Re-Integrating Sustainable Education into Lifelong Learning

Dear Colleagues,

Background

How can we support the adoption of sustainable behaviours and approaches in all spheres of life? Though the necessity for change is well established, there is a significant disconnect between what we know and how we operate. This Special Issue will explore the full trajectory of our understanding of sustainability, from early environmental education to today’s digitally interconnected models. Learning ecosystems (formal schools, universities, OER networks, or media) serve as significant narrative arenas where sustainability is taught, contested, and reshaped.

This Special Issue will explore the following:

1. Environmental Education

From cultural narratives, indigenous narrative traditions and ecological wisdom, and contemporary links to mid-20th-century nature appreciation and transcendentalist traditions, environmental learning gradually shifted toward reflective and ethical engagement with ecosystems, seen in early eco-literature and ecocriticism movements (Macintyre, Tilbury & Wals, 2024). The emergence of 1970s ESD integrated biocentric worldviews, intergenerational responsibility, and systems-based approaches across educational settings. Recent scholarship highlights the value of systems thinking, which connect feedback loops, interdisciplinary modelling, and socio-scientific inquiry, as foundational in sustainability education (Peretz 2025). Academic “anchor institutions” are positioning themselves as sustainability-leveraging ecosystems, embedding SDG-aligned curricula, research, greening initiatives, and community outreach within holistic systems-based frameworks.

2. Contemporary Debates

Narrative Power and Cultural Paradigms

Scholars argue that sustainable development is driven not just by technical solutions but by transforming dominant cultural narratives—from anthropocentric, consumption-based stories to biocentric, interconnected frameworks. Mythic assumptions in conservation stories have often relied on myths, such as heroic saviours vs. doomed wilderness and fear-based pedagogies reinforcing hierarchical power structures and weak individual agency, hindering inclusive sustainability. Such tensions lead to further polarization between techno-optimists and advocates of people-centred conservation, deepening the politics of conservation narratives. This has knock-on effects on how learning resources for ESD/SDE are designed.

In business and industry, the need to support inclusive design and upskilling through training programmes and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) demonstrates how inquiry-led reflections can be integrated into socio-scientific issues and cross-disciplinary projects cultivating durable systems reasoning across learning ecosystems.

There are also key debates around enabling open, linked systems versus entrenched, closed silos. The emphasis on interoperability among OER platforms highlights digital landscapes as ecosystems of content, actors, and connections and an operative and effective part of civic spaces of learning and knowledge exchange. This raises pedagogical questions about what the public can learn from sustained narrative exposure and who is able to design and evaluate public learning chambers.

Competence, Care, and Agency

Poor education in civic spaces around sustainability is fuelling hesitation and, at the same time, fuelling anxiety and nervousness. One area where better sustainability education is needed is in the competence vs. care tension, which centres around the crucial need for systems modelling and data literacy versus narratives that foreground care, interdependence, and relational accountability and motivate action and inclusion. Another area where public debate and education will support sustainable education involves the individual vs. structural agency tension. Many learning narratives valorise individual behavioural change, while systemic framings emphasise institutions, infrastructures, and policies. Contemporary scholarship suggests that powerful learning ecosystems link these strands, equipping learners to analyse systems and participate in collective action that alters structures (Peretz, 2025; Louder & Wyborn 2020).

3. Implications for Designing Learning Ecosystems

• Seeking ways to balance systems thinking with narrative reflexivity;
• Designing for openness and interconnection;
• Cultivating plural knowledge ecologies;
• New forms of learning design for media literacy as sustainability literacy;
• Alignment between so-called formal and informal learning ecosystems: campus, curriculum, and community.

The best learning ecosystems do not treat stories as an afterthought. They actively bring them to light, question them, and rewrite them, making space for different perspectives and linking clear thinking with fairness. This approach frames learning as more than knowledge exchange; it builds collective capability and agency for supporting change in behaviours within communities, businesses, and political circles and can provide a platform for creating fair and sustainable futures.

References

Bernardelli, A., Pescatore, G., & Sonego, A. (eds.) 2025. Green Narratives, Ecology and Sustainability in Contemporary Television – Exploring Narrative Ecosystems. Media Mutations Publishing. https://publishing.mediamutations.org/green-narratives-ecology-and-sustainability-in-contemporary-television---exploring-narrative-ecosystems-2.

Liu, J., Kitamura, Y., & Savelyeva, T. 2022. Building an ‘Ecosystem’ for transforming higher education teaching and learning for sustainability.” Asia Pacific Education Review, 23, 539–542. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12564-022-09794-1

Louder, E., & Wyborn, C. 2020. Biodiversity narratives: stories of the evolving conservation landscape. Environmental Conservation, 47(4), 251–259. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/environmental-conservation/article/abs/biodiversity-narratives-stories-of-the-evolving-conservation-landscape/857FFCB16378AC8827B463943EBB268F

Macintyre, T., Tilbury, D., & Wals, A. (2024). Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 Years of Learning for Environment and Change (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003467007.

Otto, D., & Kerres, M. “Increasing Sustainability in Open Learning: Prospects of a Distributed Learning Ecosystem for Open Educational Resources.” Frontiers in Education, 7, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.866917/full

Peretz, R. “Integrating Systems Thinking into Sustainability Education: An Overview with Educator-Focused Guidance.” Education Sciences, 15(12), 1685. https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/15/12/1685.

Rossi, I. 2025. “Cultural Narratives and Sustainability: Insights from Humanities Research.” Humanities Research Journal, 1(4), 18–21. https://www.humanitiesresearchjournal.com/uploads/archives/20250630134049_20.pdf

Singh, D. 2024. “Environmentalism in Contemporary Eco-Literature.” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 29(3), 84–91, 2024. https://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.29-Issue3/Ser-1/M2903018491.pdf

Stevenson, R., et al. Education and Learning for Sustainable Futures: 50 Years of Learning for Environment and Change. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385732446_Education_and_Learning_for_Sustainable_Futures_50_Years_of_Learning _for_Environment_and_Change/fulltext/6733041269c07a411444fbc3/Education-and-Learning-for-Sustainable-Futures-50-Years-of-Learning-for-Environment-and-Change.pdf

Prof. Dr. Arinola Adefila
Prof. Dr. Fred Yamoah
Dr. Muyiwa Oyinlola
Prof. Dr. José Pablo Prado Córdova
Guest Editors

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• sustainability education
• relational pedagogies
• lifelong learning
• authentic practice
• work-related training
• green skills
• digital learning for sustainability
• inclusive education
• environmental literacy
• policy and governance
• community-based learning
• sustainable development goals (SDGs)