Climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time, requiring significant responses from all aspects of society, including education. The prevailing responses to climate change tend towards treating the crisis as a predominantly scientific and managerial issue that requires technological solutions or behaviour changes. Correspondingly, climate change education (CCE) tends towards teaching climate science and (predominantly individual) behaviour change. Recently, socio-political competencies and climate justice have been advanced, which, while crucial, still do not adequately address the question of how we got here in the first place. What is needed, we argue, is greater attention to how climate change is one of multiple, intersecting sustainability crises (e.g. biodiversity loss, chemical and plastic pollution) rooted in a widespread anthropocentric, extractionist, and instrumental mentality.

Both Sterling (2016) and Bonnett (2021) advocate for a twofold strategy to environmental and sustainability education (ESE): on the one hand, a short-term pragmatic agenda of ‘damage limitation’ that cautiously uses science and technology to lessen environmental damage and social injustice as much as possible; and on the other hand, a long-term agenda to shift the human–more-than-human relationship to one that reflects our interconnectedness with the natural world, which must occur simultaneously, and increasingly inform the short-term strategy.

We suggest posthumanism, with its focus on both decentring the human and simultaneously actively exploring from multiple and supra-disciplinary perspectives, a human self-understanding based on relationality, continuity with the natural world, and the animality and materiality of human beings, could provide the roots and shoots for the long-term shift.

In this paper, we engage with posthuman research, which has had a recent resurgence of interest, including within ESE (Clarke & Mcphie, 2020). We align ourselves with the view of ‘posthumanism’ as a simultaneously critical and creative endeavour that involves interrogating the ‘self-representations and conventional understandings of being human, which “we” have inherited from the past’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 41) while engaging in the on-going task of learning to think differently about ourselves.

We make the case for why a posthumanist, rather than a critical humanist (Lindgren & Öhman, 2019) approach is needed, by revisiting and challenging some of humanism’s central claims. It should be one of the fundamental concerns of education to challenge human-centredness but not abandon our distinctive human subjectivity entirely. We find Kretz’s (2009) concept of ‘open continuity’ helpful: human identity or self-concept remains very much intact but humans are also considered as ‘situated in ecologically relevant wholes of which [they] are a part’ (2009, p. 131), there is ‘a merging between (what is normally construed as a) self and other’ (2009, p. 123). Such a shift in human self-understanding has far-reaching consequences for the education of current and future generations (Herbrechter, 2018).

We then address the question of how posthumanism might influence ESE/CCE. In particular we examine and contribute to the knowledge on how posthumanism might alter existing frameworks such as UNESCO’s (2017) key competencies for sustainability.

We explore and review the recent surge in research on different ways to tackle posthumanism in education. Then, to feed into this diverse and growing field, we want to address the reality facing most ESE/CCE educators today, that of finding their own pathways towards posthuman ESE/CCE within existing anthropocentric educational frameworks. We want to explore how these existing frameworks might be posthumanised. Recently, there has been an emphasis in ESE on developing competencies ‘that enable individuals to participate in socio-political processes and, hence, to move their societies towards sustainable development’ (Rieckmann, 2018, p. 41). We chose to examine how UNESCO’s (2017) key competencies for sustainability might be challenged, troubled, and reconfigured – posthumanised, and how learners might develop these competencies in an entangled and embodied way with the more-than-human.

Posthuman ESE/CCE entails learning together with and co-constructing knowledge with the more-than-human (Blenkinsop et al., 2022; Herbrechter, 2018a; Quinn, 2021; Taylor, 2017; Verlie CCR 15, 2020). Much posthuman ESE/CCE falls within the sphere of new materialism and involves a focus on immersing learners in their embedded materiality and relational entanglement with the more-than-human (Clarke & Mcphie, 2020; Lynch & Mannion, 2021; Mannion, 2020; Mcphie & Clarke, 2015). The diverse approaches explored are the beginnings of a wave that is creatively pushing at the edges of current pedagogy and existing ESE/CCE practices. Posthumanist ideas significantly alter how UNESCO’s (2017) competencies are understood. We draw on Sterling (2009) to posthumanise the systems thinking competency: ‘Systems thinking can be used as a methodology for anti-ecological, as well as ecological, ends’ (p. 78). Ecological thinking, however, is a fundamentally different way of perceiving the world, a worldview, an ontology. Ecological thinking actively resists instrumental rationality, objectivism, and dualism, and extends our boundaries of concern (Sterling, 2009). Posthuman systems thinking would go even further in terms of inclusiveness of the more-than-human and different ways of knowing. Normative competency involving ‘reflection on the norms and values that underlie one’s actions’ and the Self-awareness competency involving reflection on ‘one’s own role in the local community and (global) society’ (UNESCO, 2017, p. 10) would be interpreted radically differently if posthumanised. Indeed, how different would the Collaborative competency, involving ‘the abilities to learn from others; to understand and respect the needs, perspectives and actions of others; to understand, relate to and be sensitive to others’ (ibid.), be if posthumanised, where ‘others’ includes the more-than-human, entire ecosystems? Posthumanising UNESCO’s key competencies entails making more porous their boundaries and therefore the boundaries of their associated educational approaches, methods and ways of thinking and learning alongside, through and with the more-than-human.

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