Integrating Sustainability into Place-Responsive Environmental Education
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Education and Approaches".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2026 | Viewed by 1
Special Issue Editor
Interests: education for sustainable development; environmental education; outdoor education; place-responsive education; environmental knowledge; environmental attitudes; pro-environmental behaviour
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Environmental education across formal, informal, and non-formal settings represents a strategic entry point for advancing sustainability and is most effective when informed by place-responsive education, which grounds teaching and learning in the local environment, culture, and community and uses learners’ direct experiences of place to foster meaningful and sustainability-oriented understanding and action.
Learners bring rich, experience-based understandings of the natural world, often demonstrating strong curiosity towards the environment. Sensory-rich, direct engagement with local natural environments supports experiential learning, strengthens emotional connectedness to nature, and fosters environmental agency. Such concrete experiences contribute to the development of ecological literacy and systems thinking, providing an essential foundation for later scientific understanding and pro-environmental action.
A growing body of research demonstrates that participatory and inquiry-based approaches, such as outdoor learning, place-responsive education, and experiential learning, are particularly effective in environmental education and align closely with education for sustainable development, especially SDG Target 4.7, which emphasises the knowledge, skills, values, and dispositions required to promote sustainability. Environmental education thus lays the groundwork for lifelong sustainability-oriented learning.
This Special Issue welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions that critically examine these issues, including conceptual frameworks, policy analyses, and research-based studies that advance understanding of environmental education and sustainability across educational contexts.
Prof. Dr. Gregor Torkar
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- environmental education
- place-responsive education
- sustainability
- education for sustainable development
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