The Education for Environmental Sustainability (EfES) SIG aims to encourage and support discussion, research, practice and scholarship focused on EfES in its broadest sense. The SIG will support inquiry into Environmental Education (EE), Climate Change Education (CCE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and and other approaches to education connecting people and the environment.  The SIG will provide a focus for this rich and varied research. The SIG will create a forum for academics, practitioners and students to engage critically with the nature and purpose of EfES including curriculum, pedagogies, practice and policy.

A strength of the SIG is that it seeks to support research and scholarship across all subject specialisms (e.g. geography, science, English, history, art), sectors (formal and non-formal) and age-phases (EYFS, primary, secondary, HE) concerned with EfES. At the same time, the SIG will seek to establish dialogue with and between other BERA SIGs, including ‘Children and Childhoods’, ‘Curriculum, Assessment and Pedagogy’, ‘Nature, Outdoor Learning and Play’, to draw together knowledge relating to EfES. This is a timely opportunity to establish an EfES SIG, building on the 2021-2022 BERA Research Commission focused on EfES.

SIG aims

• Create a community within BERA for dialogue, and to advance research and practice in EfES
• Support collaborations between established and early careers researchers, practitioners and educators;
• Foster research engagement through enabling inter/transdisciplinary discussion of new and complementary theoretical insights from other SIGs;
• Explore changes and continuities in understandings of, and approaches to, EfES, including themes of inclusion, participation and ethics;
• Further understanding of the nature and purpose of EfES including curriculum, practice and policy.