Community gardening, watershed restoration, community forestry, and similar “civic ecology” practices represent the actions of urban residents who take it upon themselves to manage small plots of land for both social and ecological values. These practices, through enhancing biological diversity, landscape heterogeneity, ecosystem services, and social capital, and through integrating multiple types of knowledge and grassroots participation in resource management, may serve to foster resilience of desirable social-ecological systems. Such civic ecology practices also provide opportunities for youth participation, and thus to situate environmental learning in authentic stewardship practices that address both community and environmental goals. A positive feedback loop exists between the civic ecology practice and the environmental education programme, as when children learn about and express appreciation of the local knowledge of adult community gardeners, thus further encouraging the adults to become engaged in civic ecology practice in their community. In this introductory presentation to the resilience special session within the Learning in Society theme, we will present a short overview of the resilience framework and apply it to examples of environmental education situated within civic ecology practice in cities. We also will set the stage for the other talks in this session including a theoretical presentation focused on the ecology of environmental education (Tidball), an empirical presentation of social-ecological systems perspectives on environmental education in the Bronx (Kudryavtsev), a discussion of environmental education associated with community forestry in Korea (Lee), and an analysis of higher education and community forestry participatory research programs across the US (Ballard).