From ontological reorientation to pedagogical specification: more-than-human pedagogy in ecologically precarious times

Environmental education (EE) has increasingly turned to posthuman and more-than-human thought to confront ecological crisis, yet ontological innovation has consistently outpaced pedagogical specification. This conceptual essay diagnoses that field-wide gap and proposes a constructive response. It uses Scott Jukes’s Learning to Confront Ecological Precarity (2023) as its principal case—not as an object of review but as the most sustained attempt to translate more-than-human theory into outdoor environmental education (OEE) practice. Through three analytical lenses—pedagogical specification, researchability, and transferability—the essay argues that such work offers generative heuristics but seldom the scaffolds, mediating sequences, and criteria of judgment that allow practices to travel, accumulate, and be critiqued. It then advances three pathways toward specification: a scaffolded inquiry routine, a transferable material-tracing design, and orienting criteria for educational judgment that preserve emergence while making quality discussable.