Students, smoke, sparks, and mushrooms: tensions within sustainability teaching

This chapter presents examples of students’ experiences with teaching that focuses on learning about sustainability, nature, and environmental-related topics during a project-based theme week in a Danish public school. Responding to the call for studies that include participatory and processual dimensions (see Environmental and Sustainability Education scholars, e.g., Læssøe, Simovska, Barret, & Barret Hacking, 2008), this chapter foregrounds students’ encounters and en-gagement within sustainability teaching, inspired by relational approaches to knowledge (Ingold, 2007, 2011). The chapter unfolds a mapping of intensified moments (MacLure, 2013; 2024) and demonstrates how a methodological responsiveness focusing on the students’ literal, affective, and epistemic movements can display nuances for understanding how the students navigate, negotiate, and sometimes subvert the tensions and ambiguities within ESE teaching. The chapter sug-gests that revisiting these intensities can provide an entry point for imagining alternative directions and offer new perspectives on future ESE research.