Education has a key role in building and ensuring a safe world for mankind. Today it takes on a special importance because we have moved beyond the safe space of action for humanity. Scientists are issuing a red alert for Earth. In order to avoid the worst, we have a duty to take extraordinary emergency measures. A necessary step is a radical change in education. Its overriding goal must be to shape the attitude of a young person in the sense of unity with nature, capable of caring for other nonhuman beings. In this article, I present ten tips that should be an integral part of the educational process if we want to educate a generation of people who are aware, empathetic, and able to take effective action to resolve the climate and environmental crisis.

The article presents the results of a survey conducted among Polish language teachers (n = 120) on the methods, possibilities, and barriers to implementing environmental humanities in Polish schools. The analysis of the collected material shows that the surveyed Polish language teachers feel responsible for shaping the pro-climate attitudes of their students, and Polish language lessons can strengthen students’ agency in times of the climate crisis.

Zuzana Obertová presents the term climate fiction and points out its relationship to science fiction. She draws attention to the problem of reducing the idea of climate fiction to a type of genre literature. She gives examples of climate fiction by Polish and Slovak authors and presents ecocriticism as a research method for climate fiction as well as climate change literature in a broad sense. She sums up the state of ecocriticism in Poland and Slovakia.

The contemporary humanities are facing another crisis and need to take up a significant task – through education and critical reading of texts, the humanities have to clarify not only the understanding of such categories as anthropocene, capitalocene, and ecopoetics, or ecocriticism, but also create an active change in thinking and acting. The present article is an attempt at undertaking those challenges by reading into the above-mentioned threads in contemporary literature and trying to propose solutions that would make students sensitive to the content of nature. I discuss reading strategies and interpretation models that include such mechanism of reading literary texts in which ecologically engaged literature influences the perception and understanding of the world around us, thereby becoming literature participating in social processes.

This article describes some attempts at answering the challenges of the present in connection with the commonly perceived climate changes, unfavourable for the Earth’s environment, and the need to shape attitudes of responsibility for the quality of the common good. The author presents the possibilities of introducing various pro-ecological content in the academic programme of prospective Polish language teachers. First, she briefly discusses the theoretical bases of ecocriticism, then indicate some possible interpretations of selected literary texts during high-school classes, and present social projects aimed at promoting a change hitherto people’s lifestyles.

The paper discusses the possible reading of Bruno Schulz’s story called “Sierpień” [August] at school in the context of Leszek Onak’s e-text entitled “Cierniste diody” [Thorny diodes]. The author of the article suggests a need to introduce the latest literature to Polish language lessons. She shows the ways of taming the difficult text of Bruno Schulz and e-literature. The main idea of this interpretation is based on showing the difference visible when the two worlds presented in both narratives are juxtaposed (the garden, the character of Tłuja). In this way, it presents a relation between these two ways of telling about a man and his surroundings and also shows the relationship between man and nature.

In the era of climate humanistic education, one can notice many changes in the approach to nature, to thinking about nature and man. Urszula Zajączkowska – a contemporary Polish poet, biologist, and scientist – in her works, presents an innovative approach to the relationship between nature and man, as well as developing a new description of language. The analyzed volume of essays, Patyki i badyle [Sticks and stalks], is a literary description of observations of the life and death of plants, shoots and trees. Zajączkowska represents a reflective method of studying nature; she talks about the life of green plants with tenderness and emotion, calling them “creatures” with “bodies”. Anthropomorphization in the treatment of plants is characteristic of the poet’s entire work, thus constituting a kind of linguistic experiment. For Zajączkowska, plants are unique; they are characterized by simplicity and loneliness, and man is inscribed in their nature and should learn the humility of life from them.

Kordian Bakuła’s article deals with chosen problems of ecological humanities. Adolf Dygasiński’s short story has been regarded as a precursor of contemporary trends in the humanities due to the way in which it addresses issues which are alive and topical nowadays: natural cultivation of truth, sensual and direct cognition, coexistence and compassion with nature. According to Bakuła, they constitute the project of the natural secular humanities.

This article presents the potential for using the elements of ecocriticism and climate education in Polish language classes at primary schools. Using materials from the textbook and original ideas, the author presents practical didactic solutions, which make it possible to build environmental awareness among students. The literature and language lessons, together with the ecological project discussed in the article, focus on the reconstructing cross-curricular dialogue in school practice. The digital tools proposed by the author are in line with the eco-trend, which is more and more visible in education nowadays.

The paper discusses film education issues in the context of educating on climate. The authors focus on tracing the presence of the concepts of environmental humanities and ecocriticism in educa- tional materials by selecting two lesson projects related to films. In the first part of the paper, the authors give a broader perspective on the theoretical context; in the second and the third part, respectively, they comment on the lesson projects concerning Ága (the New Horizons of Film Education program) and The Biggest Little Farm (distributor’s proposition published on www.edukacjafilmowa.pl).

The word-formation components originating in the classical languages are both malleable and effective device of marking new facts resulting from rapidly occuring changes on the global scale. What seems to be a decisive factor here, are considerable requirements of contemporary language systems towards newly coined words, that relate to those words’ functionality and internationality. The newly formed words need to mirror the transient realities of life and meet the communicative needs of speakers who live in the reality characterised by fast civilisation changes. Both the word-building formants originating in Latin and those originating in Greek fulfill those requirements. Latin and Greek prefixoids, in addition to being highly productive, may be easily combined with word-building components of native and foreign origin. On the one hand, it is an advantageous situation from the viewpoint of a given language users, while on the other, the said situation creates a risk of abusing and exhausting the meaning of some words, which brings about the need to eventually replace them with others. The speakers who gradually broaden their lexicons by including the newly-formed words may, in the course of this process, utilise their preexisting knowledge and thusfar experience that on the conceptual level correspond to the usage of word-formation components originating in Latin and Greek. The author of the article has combined her linguistic knowledge pertaining to how prefixes and prefixoids originating in Latin and Greek function in the Czech language, with the research findings of language didactics. At the same time, the author indicates particular case where the English language influences the Czech language.

The paper presents the necessity of implementing ecolinguistic topics into L1 teaching. It takes Instagram posts of Czech, Polish and Slovak influencers as an example and shows that manipulation techniques overreach the boundaries of countries and languages. If we accept the thesis that manipulation is dominantly a non-ecological phenomenon, which threatens the life of wider ecosystems, the reaction of school is inevitable, especially because children and youth form a highly vulnerable group.

The article is aimed at providing the theoretical background for the foreign language (ESL) environmental education, which is sought in the early manifestations of the environmental movement, as well as presenting the main assumptions of ecological criticism as a benchmark for the educational practice whose major objective is to instil environmental awareness in students at the time of the climate crisis. The second part of the paper includes an analysis of environmental contents in Polish schoolbooks used in the ESL classroom at intermediate and advanced levels. The authors’ decisions regarding the presentation of ecological topics and climate change issues are then investigated in terms of its compliance with ecocritical claims and its support of activist and emancipatory attitudes. The analysis seeks to indicate the best methods and ways of pursuing critical environmental pedagogy which would be able to rise to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Ewa Półtorak’s aim in this article is to reflect on how to incorporate elements of ecological education into the foreign-language teaching / learning process, as implemented in the third level of the Polish education system. Półtorak focuses on methods used to develop communicative language competences at school, especially on the example of teaching / learning French as a second / subsequent foreign language.

In her article, Anita Račáková analyses how the Slovak State Educational Program for the 2nd level of primary schools incorporates topics related to climate, or, more precisely, to issues of the environment and its protection. Račáková enquires whether these topical issues have been addressed in the Program, in which educational areas and subjects they are handled, and in what form and to what extent. Her analysis shows that ecological and climatic topics have a dual status in programs for the 2nd level of primary schools. They are part of compulsory extracurricular education in the areas of Man and Nature, Man and Society, and the optional cross-sectional subject Ecological Education. These topics are also incorporated into the educational areas of Man and Values, Language and Communication, where they are used as a tool for developing the personality of students.

The interview with Jolanta Wadowska-Król concerns the problem of lead poisoning, which occurred amongst children from Szopienice, a district of Katowice, in the 1970s. This occupational disease mainly affected industrial workers who were exposed to this element in hazardous concentration. However, what is unique about the events that took place in Szopienice was that also children were afflicted by lead poisoning in droves. It resulted from the fact that their living environment had been contaminated by particulate matter coming from the nearby steelworks. In the conversation with Doctor Wadowska-Król, the lead poisoning is considered in the context of climate change in Upper Silesia, in particular the air pollution caused by the region’s heavy industry. The past events are used to discuss such issues as manual work, ecofeminism, the Silesian matriarchy, and environmental injustice.

The subject of reflection in the article is the reception of classical literature at school. In order to investigate it, the author conducted an anonymous survey in primary and secondary schools in Gdańsk, Wejherowo and Wiślinka. The collected material contradicts the stereotypical belief that young people associate the discourse of the past only with backwardness and limitation. It turns out that they perceive the coexistence of the past with the present and are far from monopolizing their reading with literature embedded solely in the current socio-cultural situation. In this context, the author presents publications that enliven the reading experience and are a counterweight to conventional lesson content, often reducing masterpieces of the past to obvious theses and top-down issues.

The article deals with the topic of teaching Polish as a foreign language to Slovenes. The aim is to present the impact of the negative transfer on learning Polish by Slovenes and to discuss the errors they make due to interference. The material was excerpted from the written works of MA students of Polish Studies in Ljubljana. Negative transfer occurs at all levels of language education, also among students who are fluent in Polish. The article also presents effective strategies for working with Slovenes to eliminate negative transfer errors, i.e. a departure from a communication strategy in favour of a contrastive approach, translation tasks and exercises based on the technique of language drill.