In a time of declined interest and concern for sustainability issues in the public sphere, this paper addresses two challenges in the field of environmental and sustainability education research. First, the risk of blurring education with activism when engaging children and young people to actively participate in democratic transitions towards more sustainable ways of living and coexisting is discussed (Wildemeersch et al. 2023). Second, the paper discusses the observation that the concept of sustainability issues seems to lack a concrete experiential reference point in the world, making such issues difficult to verify through intersubjective experience. Do we experience the same thing when faced with a sustainability issue, and do we have the same material and affective attachments? Drawing on Bonnie Honig's (2017) concept of ‘public things’, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) concept of ‘matters of care’, the purpose of the paper is to explore the pedagogical task of calling a concerned public into being in response to a sustainability issue (Marres 2012), while being attentive to the inherent critical and transformative potential of education. Methodologically, the paper is developed as a philosophical argument in three parts. In the first, I critically engage with the concept of 'wicked problems' and the idea that sustainability issues are complex, abstract and overwhelming and that environmental and sustainability education therefore needs to take into account conflicting values, diverse stakeholders, contradictory solutions and long-term approaches (Sharp et al. 2021). In the second, I turn to Honig's (2017) work to show how sustainability issues are entangled in different and sometimes contradictory affective, material and social attachments to concrete 'public things'. I then propose a way of unfolding sustainability issues in education by attending to the concreteness and worldliness of ’public things’ and how such pedagogical unfolding involves a transition from abstract ’wicked problems’ to concrete ’matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), from bewilderment and confusion to renewed insights and attachments. The paper concludes with an exploration of the pedagogical possibilities of remaining in a mode of ’educational transitions’ within environmental and sustainability education, drawing on an example from classroom practice in Sweden. Here the classroom is analyzed as a fragile and sophisticated ’work-net’ (Felski 2020) where children and young people come together in consensus and dissent via the mediation of ’public things’, while being collectively supported by the affective atmosphere of the room/educational environment for critical transformative moments to happen.

Felski, R. 2020. Hooked. Art and Attunement. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Honig, B. 2017. Public things: democracy in disrepair (1st edition.) New York: Fordham University Press. Marres, N. 2012. Material participation: technology, the environment and everyday publics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marres, N. 2005. No Issue, No Public. Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of Politics. PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sharp, E. L., Fagan J., Kah, M., McEntee, M., Salmond, J. 2021. Hopeful approaches to teaching and learning environmental “wicked problems”. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 45(4), 621-639. Vlieghe J., Zamojski P. 2022. Teacherly Gestures as an Ontological Dimension of Politics: On the Need of Commonising in an Age of Pervasive Privatization. Revista de Educación 395 January-March 2022, 109-128. Wildemeersch, D., Håkansson, M, Læssøe, J. 2023. No time to waste? Dealing with ‘urgency’ in environmental and sustainability education. Environmental Education Research, 1-13.