especially on his notion of conscientização—such as the work of Ione de Sousa and colleagues (2020), of Mirelle Oliveira and colleagues (2021), and of Freire and Rodrigues (2020)—since for him political issues are central to education: “the teacher must also be teaching in favor of something and against something. This ‘something’ is just the political project, the political profile of society, the political ‘dream’” (Shor and Freire 1987, p. 46).

As such, from this perspective of conscientização, environmental education should be centred on supporting teachers’ and students’ explicit engagement with the socio-political elements of environmental issues. In particular, here it is worth noting how Freire himself was starting to work on such socio-political issues surrounding environmental education as central to the conscientização endeavour right before he unfortunately passed away in 1997: “I do not believe in loving among women and men, among human beings, if we do not become capable of loving the world. Ecology has gained tremendous importance at the end of this century. It must be present in any educational practice of a radical, critical, and liberating nature.” (Freire 2004, p. 47). As expanded on by colleagues who later proposed the Freire-inspired notion of ecopedagogies (Gadotti 2009; Misiaszek and Torres 2019), such perspective is grounded on a critical understanding of environmental issues and education as intertwined with the political, that is, with social conflict and struggles for praxis against socio-political-environmental forms of injustices.

In relation to my own praxis, I then believe that this socio-political framing can allow science educators like me to challenge the overreliance on ‘scientific facts’ about the environment that is part of how science education has been framed within environmental discourses. As recently argued by Sara Tolbert and Jesse Bazzul (Bazzul and Tolbert 2019; Tolbert and Bazzul 2017), this narrow approach to science education only contributes to creating a picture of science and scientific practices with no ruptures, conflicts or injustices, something we know to be the real picture of our field and of, more generally, environmental issues.

Haira: That is interesting, Luciano. As I wrote elsewhere (Gandolfi 2022), Freire can be indeed an important thinker for us to revisit when reflecting about the role of education in environmental justice and vice-versa. In my reflections on this topic, I have been engaging with several Freirean-inspired work around environmental issues and ecology, such as the ecopedagogies you mentioned, seeking to frame environmental education from a socio-political perspective. For me, this seems to be imperative to thinking and practicing environmental justice within education: an approach that involves thinking about consequences of environmental degradation, not only from a purely scientific or local viewpoint—or even in relation to future generations, as often seen in environmental discourse in the global North, such as in the recent English educational policy Lizzie mentioned earlier (DfE 2022)—but also from the sociopolitical and historical perspectives of communities that have been severely impacted by environmental issues and by the restriction of their connection with more-than-human elements of the environment for centuries, such as indigenous and landless groups in global South, where exploitation of natural resources has been both the livelihood and the bane of environmental struggles. So here I believe that the socio-political angle that I saw permeating certain parts of environmental education in Brazil during my time as a science teacher there is something that more traditional approaches to environmental education in the global North can certainly better engage with.

Lizzie: This is indeed a very important framing for environmental education, and we have seen increased calls for socio-political discussions—and action—to become central to environmental education here in England, as some colleagues and I have pointed out (Dunlop, Rushton, Atkinson, Ayre, Bullivant, Essex, Price, Smith, Summer, Stubbs, Turkenburg-van Diepen and Wood 2022). In our recent work with young people and teachers in England about environmental justice (Dunlop and Rushton 2022), for instance, we have been exploring how it needs to involve teachers being sensitive to the contexts in which they teach, bringing together new academic concepts such as inequality, intersectionality, and risk to the teaching of, for instance, geography. Such concepts are not limited to geography of course, and they can offer students positive ways of navigating the socio-political aspects of their environments which gives them the agency and freedom to question and imagine more equitable futures for their own—and that of others—flourishing. This approach seeks therefore to make environmental justice integral to teaching and learning in geography, not simply an optional facet in the same way that the environment is not an optional facet of justice, but an ineradicable part of achieving a just and equitable world. But that entails re-thinking how we prepare and support these teachers to actually embed this kind of approach to environmental justice into their practice, which I believe to be an important challenge we all face in our own contexts. Furthermore, this requires us as teachers and teacher educators to iteratively reflect on our capacity to identify our own expectations, judgements and prejudices to enable us to look beyond what we expect or might wish to see in practice and policy as teachers and teacher educators.

Continuing with this idea of critical reflection in our practice as teacher educators, in the discussion which follows we then explore the place of environmental justice in teacher education and the barriers we encounter in our own work.

The place of environmental justice in teacher education

Our collective reflection on this specific theme surrounding teacher education coalesced around three areas: (1) critical thinking in teacher education; (2) interdisciplinary approaches to environmental justice; and (3) school and university teacher education structures.

Critical thinking in teacher education

Bernadete: I think that in recent years, due to the influence of the labour market that irreversibly incorporated digital technologies for spatial analysis (Geographic Information Systems) and that influence the cartographic production and monitoring of events on the planet, whether physical or social, the education of geographers began to give a significant emphasis to the mastery of such technologies, giving up significantly on another aspect of geographical analysis: criticism. In this sense, one of the challenges in the education of geography teachers is to make this technical knowledge, also very prominent in the general geography curriculum, a tool and a didactic resource for discussions that make the student (citizen) capable of critically understanding the data and information: to critically position oneself about events in an integrated way, that is, to understand that they result from a correlation of facts/events/forces of both physical and social natures, which need to be interpreted, and that technological resources are just one of the means to make such an interpretation.

Lizzie: I agree, and I think I would describe this skills around criticism—or critical thinking—as that ability to interpret and make sense of geographical data and information in varied forms is a key capability, or geocapability, as described in the context of university geography scholarship by Helen Walkington and colleagues (2018), and of school geography scholarship by Richard Bustin (2019) and colleagues (Bustin, Lambert and Tani 2020) and by David Lambert and colleagues (2015). Geocapabilities in higher education include, “the use of the geographical imagination; ethical subjecthood with respect to the impacts of geographical processes; integrative thinking about society–environment relationships; spatial thinking; and the structured exploration of places” (Walkington, Dyer, Solem, Haigh and Waddington 2018 p. 7). This emphasis on spatial thinking and exploration of place resonates with what you noted about the development of uncritical cartographic and spatial skills, Bernadete. For me, this is at the heart of what it is to be a geography teacher educator: we are not only training people in the technical skills needed to use GIS for example, but we are also educating them to use them in a critical way where they ask geographical questions.

This approach to geography education has been articulated in England as an enquiry approach: Margaret Roberts (2013) describes how enquiry is an approach to teaching and learning that is driven by asking questions, rooted in sources of geographical evidence that include the knowledge and ideas that students bring to the classroom, i.e. their own geographies. An enquiry approach requires the student to think geographically (e.g. to reason, to analyse, to evaluate) and be reflective, an approach to geography education that is fundamental to my work as a geography teacher educator, as I have explored recently (Rushton 2021).

Bernadete: I can see how an explicit framing of what you are calling as an enquiry approach allows for greater criticality and for me this is such an important movement, or a reaction or pedagogical response, to this danger of uncritical use of digital technologies for spatial analysis. Such approach is not very dissimilar to one of Freire’s (1968/1972) most seminal contributions to critical education—the notion of problem-posing: the work between teachers and students on problematising their realities, that is, on collectively exploring their realities to unveil ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ behind claims through developing questioning attitudes towards knowledges, social issues, etc.; to sum up, avoiding acritical knowledge reception.

Interdisciplinary approaches to environmental justice

Haira: This is a really important point you made about disciplines and critical thinking, Bernadete. For me, being a co-coordinator of a specific course within our secondary teacher education programme that cuts across several teacher’s subject specialisms (e.g. Science, Geography, History, Maths, Arts, etc.), I believe that the issue of environmental justice needs to be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner within education. While we can specifically work with science teachers on what has been termed socio-scientific issues (SSIs), my practice in this area has showed me that environmental emergencies and injustices can be more meaningfully explored within an interdisciplinary framework within teacher education, where critical conversations across subjects/disciplines are established to harness our different backgrounds and expertise into addressing a theme that is embedded by social, psychological, scientific, and both physical (e.g. more-than-human: land, plants, animals, water, etc.) and immaterial (e.g. indigenous cosmovisions) complexities (Carvalho, Steil and Gonzaga 2020).

Lizzie: Yes but, as you know, Haira, geography and science are the only subjects that are seen as the place for climate change and sustainability education in England. This has been emphasised in the Department for Education’s recent strategy, where they advocate for teaching the ‘scientific facts’ of climate change (DfE 2022). I would like to see research focused on how teacher education in all subjects, and all age phases can integrate environmental education and its links to social justice as a way to support teachers to develop this as part of their professional identity and work. And in addition to this interdisciplinary work, part of this endeavour needs to also attend to the emotions and affective domains of learning so that emotionally responsive pedagogies are developed which identify responsibilities, build the coping potential of children and young people so that their capabilities to take action are enhanced (see for example Dunlop and Rushton 2022).

Bernadete: I think these ideas have great synergy with one of the main directions of my current collaborative research with colleagues in our ITE programme in Geography, and with the cross-university and cross-disciplinary project Estado da Arte em Educação Ambiental (EArte—see more details here: http://www.earte.net/), which are imbued with similar purposes for teacher education and concerns with environmental justice involving researchers from different disciplinary areas.

In the case of our ITE programme in Geography, we have sought to deepen discussions on environmental issues and injustices as part of education in direct connection with our trainee teachers’ experiences in local state schools, as part of their internships in those schools within the remit of two federally funded initiatives: Teaching Induction Scholarship Program (PIBID), and Pedagogical Residency. In these initiatives, which are part of our ITE programme, trainee teachers are not limited to the Geography subject in their exploration of environmental themes, but they are expected to dialogue with other areas of knowledge by engaging with teachers from different subject expertises, such as through developing interdisciplinary projects with other teachers in their internship schools.

In the case of our work within the EArte Project, which has been developed by a group made up of educators and researchers from different universities and schools across Brazil around the area of environmental issues, we have been discussing the diverse theoretical and methodological trends in the field of Environmental Education for a couple of decades now, paying special attention to what has been published around teacher education and wider pedagogical practices for EE, including around environmental (in)justices. In this project, we have been working in close partnership with educators and researchers from different knowledge areas, such as Biology, Philosophy, Physics, Law, Psychology, Arts, Geography, Sociology, on the area of environmental issues and injustices, with no disciplinary limits in how we explore this topic. And the dialogue has been very productive, as each person contributes their own aspect or facet (from their own disciplinary field), and together we build something for the area of EE that overlaps, intersects and contrasts different ways of, for instance, engaging with environmental injustices in education: we are not defending the relevance of a specific discipline for such engagement with environmental injustices, we are weaving these ways of thinking together.

Luciano: These are indeed interesting initiatives, Bernadete, and I would really value this kind of opportunity and way of working. However, many university-based educators understand that environmental topics, despite their relevance, are less important for the education of, for instance, physics teachers than more traditional (e.g. physics) concepts. There is, in this case, a sense that some knowledges and topics are more important and need to be prioritised over others. For example, I have constantly seen in my work in this area that many physics teacher educators still resist the incorporation of environmental topics in their physics teacher education courses, especially if it means a change in original curricula and practices. In other words, the gap between physics (my own subject specialism) and environmental education is an important factor that seems to be hindering this endeavour for addressing environmental justice within physics education. And changing this is not so simple, since it often requires “new thinking” around what the education of a physics teacher should be about. The challenge in overcoming such a rigid disciplinary model for physics, for instance, then also requires attention in relation to the technical conception of teacher education, with the valuing of more traditional technical types of knowledge and skills to the detriment of more dynamic, complex and interdisciplinary topics, such as environmental issues.

In a recent work, for instance, I pointed out with some colleagues that one of the ways in which science, including physics, teachers can approach environmental issues in the classroom is through the epistemological perspective of complexity, or complex systems (Pereira, Silva, and dos Santos 2022). We explored how this particular perspective can be understood as an example of ‘new thinking’ in physics classes, especially because it opposes an approach focused on completely predictable and determined phenomena, as often found in more technicist pedagogical and curricular practices in physics education. From this perspective, environmental issues are understood as complex systems and, as such, as interdisciplinary in nature, mainly because they cannot be addressed within the scope of a single discipline.

These ideas around interdisciplinarity can then provide an important opportunity to reflect on how we understand environmental injustices within education. Whilst some disciplines and school subjects may view it as a core part of their purpose (e.g. geography education), others may view this as ‘new thinking’ (e.g. physics education). Key then are the educational structures through which we develop and enact such kind of interdisciplinary education centred on issues of environmental injustices, and it is the particular case of spaces of school and university teacher education in this scenario which we now consider.

School and university teacher education structures

Bernadete: This point by Luciano around ‘new thinking’ in physics education is a very important one, as I believe that the view of environmental education as a possible solution to transform/revolutionise our relationship with nature and with injustices is still very inconsistent across university-based teacher education programmes in Brazil and, more recently, has certainly lost space as a sociopolitical project for the teaching profession here, especially with the recent federal government and its educational reforms. Contrary to our more recent educational policies and their links to teachers’ professional development—which are framed under the technicist view of the profession we mentioned above—, teachers should be seen as actors who can, in their schools, introduce discussions around environmental issues and injustices, dialoguing with the community they serve and with wider national and trans-national scenarios and concerns. In order to be able to do this, including to support their own students to be able to think both about local and global issues, these teachers need to be supported in revisiting and expanding their knowledge and pedagogical practices around this area. And I believe higher education should play an important role in this regard, offering continuing professional development in addition to ITE opportunities, and helping the establishment of collaborations between trainee and experienced teachers in practice that aim at transforming teaching praxis around environmental issues and justice in dynamic, reflexive, and critical ways.

Haira: This is indeed an important point about teacher education, Bernadete. And I think this issue of teachers professional development is even more problematic in England: since there is a lack of interest around environmental education found within educational policies (e.g. national curriculum) and their associated national examinations, it becomes extremely difficult for teacher educators here—even those with enough knowledge and preparation to engage with such topics—to justify an apparent expansion of the current teacher education curriculum beyond what will be strictly expected from these novice teachers when they arrive in their classrooms. In educational systems like the English one which are geared towards learning for high-stakes examinations, curriculum delivery and classroom management, the kind of teachers’ professional development needed for enabling their work around issues of environmental justice seems very distant from our current realities.

Lizzie: As a university-based teacher educator, I had the freedom to develop a secondary geography teacher education programme rooted in environmental justice. And there are some other examples of environmental education as a framework and/or for initial teacher education in England, for example, the framework developed by the University of Reading (2022).

However, you are right about these challenges in England, Haira: what we then end up seeing in England is that the inclusion of environmental education in teacher education—such as these examples—is reliant on a commitment to this approach by individual teacher educators and school-based mentors in spite of current educational policies. For instance, recent policy documents relating to the curriculum of teacher education (Core Content Framework, DfE 2019a) and the framework for ITE for early career teachers (Early Career Framework, DfE 2019b) do not present any points related to environmental concerns or to the concept of environmental justice, neither implicitly nor explicitly. As such, the few initiatives we see developing in the country still risk relying on the individual teacher educator to have the support, expertise and confidence to do this work, as there is currently no national policy-driven resource or imperative to legitimate and support that kind of work in teacher education endeavours.

Haira: In this scenario—and I think this is relevant to both England and Brazil—the solution seems to be twofold: at the policy level, there is a need to legitimatise environmental education as a core component of education, especially in a country like England where teachers lack autonomy to be curriculum-makers themselves and where their work is mainly based on performativity towards centrally controlled systems (e.g. Teachers’ Standards, Early Career Framework, school inspections framework). And at the teacher education level, we need to better work towards supporting those teachers who, despite performativity demands and lack of support at the policy level, want to go against the grain and work with environmental education as part of their practice. As final thought on this, I then wonder about the place of initial and continuous teacher education in capacity-building for early career and experienced teachers to become curriculum-makers themselves—as already asked for by colleagues working in the field of Curriculum, such as Mark Priestley and Gert Biesta (2013)—and how this could open-up space for teachers to address issues of pressing local/global concerns, like environmental justice, via transforming their practice from a bottom-up and collective approach, instead of waiting for top-down policy-driven initiatives.

Final remarks and future directions: what can we learn from one another around education and environmental justice?

Throughout this article, as teacher educators working in Brazil and England, we have presented our collective reflections about our visions, experiences and hopes for an approach to environmental education centred on environmental justice. We recognise that there are limitations to such an approach which is focused on a dialogue, involving four people who draw on two national and disciplinary contexts, that took place during a specific period of time, and unfolded as presented above. As such, we acknowledge that such a dialogue could have developed in multiple ways and encompassed other ideas and contributions to environmental education, teacher education and environmental justice; for example, the ideas and contributions of scholars focused on the role and place of the more-than-human in environmental justice were not substantive in our current dialogue. In our future collaborations, we would seek to further engage with scholarship which encourages us to continue to consider the ways in which teacher education can incorporate more-than human teachers, such as explored by Carvalho and colleagues (2020), whose work underlines that learning is not a human prerogative and foregrounds, as an example, the role of plants as teachers. We also recognise that whilst we have touched on the contributions of ecopedagogues such as Gadotti (2009), and Misiaszek and Torres (2019), this is a rich area of scholarship to draw on in future collaborative dialogues. For example, subsequent global North–South dialogues could specifically consider different pedagogies which are fundamental to environmentally-just teacher education, including wild pedagogies (see for example, Morse, Jickling and Quay 2018; Morse, Jickling, Blenkinsop and Morse 2021; Blenkinsop, Morse and Jickling 2022).

Furthermore, we call attention to the importance of teacher education which spans spaces of education in both schools and higher education. Given the richness of scholarship which considers environmental justice in higher education, this provides a further avenue for collaborative dialogue which foregrounds the work of teacher educators as actors in higher education spaces—see for example work of Misiaszek and Rodrigues (2023) and their Special Issue around this area for the Teaching in Higher Education journal. Finally, and drawing on some of our recent work (e.g. Rushton, Dunlop, Atkinson, Stubbs, Diepen and Wood 2023), we highlight the emergence of an interesting landscape for further research around the affordances of teacher education as spaces to consider ideas of environmental justice and education through intergenerational dialogue, which includes and values the voices of teachers, children and young people and has the potential to extend both our ideas of the temporal as well as spatial dimensions of learning and justice.

We recognise, therefore, that there are important ideas and areas which are less prominent in our current dialogue but which can offer rich opportunities for future collaborations including and extending beyond this group of teacher educators. Nevertheless, our aim here was to engage in collective reflection as voices coming from a mix of global North and South communities to foreground and move our current practices and research in this area beyond our subject specialisms and our national and socio-cultural contexts, engaging with an exchange of ideas, concerns, theorisations, etc. This paper then adds to previous global South-North dialogues in Environmental Education (e.g. Rodrigues et al. 2020), and here we reaffirm the importance of opportunities to collaboratively and reflectively explore our shared and varied geo-epistemological landscapes and experiences of justice. More specifically, we sought to learn from each other in the spirit of transnational solidarity put forward by Paulo Freire through his notion of intercultural learning—as outlined in Pedagogy of Hope (1992)—, and by other Freirean scholars (e.g. Gandolfi 2023b; Freire, Freire, de Oliveira and Giroux 2014): we sought to come together to learn from each other and to ‘share the world’ in solidarity, grounded on the particular recognition that environmental injustices have increasingly transcended socio-political borders such as the ones built between, for instance, Brazil and England. Therefore, we hope the approach we adopted in this article—including our methodological and writing-up strategies—might inspire other scholars interested in issues of education and (environmental) injustices to engage with this kind of transnational reflection, as we believe that such an approach is consistent with educators systematically reflecting on their own practice and generating new knowledge about teacher education.

This perspective, however, does not mean that the issues we face as teacher educators in Brazil and in England are always of the same nature and scale; indeed, there are both similarities and differences in the ways teacher education is understood and enacted both within nations and between nations. For example, in this dialogue, Lizzie and Haira draw on recent experiences of teacher education in England which are often focused on working with student teachers as part of a 1-year postgraduate programmes, and within a context where the policy emphasis is on initial teacher training as opposed to education. In contrast, Luciano and Bernadete’s contexts include working with student teachers over 4 years, on average, with a focus on education. In addition, as we outlined at the start of this article drawing on Quijano (2007) and Gadotti and Torres (2009), Brazil has experienced for centuries, and continues to experience, the consequences of environmental injustices as a result of longstanding (neo)colonial projects around land and natural resources exploitation. Meanwhile, England, like many other global North countries, has only started to engage in a reconceptualisation of environmental concerns under a socio-political framing of environmental injustice.

As such, Brazilian (teacher) educators have been engaging with environmental education as embedded in issues of social justice for decades now, as argued by Luciano and Bernadete—and, to an extent, by Haira, who was educated and worked as a science teacher in Brazil—in this article. In their practices and theorisations of this area, we see issues of urgency, immediacy and close connection to environmental disasters at the core of their concerns as teacher educators. Those concerns have been made even more important by recent regressions in public policies and general federal government attitudes towards the environment and environmental justice in Brazil, especially since 2016. Questions then emerge here around the place of environmental education in places like Brazil, where the apparent inevitability of environmental destruction is being lived in real-time by the communities where teachers and educators work: should we environmental education be about preparing for a post-impact scenario? Or should it engage with challenging—and acting—against these real-time scenarios? And what might be the roles of teacher educators and teacher education programmes in this scenario, including when facing national educational policies that have been regressing in relation to critical approaches to environmental education as well?

On this point, one might say that Brazilian educators like Luciano and Bernadete could be looking at countries like England to see what the future might hold, despite their different socio-economic and socio-cultural trajectories. Environmental concerns and, linked to those, environmental education have certainly not been a core concern of public policies (including educational policies) in England, which one could attribute to a historical loss of contact with the environment for most people living in the country. While for Brazil environmental issues and disasters (including climate change and biodiversity loss) are part of real-time lived experiences, in England these issues have been traditionally framed as distant for present realities (either in time or in geographical location). This lack of concern about pressing environmental issues in the wider society and within education, which resists going beyond technical knowledge (e.g. learning about CO2 levels in the atmosphere) or individually focused initiatives (e.g. household recycling), poses important challenges to addressing environmental justice through a socio-political framing.

These examples above illustrate just some of the ways in which different geographical and social contexts bring nuanced understandings which are threaded through teacher education and are important to consider when establishing and enacting collaborative dialogues and reflecting on the resulting learning and insights from such a paper like this one. Therefore, some of the questions which we have reflected upon throughout this experience of collaborative professional learning which could inform future such dialogues include: what are the explicit and implicit ideas, values and beliefs about teacher education which we bring to conversations about environmental education and environmental justice? How might we through dialogue challenge, interrupt and transform our ideas and practice? What opportunities for collaborative professional learning exist and how might we engage with and contribute to these? We share these as a stimulus for teachers educators in varied geographical and social contexts to continue to consider the ways in which environmental justice can be enacted through teacher education including and moving beyond the contexts, communities and disciplines considered in this dialogue.

Lastly, as we continue to work as researchers and teacher educators committed to contributing to environmental justice through our professional lives, we reaffirm the crucial spaces of teacher education and continuing professional development as worthy of continued attention by researchers and resource and support by policy makers. Teacher education, which intentionally foregrounds opportunities for teachers of all subjects, working with children and young people of all ages to develop pedagogies and practice which are environmentally just is a vital part of realising environmentally just local and global contexts. So we close this article with an encouragement for future research on this area that aims at expanding the kinds of conversations and reflections we started here around what might be the role(s) of teachers and teacher educators in helping to build a more environmentally just world, especially when going against the grain of several (environmentally and socially) unjust views and practices of education—such as the ones we identified in our contexts of work—seems to be currently imperative this profession.