From Eco-Anxiety to Eco-Resilience: Relational, Socio-Cultural and Intergenerational Pathways in Early Childhood Sustainability Education by Dr. Dr Janbee Mopidevi, ITRAC Global, UK

We live in a polycrisis: interconnected crises that together deepen uncertainty and vulnerability (World Economic Forum, 2023). Young children encounter environmental change through media, lived experience and school. Pollution, animal suffering and biodiversity loss can evoke sadness, worry and fear in them (Hickman et al., 2021). How these emotions might become starting points for eco-resilience is a key question for Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE).

Environmental education has largely emphasised knowledge, attitudes and individual behaviour (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). Eco-anxiety research, by contrast, calls for spaces that support emotional meaning-making, constructive hope and participation (Pihkala, 2020; Chawla, 2020). This completed pilot by ITRAC Global, a UK-based independent consultancy, therefore treats eco-anxiety as a situated response rather than an individual pathology. It treats eco-resilience as a relational capacity shaped by connections with people, the more-than-human world and wider socio-ecological systems.

The Pilot

The pilot ran over the 2025–2026 academic year. It involved parents and educators of children aged 5–8 in Dutch primary schools, with four Windesheim Honours College undergraduates acting as facilitators. It was informed by the Relational Co-Creation Framework (Mopidevi, 2025) and used ITRAC Global’s eco-story Beatrix Bee and the Wildflower Transformation as a narrative catalyst.

The story is set in the Netherlands, where monocropping and heavy fertiliser use drive biodiversity loss and harm pollinators. It combines fact-based accounts with fictional human and more-than-human characters who give nature a voice. The story echoes Tagore’s (1913) vision of humanity in harmony with nature and supports critical systems thinking (Sterling, 2021).

The Conceptual Framework

The framework is grounded in relational epistemology, which holds that knowing arises through relationship rather than detached observation (Tagore, 1931; Krishnamurti, 1969). It also draws on socio-cultural and transformative theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Lave and Wenger, 1991). It has five interconnected, non-linear dimensions:

• Socio-cultural scaffolding: the contexts shaping children’s environmental concerns.
• Relational co-creation: children’s responses, adult mediation and jointly devised solutions, such as ways to protect bees and revive biodiversity.
• Disorienting dilemmas: encounters with ecological uncertainty and emotionally significant story moments that prompt perspective shifts.
• Competence pathways: understanding, systems thinking, responsibility, agency and action (Bianchi et al., 2022; Wiek et al., 2011).
• Governance support structures: the conditions that sustain relational approaches across homes, schools, teacher education and educational systems.

The project also links to GreenComp (Bianchi et al., 2022), notably the competences of embodying sustainability values, embracing complexity, envisioning sustainable futures and acting for sustainability. Children’s concern for bees and their suggestions for action offered preliminary insights into these areas. However, the competences were not measured, and no improvements are claimed.

Methodology

This qualitative, interpretative pilot drew on several sources:

• parent and educator surveys
• observations and story-related interactions
• children’s drawings
• a co-creation session with parents, educators and HE students

The surveys linked children’s distress to concrete encounters with pollution, animal suffering and emotionally charged media images. Reported responses included sadness, worry, fear and empathetic distress, and some children personified nature. Adults reported few strategies for supporting meaning-making, as well as inconsistencies between home and school. Familiar activities such as recycling or litter-picking rarely let children explore their concerns or link them to wider ecological relationships.

Three Pathways Towards Eco-Resilience

Relational. Children’s environmental emotions arise through relationships with families, educators, peers, communities and the more-than-human world (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Vygotsky, 1978). Several practices proved valuable: attentive listening, guided questions, visual prompts, pauses during storytelling and one-to-one conversations. Adults helped children interpret their experiences rather than simply informing them. Acknowledging children’s emotions rather than correcting them reflects an ethic of care (Noddings, 2013). It also reflects Krishnamurti’s (1953) view of education as understanding our relationships with people, nature and society.

Narrative. Parents and educators read the story aloud beforehand and brought their observations to the co-creation session. Key moments opened discussion of uncertainty, interdependence and collective care: Beatrix feeling scared, flowers “smelling funny”, a young bee not returning, and helpers arriving “with muddy boots and kind hearts”. Children drew the meadow (weide), bees and imagined helpers. These drawings suggested that visual and imaginative expression helps children engage with abstract ecological concepts. ITRAC Global therefore values eco-storytelling as a relational intervention rather than as information transfer, because of the dialogue and shared interpretation it enables.

Intergenerational. The co-creation session treated learning as participation in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Parents and educators shared knowledge of children’s everyday lives, while students supported reflection and systems mapping. One child remarked, “I can actually do something.” This does not demonstrate a sustained shift, but it may illustrate emerging agency. The approach values epistemic diversity: children’s questions can inform adult understanding. HE students can bridge research, practice and community, which positions universities as relational living labs.

Implications

Early childhood sustainability education should acknowledge children’s environmental emotions while linking them to ecological understanding, supportive relationships and participation. Children should neither face distress alone nor carry responsibility for systemic problems. Eco-storytelling and family–school–university partnerships merit further exploration.

Future research should track how eco-resilience develops over time, using developmentally appropriate indicators. These could include children’s ability to:

• express concerns

• recognise ecological relationships

• seek shared support

• imagine possible futures

• take age-appropriate action

The findings are preliminary and context-specific, not causal evidence.

Towards Relational Eco-Resilient Futures

The project was presented at the Copernicus Alliance Higher Education Summit in August 2026. Its central proposition is that children should not have to navigate environmental uncertainty alone. ITRAC Global welcomes partners to:

• pilot the framework over a semester or academic year

• run educator workshops

• embed student-led co-design in SDG-aligned curricula

• co-develop learning resources and micro-credentials

Project lead: Dr Janbee Mopidevi, Founder, ITRAC Global, UK, Collaboration enquiries: Janbee.itracglobal@gmail.com

References

Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U. and Cabrera Giraldez, M. (2022) GreenComp: The European sustainability competence framework. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979) The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chawla, L. (2020) ‘Childhood nature connection and constructive hope: A review of research on connecting with nature and coping with environmental loss’, People and Nature, 2(3), pp. 619-642.

Hickman, C. et al. (2021) ‘Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: A global survey’, The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), pp. e863-e873.

Kollmuss, A. and Agyeman, J. (2002) ‘Mind the gap: Why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior?’, Environmental Education Research, 8(3), pp. 239-260.

Krishnamurti, J. (1953) Education and the significance of life. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Krishnamurti, J. (1969) Freedom from the known. Edited by M. Lutyens. New York: Harper & Row.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mopidevi, J.S. (2025) ‘Co-creating sustainable futures: A hands-on HE workshop on empowering students as co-designers in ESD using the Relational Co-Creation Framework’. Bold Education in Scary Times: Shaping a Just, Safe and Regenerative Future, Higher Education Summit, 19-20 November 2025.

Noddings, N. (2013) Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education. 2nd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pihkala, P. (2020) ‘Anxiety and the ecological crisis: An analysis of eco-anxiety and climate anxiety’, Sustainability, 12(19), 7836.

Tagore, R. (1913) Sadhana: The realisation of life. London: Macmillan.

Tagore, R. (1931) The religion of man. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wiek, A., Withycombe, L. and Redman, C.L. (2011) ‘Key competencies in sustainability: A reference framework for academic program development’, Sustainability Science, 6(2), pp. 203-218.

World Economic Forum (2023) The Global Risks Report 2023. 18th edn. Geneva: World Economic Forum.

A central problem in schooling is not necessarily ineffective instruction or outdated grading practices, but a lack of attunement to students as learners and human beings (Murdoch et al., 2020). In many classrooms, students are asked to perform, comply, and produce evidence of learning within systems that remain largely unresponsive to their emotional experience, self-perceptions, lived experiences, and developmental need for agency (Immordino-Yang, 2015). As students move through school, their need for emotional connection, self-direction, and self-reliance increases, yet educational structures often become less responsive to those needs (Bandura, 1997; Ryan & Deci, 2020). The result is a persistent mismatch: schools grow highly attentive to outcomes while remaining insufficiently attuned to the individual producing them. In short, schooling requires not more empathy in disposition and culture, but more empathy in pedagogical design.

Empathy, often underestimated as a design principle, offers a coherent response to these gaps across the full spectrum of the classroom experience. Empathy is not softness or diminished rigor; it is the deliberate effort to understand how students are experiencing learning: how they feel about a learning moment, what they believe about their own competence (efficacy), where they feel connected or alienated, and what conditions allow them to engage with candor and commitment. When teachers design learning experiences empathetically, instruction becomes more responsive, feedback becomes more relational and more responsive to the learner (Carless & Winstone, 2023; Hattie & Timperley, 2007), and curriculum becomes more meaningfully connected to who students are. Critically, empathy is not an interpersonal add-on to instruction; it should function as a guiding principle in the design of educational practice (Noddings, 2005, 2012).

In curriculum and instruction, empathetic design asks educators to consider not just what students will learn, but how they are likely to experience it. This means anticipating where students will feel connected or disoriented, confident or overwhelmed, and building instructional structures around those realities rather than dismissing them. It means designing sequences that honor emotional readiness alongside academic expectations and recognizing that students whose inner lives go unacknowledged in a learning environment consistently underperform relative to what the curriculum assumes they can do (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). Designing with an empathy lens is not remediation; it is proactive attunement.

In feedback, an empathy focus shifts the teacher’s orientation from evaluation alone to full relational response. Feedback designed with empathy attends to what students produced and how they felt about that moment, how they see themselves as a learner, and how supported they feel by the teacher. In other words, empathy in feedback can be both more precise and more likely to be acted upon because it feels more personal (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Noddings, 2012; Wisniewski et al., 2020). Students who receive feedback that resonates with their present emotions are more likely to act on that feedback (Yeager et al., 2014). Empathetic feedback is not encouragement without critique; it is critique that seeks to connect learning to the emotional responses it elicits.

Empathetic assessment design expands the evidentiary scope of assessment beyond academic performance to include four dimensions of student experience embedded within the assessment itself: self-evaluation (students’ judgments of their own performance relative to criteria), self-appraisal (affective reflection on confidence, uncertainty, or emotional state in the moment of performance), self-expression (content: structured opportunities to communicate thinking, questions, or perspective

that conventional formats leave uncaptured) and self-expression (personal: structured opportunities to share information about their lives). Rather than capturing only what students can do, empathy in assessment design better captures how students are emotionally experiencing a learning moment, making it possible for teachers to respond with greater precision, humanity, and accuracy (Immordino-Yang, 2015). Empathy, in this sense, is not an affective preference but a validity concern: without attunement to the learner’s experience, the evidence we collect from assessments risks misrepresenting what students know and can do. For a full treatment of the EAD framework, its theoretical grounding in social cognitive theory and equitable assessment research, and its classroom applications, see Reibel (2025).

Empathy, as a design principle, reorients pedagogy. When schooling is designed only around what students produce, it systematically undervalues who they are. Empathetic design does not soften that demand; it sharpens it by attending to the conditions under which learning becomes possible. Instruction that anticipates how students will experience content, feedback that speaks to who the learner is and not only what they did, and assessment that creates space for students to be known rather than merely measured are preconditions for durable learning.

The argument is not that schools should use empathy to make their culture feel warmer. It is that schools cannot produce the depth of learning they claim to pursue while remaining structurally indifferent to the emotional realities of the students inside them. Empathy in pedagogical design is, ultimately, a commitment to accuracy. Knowing what a student can do requires first understanding what it is like to be that student in the moment of learning.

RCEN NEWSLETTER 01/2025

In The Relational Dimension of the Teaching Profession, we follow four teachers who meet their students in a particularly evolving way. Deploying what is described as pedagogical tact and stance, the author has filmed teachers in order to observe how they create pedagogical meeting spaces wherein the teachers and students meet as people, thus developing an understanding of trustful, relational teaching in practice.

The relational dimension of the teaching profession is something that has hitherto played a hidden role in teacher education.

Nevertheless, well-functioning teacher-student relationships are a fundamental part of successful teaching. Including a multi-relational perspective on teaching and education (Pedagogical Relational Teachership, or, PeRT) as well as a taxonomy with an observation scheme for student teachers and researchers, this book is aimed at student teachers at undergraduate and advanced levels and is also suitable for teachers in practice. 

"Dr. Ljungblad’s new book is a significant contribution to the emerging field of relational pedagogy. Both her theorizing and her exquisite empirical work amply demonstrate what a possibility opens if we take relationships in education seriously. It is a must-read for all interested in the teaching profession and in education."

The overarching research question for this thesis is: In what way can student teachers' emotional experiences be considered a pedagogical phenomenon in teacher education? This overarching research question is explored through the following two sub-questions: • What characterizes student teachers' emotional experiences during their teacher education? • How can these experiences be taken care of in teacher education as a condition of possibility regarding the students´ Bildung process? The study's theoretical perspectives are mainly based on John Dewey's (1980; 1895) concept of experience and his understanding of emotions as a changeable, integrated, and necessary phase of every experience. In addition to this, the theoretical framework is phenomenologically informed, starting from Knud Ejler Løgstrup's (1956;1984; 1987;1996) concepts of omnipresence and attunement, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (2009) perspectives on intentionality, and in Dan Zahavi's (2003) perspectives on intersubjectivity. Furthermore, in Peter Goldie's (2000) understanding of the intentionality of emotions and finally in existential phenomenology with Søren Kierkegaard's (2014) and Paul Tillich's (2000) definitions of the term existential anxiety.