This article examines how an ecological approach to education can enable student-led practices that strengthen school connectedness. This qualitative case study illustrates how school connectedness and student agency can be realised when educational practice is ecologically embedded within community systems. School connectedness is rooted in shared responsibility, empathy, and real-world engagement. Data from five semi-structured interviews were analysed, revealing how students in one Canadian school took the initiative to prevent the closure of a local aged care home. By orchestrating fundraising events, forging relationships with community businesses, and offering direct support to vulnerable residents, students demonstrated the transformative impact of their engagement on community well-being. These findings highlight how school connectedness flourishes when anchored in an ecological framework that transcends traditional school boundaries. The case develops ‘eco-community connectedness’ as a conceptual proposition for understanding connectedness as a dynamic, participatory and multi-level practice. The article concludes with a practical tool, an ‘Eco-Community Connectedness Framework’ that supports educators to consider how teaching practices, relationships and institutional conditions can enable student agency and connectedness across school-community ecologies.

Tillage and stubble management are key drivers of soil health, crop productivity, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet long-term spatially explicit data on these practices remain scarce. Using data from two Australian national soil monitoring programs Soil Carbon Research Project (SCaRP) and Soil Organic Carbon Monitoring (SOC-M) we analyzed over two decades (2001–2023) of tillage and stubble management records collated across 300 Australian farmer paddock scale datasets. We developed machine learning models based on random forest to predict spatial and temporal trends in these practices, incorporating crop type, soil classification, climate variables, and spatial coordinates as predictors. Our models were benchmarked against multinomial logistic regression and a nearest-neighbour baseline, demonstrating that random forest consistently achieved higher accuracy, particularly for dominant practices such as no-tillage and stubble grazing. Variable importance analyses identified “Year” as the most influential predictors, capturing widespread no-tillage adoption post-2010, while latitude and crop type further explained regional variations. Partial dependence plots revealed sharp inflection points in adoption trajectories around 2010, coinciding with major policy and technological shifts. We applied the models to generate gridded predictions (0.5° resolution) across the Australian cropping zone, providing insights into the evolving distribution of tillage and stubble practices. These spatial products not only improve GHG accounting frameworks and Earth system models but also offer actionable intelligence for soil health policy and targeted extension programs. Our approach demonstrates how combining ground-based monitoring with machine learning can fill critical data gaps and provide a scalable framework for agricultural management assessment and climate mitigation strategies.

This chapter theorises the semiotic, ideological, and discursive roles played by costuming in Gothic and horror narratives across transmedia platforms. Drawing upon critical frameworks including theories of monstrosity, abjection, and cultural semiotics, it examines how costume operates not just as a visual signifier but as an ideological tool for constructing and problematising notions of identity, otherness, and cultural anxiety. The analysis is structured around four thematic discussions: the aesthetics and semiotics of Gothic and horror costuming, which outlines how costumes encode and externalise psychological and societal fears through visual symbolism; monstrosity and gender, analysing the ideological implications of costuming as a means of demarcating deviance, gender fluidity, and the instability of cultural norms; the undead and aesthetics of decay, exploring how costuming represents social critique through depictions of decay, disruption, and everyday horror; and finally, the transmedia circulation of monstrous costuming, investigating how costumes function beyond narrative contexts as dynamic, evolving cultural artefacts through practices such as cosplay, fan appropriations, “monstrous” dolls including Barbie, and high-fashion reinterpretations. This chapter positions Gothic and horror costuming as fluid signifiers that continually adapt to shifting socio-cultural discourses, reflecting broader processes of identity formation, and collective anxieties within popular and media culture.