Enacting Eco-democracy in Education

Enacting eco-democracy in education: Young students and more-than-human Relationships

Researchers

Linda Wilhelmsson and Teresa Elkin Postila Mid-Sweden University

Karen Malone Swinburne University of Technology

Funding: Mid-Sweden University

Overview of the project
This collaborative research project between researchers in Australia and Sweden will explore the potential to enact eco-democracy focusing on student teachers experiences in university teacher education programs (in primary and early childhood degrees), and the pedagogical practices by educators in early childhood centres and primary schools. The research activities will support teacher education students as participants in research about eco-democracy to reflect on their experiences of university teaching and their time when engaged in Industry learning either as part of their university subjects or their Industry based professional experience. At the same time, it will engage early childhood educators to share their pedagogical practices and philosophies of relational, more-than-human learning by documenting children’s activities during Bush kinder or nature play programs as pedagogy in practice.
This project seeks to research how ecological concerns and connections and embedded in education practices that support ecological care, justice and responsibility. This research comes at time that is critical when we are living amidst what Sean Blenkinsop and Linda Wilhelmsson (2025) call a convergence of crises: ecological, social, and democratic. In response, they and several scholars propose not simply the preservation of existing liberal democratic institutions, but a fundamental reimagining – a turn toward ‘eco-democracy’.  Eco-democracy, broadly defined, integrates ecological concerns with democratic principles, calling for the recognition of more-than-human agency in education.
Eco-democracy has evolved through two key strands of thought. The first, rooted in deliberative democratic theory and green political thought (see Petersson, 1999; Lundmark, 1998), that seeks to expand existing liberal democratic frameworks to include ecological literacy and sustainable citizenship. This model largely retains anthropocentric assumptions and aims to cultivate informed human citizens who advocate for environmental protections (Pickering, Bäckstrand, & Schlosberg, 2020). In this model the role of education focuses on human activities such as supporting environmental conservation and stewardship, instilling ecological knowledge and curiosity about how the environment functions, and encouraging human environmental behaviour change to ensure less human impact including advocating for greener living and infrastructure, less waste etc…
The second strand is more innovative and groundbreaking. It questions the very foundations of democracy as human-centered and anthropocentric. This is the vision Peters (2017) and Lepori (2019) begin to articulate: one where democracy is reconstituted to include the rights, voices, and agencies of the more-than-human. This strand includes a model of education that explores how humans interact and support the rights of ecosystems, animals, and objects and entities, it advocates we are in entangled relations with all beings, so rather than viewing the environment as something outside of us, something we are managing or learning about, it seeks to see education as about nurturing and fostering relations and learning-with. Blenkinsop and Wilhelmsson (2025) describe this as a shift from saving democracy to re-creating it, one oriented toward mutually beneficial flourishing. It is this second strand of eco-democracy that informs the foundation of the research project we are exploring.  
The intention of this project is to explore at this time of ecological crisis and a transition in philosophical thinking, how a shift away from a human centred approach to education is being addressed. To do this we will develop small case study exemplars which explore the experiences of teacher education students reflecting on their experiences in early childhood settings and how early childhood educators are embracing these new ways of thinking in their centres. In particular, the focus will be on early childhood centres where they are implementing bush kinder or nature play pedagogical programs.

Project Aims
To investigate how eco-democracy is conceptualised and enacted in teacher education programs and early childhood centres in Australia and Sweden.
To explore how teacher education students experience and reflect on eco-democratic principles during their university learning and industry-based placements.
To examine how early childhood educators implement place-based, posthuman, and ecological pedagogies in alignment with emerging policy and curriculum frameworks.
 
Research Questions
How do teacher education students understand and experience eco-democracy through their university coursework and professional placements?
In what ways are early childhood educators enacting relational, more-than-human pedagogies in bush kinder and nature play settings?
What pedagogical, epistemological, and ontological shifts are observable in children’s engagement with place, land, and more-than-human beings?

Significance of the project
Teacher Education in Australian universities in line with many university programs around the world, has tended to be based on a humanistic paradigm. That is, when discussing the ‘environment’ is it predominantly viewed as a resource, an object to study and explore, a place to visit and learn knowledge about. In recent times with the advent of philosophical and pedagogical shifts in outdoor education, sustainability and nature studies learning there has been a move away from a human centred approaches in teacher education. Although only just in its foundation a posthuman approach which embraces a more relational and more-than-human perspective, therefore incorporating spaces for more innovative eco-democracy in the curriculum is becoming more commonplace.
This shift aligns nationally with changes in the revised National Early Years Learning Framework (2023) where a strengthening in relational and place-based pedagogies and a focus on sustainability has opened spaces where programs such a bush kinder, nature learning and sustainability are becoming more commonplace. This has been supported specifically in Victorian early childhood centres by the advent of a three years funding from the Victorian government to support services to plan and implement bush kinder programs. While still lagging behind in primary schools in Australia we do see the advent of support for whole school approaches to environmental sustainability in Victorian schools as opportunities for moving beyond human-centered to eco- centred approaches.

Case Study Design Overview
This project employs a qualitative, multisite case study methodology to investigate how eco-democracy is being enacted in teacher education and early childhood and primary education settings. Drawing on posthumanist theories (Blenkinsop & Wilhelmsson, 2025; Malone 2018), the study focuses on the lived experiences of teacher education students and early childhood educators as they engage with innovative more-than-human, place-based and relational pedagogies.
Teacher education students who are enrolled in two units EDU40020 Nature pedagogies and EDU40002 Play and Environments in the department of education at Swinburne University of Technology will be asked if they would like to voluntarily participate in providing reflective documentation including observational fieldnotes, photographs, and artefact mapping during both their university coursework and their professional placements, particularly in early childhood centres implementing bush kinder or nature play programs.
In parallel, two educators in two different centres in Melbourne will be engaged in interviews and co-analysis sessions, sharing their pedagogical practices and philosophies of relational, more-than-human learning. Children’s activities will be documented in collaboration between the researchers and the educators through observational fieldnotes, photographs, and artefact mapping centring on their entangled engagements with land, weather, plants, and creatures.
Each case will generate rich narrative data, highlighting how relational ontologies are embodied in pedagogical practices. The methodology draws on performative inquiry (Barad, 2007) and ethical ethnography (Nxumalo, 2019), attending to children, educators, and nonhuman others as co-researchers. These situated exemplars aim to offer grounded insight into how eco-democratic principles are practiced, felt, and reimagined in educational life.