The accelerating changes affecting all life on the planet are not just challenging our conditions for living in a physical-bio-ecological sense but also challenging our conditions for knowing (Lysgaard & Jørgensen, 2020). Motivated by questions exploring our current conditions for developing new knowledge practices, this paper examine these through a research focus on a central tension within the Environmental and Sustainability Education research field: A tension between the need for ensuring social and societal transformation (Lehtonen et al. 2018; Vare & Scott 2007) and the emancipatory ideals emphasizing the importance of ensuring the necessary openness of educational processes (Læssøe 2020; Jickling, 2013; Jickling & Wals, 2008). This tension is explored based on an in-depth qualitative analysis of case examples situated in different Danish schools through a focus on students’ encounters and introduces an in-depth analysis of teaching ‘moments’ (MacLure 2013) addressing sustainability and nature related topics (Brückner forthcoming). With inspirations from new posthuman Bildung perspectives on curiosity (Clarke 2023; Swanson, 2020; Taylor, 2020), and different approaches to knowledge as relational (Ingold 2021), the paper discusses how critical perspectives on the students’ participatory possibilities and abilities during sustainability teaching can inform new insights on how these can contribute to a re-thinking of what future sustainability teaching and education entails (Brückner forthcoming).

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