The Anthropocene is, among other things, an age of disentanglement, disenfranchisement, and of onto-epistemological isolation of the human from its surroundings. The polarization is manifest on multiple scales, to the point that we risk leaving young people feeling both hopelessly and helplessly alone against the troubles of our time. The importance of educating for the ability to not only tolerate, but to be active in both imagining and practicing acts of peaceful, mutually constitutive being-with (Haraway, 2008) cannot be understated. Experiences of interdependence and -connectedness is vital for human well-being, yet the paper also takes legitimate human experience of interdependency with nature as a necessary component of successful Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) (Lloro-Bidart & Banschbach, 2019). The aim of this presentation is to examine the potential of meetings between human learners and the more-than-human as part of ESE. More specifically, the paper discusses such meetings in ESE when structured as didactical perspective-taking, building on the critique of reductionism in perspective-taking by Iris Marion Young (1997) as part of the larger discussion on representations of nature in ESE. Importantly, if ESE is to be made to be an eco-democratic endeavour, then the question of the place and representation of the more-than-human becomes paramount (Vetlesen, 2023). While some degree of reduction in education is unavoidable, the paper contends that a less isolated, ahierarchal, interdependent awareness of “nature” in all its forms both is and can be represented in education. Following this, the paper argues for both the possibility and the necessity of respectful reduction as an approach when taking the perspective of more-than-human Others. Here it is suggested that the value of such respectful boundary-crossings between human and more-than-human may supersede the lack of perfect representation, given the potential of revealing previously unsensed entanglements and relationships. The paper further proposes didactical more-than-human perspective-taking as an avenue for of engendering ‘receptive-responsiveness’ to nature as described by Bonnett (2012). Childrens’ meetings with more-than-human Other perspectives may thus serve as an opportunity to broaden conceptions of whom and what to acknowledge as morally relevant, opening for imagining alternative ways for young people to envision their futures. The theoretical discussion will be contextualised with preliminary findings from ongoing empirical research on more-than-human perspective-taking practices in Norwegian secondary education.

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