Submit your contribution to join an international dialogue on research, practice, and innovation in environmental education.
Submissions for oral presentations and posters are invited from researchers and scholars at all career stages, including doctoral researchers and early-career academics, as well as schoolteachers, practitioners, civil society organisations, and public and private institutions.
We welcome conceptual essays, case studies, literature reviews, and practice-based reflections aligned with the themes of this call. Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, comparative, and community-engaged contributions are particularly encouraged, including work on media, the arts, and emotional intelligence that helps communicate ecological change, social justice, human rights, democracy, and environmental racism with clarity and public relevance.
Submissions are welcome in English, French and Spanish.
The Conference will be complemented by a dedicated programme for young people (YEEC: Youth Environmental Education Conference), as well as by special events, including meetings organised by scientific journals and institutions.
(Some themes are linked to round tables and webinars)
1. Biodiversity and nature at the centre of pedagogical innovation
Outdoor education remains one of the foundational pathways of environmental education. Yet dominant cultural paradigms often keep everyday life at a distance from nature, especially in large urban contexts shaped by either advanced technological development or inequality and scarcity. Reconnecting human beings with nature and the Earth, therefore, requires pedagogical innovation, the transformation of educational spaces, and stronger relationships with local communities. Biodiversity and nature are increasingly recognised as central dimensions of educational renewal in response to contemporary environmental, social, and pedagogical challenges. This theme invites critical reflection on how teaching and learning can be reimagined through interdisciplinary, experiential, and sustainability-oriented approaches that foster ecological awareness, inclusion, and active citizenship. Contributions may address the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of placing biodiversity and nature at the centre of educational processes across educational contexts and levels.
Within this perspective, protected areas play a crucial role. In the context of ecological, climatic, and social transformations, they offer privileged settings for critically examining the relationships among biodiversity conservation, territorial governance, educational practices, and ecological citizenship. At the same time, economic pressures often threaten their integrity and long-term educational potential.
In these contexts, environmental education should not be understood merely as awareness-raising, but as a cultural, pedagogical, and institutional framework capable of connecting knowledge production, territorial mediation, public participation, civic activism, and social innovation.
A persistent challenge, however, is that the educational function of protected areas is not always fully developed or structurally supported.
Schools, environmental education centres, guides, cooperatives, third-sector associations, universities, and managing bodies often work with competence and commitment, but too frequently in isolation. Resources are often discontinuous, funding remains uncertain, and long-term planning is incomplete. Staff instability and difficult coordination across institutional levels further weaken continuity and impact.
The result is a paradox: a rich and widespread body of practices exists, yet the infrastructure needed to sustain, connect, and institutionalise them remains insufficient.
2.Urban education, fair and sustainable cities and participation
Although cities may appear primarily as human artefacts, their materials come from nature; they depend on ecological systems; they affect those systems; and many living species, human and non-human alike, inhabit them.
Urban environmental education remains an underdeveloped field of practice and research, despite significant experiences in both the Global North and the Global South. This track explores the relationships among urban environmental education, social and spatial justice, sustainability, and democratic participation in contemporary cities. Urban life is shaped by pollution, inequality, violence, isolation, and exclusion, but also by community resources and active civic movements. The track therefore seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on how educational processes, civic engagement, and inclusive urban governance can contribute to more equitable, resilient, and sustainable urban futures.
We welcome contributions that examine cities as spaces of education and learning, investigate urban metabolism and participation in shaping public life, and critically engage with justice, inclusion, environmental responsibility, and the right to the city.
3. Climate education
The impact of the climate crisis is intensifying rapidly and is particularly severe in the Global South, where socio-economic vulnerabilities and exposed geographical conditions increase risk. Climate change disproportionately affects populations that have contributed least to global emissions, revealing deep patterns of environmental injustice linked to class, race, gender, and histories of exploitation associated with the dominant economic model.
At the same time, the climate crisis increasingly affects wealthier countries in temperate regions, where floods, droughts, heatwaves, and hydrogeological instability are becoming more frequent. Across contexts, global heating intensifies natural disasters, health threats, and biodiversity loss.
Climate education, closely linked to climate justice, North–South relations, and migration, is becoming an increasingly urgent dimension of environmental education. Yet it remains difficult to overcome scientific illiteracy, cognitive distortions, and forms of climate denialism sustained by fossil-fuel interests, as well as softer forms of neo-denialism that acknowledge climate change while minimising its human causes or relying on technocratic responses unable to produce deep systemic change. For this reason, high-quality preparation for future teachers, journalists, non-formal educators, and other professionals is essential.
4. Educational research and policy in schools and higher education: breaking cultural and epistemological silos
Schools and universities remain fragmented into disciplines that separate what is inherently interconnected. Beyond formal structures, further hidden divisions shape educational work and the broader contexts in which it unfolds. This theme asks how environmental education can create dialogue, circulation, and mutual transformation among ideas, concepts, and goals across fields of knowledge and training. As a driver of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary education, environmental education can support holistic and systemic thinking across multiple scales of space and time, helping learners understand how environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions interact. Addressing complexity, therefore, requires renewed attention to epistemological questions and to the diversity of paradigms that inform environmental education research.
5. From ideas to action: decolonial perspectives, local knowledge, and critique of unsustainable paradigms
Preparing for the future requires a critical understanding of current socioeconomic models and their uneven effects across the Global South and the Global North. This includes transitions towards low-carbon economies and more sustainable ways of living. Environmental education must therefore be decolonised by recognising and valuing voices from the Global South, respecting traditional and local knowledge, and moving beyond the dominant logics of globalisation.
This theme builds:
1) on the resilience of Indigenous peoples, small island nations, and local communities, including those in Europe and North America, while promoting planetary citizenship and awareness of our shared destiny on Earth, our common home;
2) on critical thinking and science-based scenarios that challenge mainstream narratives of unlimited growth.
Cooperation, peace among peoples and with the Earth, and non-violent resistance to social and environmental injustice are central to this track.
Relevant pedagogies and methodologies for transformative learning include service learning, community stewardship, project-based education, place-based education, participatory action, citizen science, skills development, and action-oriented education. These approaches support personal, collective, and political choices while also engaging holistic worldviews, eco-social and epistemic perspectives, critical and systems thinking, ethical reflection, and participatory practices.
This theme also addresses:
6. Adult education: communities, territories, and empowerment through environmental and sustainability education
Environmental and social challenges require participatory approaches that can envision shared futures and enable more desirable trajectories for human and non-human life on the planet.
While young people are often highly visible in movements and initiatives, adults remain crucial because of their roles as workers, migrants, voters, policymakers, Indigenous persons, practitioners, scientists, and citizens. Particular attention should also be paid to the relationship between women and the environment.
Older adults also deserve attention. They often carry practical knowledge, historical memory, and lived experience that can support intergenerational learning and civic engagement. Environmental volunteering and participation in collective action can contribute to active ageing, while older people are also among the groups most exposed to climate and environmental injustice. In many countries, especially wealthier ones, they represent a growing share of the population.
Despite its strategic importance for social transformation and for environmental and social justice, adult environmental education remains underexplored and underdeveloped.
Environmental education for adults, therefore, requires specific approaches to engagement, an environmental andragogy, and targeted pedagogical innovation.
We welcome contributions on adult learning processes and methodologies; intergenerational learning; workplace learning and vocational education; community-based and popular education in the Freirean tradition; learning within organisations; pedagogies of care; situated, transgressive, and transformative learning; and education for eco-citizenship, among other approaches that can strengthen both the theory and practice of adult environmental education.
7. Digital technology, artificial intelligence, and educational sustainability: challenges, conflicts, and prospects
The advance of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is profoundly transforming educational systems, learning processes, teaching practices, and the organisation of knowledge. At the same time, increasingly urgent questions are emerging about the environmental, social, cognitive, and ethical implications of expanding digital infrastructures and AI tools.
At the same time, the critical and informed use of these technologies may help educational systems move more quickly beyond outdated models and create access to significant new opportunities, sometimes through processes of technological leapfrogging.
This theme promotes interdisciplinary discussion on the ambivalent role of digital technology and artificial intelligence in education, bringing together pedagogy, environmental studies, philosophy of technology, sociology, computer science, media studies, and public policy.
It also invites critical reflection on misinformation and on the ways corporate and governmental interests can shape digital systems.
Particular attention should be paid to the tensions between technological innovation and sustainability, including the energy consumption of AI systems, the extraction of critical minerals for digital infrastructure, technological obsolescence, the automation of educational processes, cognitive dependence on algorithms, risks of manipulation, transformations in educational relationships, and emerging inequalities.
Via del Carmine, 15
10122 Torino – Italy
tel.+39 0114366522
secretariat@weecnetwork.org
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