Discussions about sustainability are unfolding against the backdrop of increasingly alarming climate data. Recent observations indicate that global temperatures in the first quarter of 2025 were the second warmest on record (Hausfather, 2025). While such data suggest an urgent need for a unified response, phantasmagorical political rhetoric - such as the continued echo of “drill, baby, drill” (Trump, 2025) - highlights that sustainability discourse remains deeply divided. Education has long been identified as a key strategy for addressing the climate crisis; however, it has so far failed to provide a clear pathway out of it (Heggen et al., 2022). For educational systems to meaningfully respond, the focus needs to shift from the accumulation of competencies toward the cultivation of mindsets oriented toward transformation and change (Broo, 2022; Lees, 2021; Rimanoczy, 2020).

In sustainability education, emphasizing mindset rather than competencies connects personal beliefs with collective responsibility by integrating cognition, values, and emotions in ways that guide action (Kassel et al., 2018; Rimanoczy, 2020). The concept of a sustainability mindset (SM) has been introduced to encompass both external dimensions (knowledge, systems thinking, skills) and internal dimensions (values, purpose, reflection) (Rimanoczy, 2020). However, existing SM models remain largely anthropocentric. They privilege human introspection and agency, while the more-than-human world is positioned primarily as context, resource, or moral obligation. This framing risks reproducing the very human exceptionalism that underlies unsustainable practices. Consequently, sustainability education requires a reconceptualization of mindset that foregrounds relationality, plurality, and nonhuman agency.

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) offers a promising theoretical pathway for such a reconceptualization. OOO advances a flat ontology in which all entities - human and more-than-human- exist on equal ontological footing, while retaining a degree of withdrawal beyond full human comprehension (Morton, 2016). When applied to sustainability education, OOO reorients SM toward humility, attentiveness, and ethical openness to more-than-human beings, expanding its ecological and moral dimensions beyond human-centred reasoning.

Against this theoretical backdrop, the central research question guiding this study is:

How can applied drama-based methods support the development of a sustainability mindset among primary school students by enabling engagement with complex, uncomfortable, and more-than-human sustainability issues?

The study pursues four interrelated aims:

1.  to redefine sustainability mindset through the lens of OOO, moving beyond anthropocentric assumptions;

2.  to introduce and integrate three pedagogical approaches—Critical Pedagogy (CP), Dark Pedagogy (DP), and Applied Drama-Based Pedagogy (ADBP)—as pathways for cultivating such a mindset;

3.  to develop a didactical model that supports the introduction of a redefined SM in primary education through drama-based practices; and

4.  to explore adapted forum theatre as a concrete pedagogical pathway for SM development in primary school contexts.

Each pedagogical strand contributes distinctly to the proposed framework. CP provides a transformative orientation, offering conceptual tools to interrogate oppression, power, and unsustainability (Freire et al., 2014). DP functions as an affective lens that legitimizes discomfort, grief, and uncertainty as integral dimensions of sustainability learning (Head, 2016; Author et al., 2019). ADBP serves as a methodological and pedagogical vehicle, enabling embodied, participatory, and collective engagement with sustainability dilemmas (Nicholson, 2005; Österlind & Hallgren, 2025; Sinha & Schmitz, 2024). Together, these approaches create conditions for cultivating an OOO-informed sustainability mindset that is simultaneously critical, affective, and experiential.

Building on this framework, a didactical model inspired by forum theatre is developed and adapted for primary education. The model introduces a three-dramatic-mode system that supports teachers in engaging students with complex sustainability issues through drama-based classroom interventions. These interventions are implemented and examined to explore how theatre-based practices may contribute to the development of a sustainability mindset among primary school students.

The study is approaching the empirical stage. The study intends to employ qualitative instrumental case study design and follows the following design steps: 1. Based on the theoretical framework and the didactical model, three lesson plans (interventions) are developed, corresponding to the three stages of integrating forum theatre into primary education. 2. The interventions are evaluated by an expert group consisting of teachers, psychologists, and special education teachers (this is particularly important as the lesson content addresses complex and potentially discomforting topics). 3. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with the teachers participating in the study in order to explore their experiences of teaching sustainability-related topics. 4. Training sessions are provided for the participating teachers, during which the three-stage forum theatre method adapted for primary education is introduced; teachers are familiarized with the principles underlying the method as well as with the lesson plans corresponding to the three stages of the method. 5. Classroom observations are carried out to examine how teachers implement the intervention in practice. 6. Follow-up semi-structured interviews are conducted with the teachers to explore their experiences of using the intervention. 7. A qualitative thematic analysis is conducted, analyzing interview data, observation protocols, and artefacts from the intervention lessons (e.g., students’ work, drawings, and other materials). 8. The intervention lesson plans and the didactical model are refined based on the insights gained.

Expected outcomes are deep insights into the development of sustainability mindset in primary school classrooms and how theatre practicess assists in revealing the complexity, discomfort and challenges of sustainbaility

Bogost, I. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing. University of Minnesota Press. Broo, D. G. (2022). Transdisciplinarity and three mindsets for sustainability in the age of cyber-physical systems [Article]. Journal of Industrial Information Integration, 27, 100290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jii.2021.100290 Dawson, K., & Lee, B. K. (2018). Drama-based Pedagogy. Intellect Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv36xw0wt Elwood, J., Andreotti, V., & Stein, S. (2019). Towards braiding. In Musagetes (pp. 13–21). Freire, P., Bergman Ramos, M., & Ramos, M. B. (2014). Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition (3rd ed.) [Book]. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Zero Books. Head, L. (2016). Hope and grief in the anthropocene : re-conceptualising human-nature relation. Routledge. Heras, M., & Tàbara, J. D. (2014). Let’s play transformations! Performative methods for sustainability. Sustainability Science, 9(3), 379–398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0245-9 Horsthemke, K. (2020). Non‐Human Animals and Educational Policy: Philosophical Post‐humanism, Critical Pedagogy, and Ecopedagogy1. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 54(4), 900–915. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12463 jagodzinski, jan. (2022). Cosmology and the Anthropocene: Speculative-Educative-Artistic Practices for a Planetary Consciousness. In Pedagogy in the Anthropocene (pp. 147–174). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90980-2_8 Kanpol, B. (1999). Critical Pedagogy (2nd ed.). Praeger. Kassel, K., Rimanoczy, I., & Mitchell, S. F. (2018). A sustainability mindset model for management education. In Developing a Sustainability Mindset in Management Education (pp. 3–37). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351063340-1 Lysgaard, J. A., & Bengtsson, S. (2020). Dark pedagogy – speculative realism and environmental and sustainability education. Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10), 1453–1465. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1739230 Lysgaard, J. A., Bengtsson, S., & Laugesen, M. H.-L. (2019). Dark Pedagogy. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3 Malone, K., & Young, T. (2023). Retheorising environmental sustainability education for the Anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(11), 1200–1204. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2152327 Misiaszek, G. W. (2023). Ecopedagogy: Freirean teaching to disrupt socio-environmental injustices, anthropocentric dominance, and unsustainability of the Anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(11), 1253–1267. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2130044 Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects : Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2016). Dark ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence . Columbia University Press. Zembylas, M. (2013). Critical pedagogy and emotion: working through ‘troubled knowledge’ in posttraumatic contexts. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2012.743468 Zembylas, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: the tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and Education, 10(2), 163–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2015.1039274