Environmental education research recognises teachers’ central role but rarely examines how their ideological orientations and relationships with nature shape learning in practice. This study investigates how teachers in Yogyakarta’s nature-based schools (sekolah alam) construct and enact environmental education as a relational and ideological process. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, data were collected through interviews and focus group discussions with 18 teachers across three schools. Guided by critical pedagogy and eco-existentialism, the analysis reveals an interdependent process. Teachers construct environmental education by fostering ecological selfhood through embodied and place-based encounters and by using environmental issues as dialogic entry points for critical reflection on human–nature relations and socio-economic contradictions. They enact this through everyday practice, where ecological responsibility is sustained through routinised moral–affective practices such as gratitude and care. The study demonstrates that environmental education emerges through the integration of relational identity, critical reflection, and affective practice, conceptualised as critical eco-existential pedagogy.
P et al. (Mon,) studied this question.