This article offers a set of unique vignettes or stories that attempt to illustrate examples of critical approaches to environmental education (EE) in diverse contexts. It draws from the experiences of five environmental educators in four different regions of the world. We detail the history of the emergence of critical consciousness in education in Brazil, and its application in a Brazilian region, then move to examples of critical educational responses to oppression in New Zealand and Zimbabwe, before closing with a critical examination of innovative teaching and research in Europe. Through this breadth of endeavour, we identify commonalities across these contexts such as the importance of participatory action and research to examine people-environment relations, particularly as constituted by indigenous peoples, and to interpret realities in ways that empower through learning-led social-ecological change.  We argue that this critical approach can foster emancipation through individual and collective learning in EE processes within very different contexts.

Rather than hoping to meld such diverse experiences into a communally-written article, we present here a set of five unique vignettes which each describe and reflect on the critical dimension of EE in their context. As a developing field, EE began to proliferate in the 1980s, primarily in response to environmental degradation and social-ecological problems that were developing in different ways across a rapidly globalising world. Processes of EE were responsive and critical in nature and were orientated to undertaking education in ways that might address a widening and deepening set of local and globalising social-ecological problems. Alongside the development of new teaching and learning processes came the imperative to consider both the concerns that were beginning to drive EE and the innovative practices that were being undertaken to engage people in resolving these.

We note then that EE as a field had critical roots in its own right. It had emerged as a field of critical engagement at the nexus of modernity and emerging social-ecological risk, and expanded and diversified with the advent of Critical Theory that drew on ideas of the Frankfurt School, the counter hegemony of Gramsci, and the critical literacy of Freirian emancipation. This latter work of Freire’s, for example in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1972)  advocated a dialogical process centred on critical literacy, and this imperative to emancipate was picked up and worked with amongst oppressed peoples in many parts of the world, as it continues to be, where environmental educators focus on critical emancipation in response to social marginalisation and ecological degradation (UNESCO, 2014). Early Critical Theory was successively expanded and re-written in diverse contexts of EE to variously constitute education as an empowering and transformative process of change. The notions of liberation and emancipation in South America were taken up in wider education arenas as co-engaged, reflexive research for learning-led change. This drew on the action research of Kurt Lewin and the diversifying intellectual narratives after the Frankfurt School as well as a series of rapidly expanding critical discourses that were taken up by Australian researchers such as Huckle (Huckle, 1996) and Robottom (Robottom & Hart, 1993) and have now extended their reach to all forms of oppression and to a concern for the more than human (Abram, 1996; Hart, 2005), for example. Within this proliferating diversity of critical perspective, the implicit critical disposition of most environmental educators variously expanded and diversified their work to constitute the diverse array of critical practices that are found across the field of EE today.

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