Is it time to start thinking about reframing climate change education? Teaching pupils about climate change and sustainability is problematic. Simply confronting them directly with the facts can be both disturbing and unsettling but trying to conceal or ignore the dangers that lie ahead is neither desirable nor practical. We need to be truthful about the science of global warming and what it might mean in the years to come without provoking eco-anxiety. Finding a way to be both honest and hopeful is a delicate balancing act. And as Nicola Walshe reports in an earlier blog post, many secondary school pupils are responding to climate change with expressions of fear and hopelessness.

Climate change raises complex psychological issues (Klein, 2015). Throughout recorded history, human beings have proved remarkably adept at ignoring things they do not want to acknowledge. Climate change falls into this category and is particularly challenging because it involves multiple interconnections and complex feedback loops. It also threatens our way of life and seems overwhelming. This leaves people of all ages – children and adults alike – feeling powerless and frustrated. Grief, guilt and anxiety are common responses.

‘Climate change … is particularly challenging because it involves multiple interconnections and complex feedback loops. It also threatens our way of life and seems overwhelming.’

Wonder, compassion and humility

We need a different starting point. Engaging with the world in a spirit of wonder, compassion and humility – as advocated by Kumar and Howarth (2022), Khovacs (2024) and others – opens up, rather than closes down, possibilities. This approach extends the notion of biophilia which was popularised by E. O. Wilson (1986) to describe the innate tendency humans have to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. It also builds on the way that Indigenous people see themselves as belonging to the environment and invest it with meaning.

People understand who they are and their place in the world in a variety of ways. We are all positioned geographically and historically and the ‘cultural lens’ that we bring to new situations is heavily influenced by the ideas which make up our worldview. These beliefs and assumptions guide our behaviour but are often so deeply embedded that we are unaware of them; bringing them to the surface is one of the tasks of education (Scoffham & Rawlinson, 2022).

Reframing climate change education

From an educational point of view, recognising that we naturally want to care for the things that we love has the potential to radically reframe how we think about climate change. This is an essentially hopeful stance and a valuable counterpart to the doom and despair that derives from a narrow reading of our current circumstances. And it turns climate change and sustainability education from a fearful encounter with unpalatable truths, into a learning process which centres on self-understanding and social and cultural narratives.

Teachers in the UK and many other jurisdictions have little if any formal training in climate change education which raises difficult questions about sequencing, progression, pedagogy and curriculum organisation (Greer at al., 2023). It also challenges us to consider our relationship with nature and acknowledge different ways of knowing and understanding. When examined in detail, mitigation and adaptation responses – which are all too often seen as ‘solutions’ to climate change – are actually rather forlorn prospects. And if we simply present pupils with climate change facts, there is a danger they will come to see environmental action as a desperate and unequal race against time.

‘The prospects for the future may look increasingly bleak; yet without hope, vision and imagination, education is fatally flawed.’

The prospects for the future may look increasingly bleak; yet without hope, vision and imagination, education is fatally flawed. One response has been for educators to focus on the natural world and on small-scale initiatives which engage children in positive action, especially in the immediate environment. While these examples are undoubtedly inspiring and enable those involved to feel that they can have an impact, it is clear from the evermore pressing evidence of environmental breakdown and the way that pupils are responding to it, that there is a need for different approaches.

References

Greer, K., Sheldrake, R., Rushton, E., Kitson, A., Hargreaves, E., & Walshe, N. (2023). Teaching climate change and sustainability: A survey of teachers in England, University College London.

Khovacs, I. (2024). A fragile education in a good world. In A. Bainbridge and N. Kemp (Eds.). A good education in a fragile world. Routledge.

Klein, N. (2015). This changes everything. Penguin.

Kumar, S., & Howarth, L. (2022). Regenerative learning, Global Resilience Publishing.

Scoffham, S., & Rawlinson, S. (2022). Sustainability education: A classroom guide, Bloomsbury Academic.

Wilson, E. O. (1986). Biophilia, Harvard University Press.