ABSTRACT

Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice shows educators how climate change can be taught from any disciplinary perspective and in a transdisciplinary way, drawing on examples from the author's own classroom.

The book sets out a radical vision for climate pedagogy, introducing an innovative framework in which the scientific essentials of climate change are scaffolded via three transdisciplinary meta-concepts: Balance/Imbalance, Critical Thresholds and Complex Interconnections. Author Vandana Singh grounds this theory in practice, drawing on examples from her own classroom to provide implementable ideas for educators, and to demonstrate how climate change can be taught from any disciplinary perspective in a transdisciplinary way. The book also explores the barriers to effective climate education at a macro level, focusing on issues such as climate misinformation/misconception, the exclusion of social and ethical concerns and a focus on technofixes. Singh uses this information to identify four key dimensions for an effective climate pedagogy, in which issues of justice are central: scientific-technological, the transdisciplinary, the epistemological and the psychosocial. This approach is broad and flexible enough to be adapted to different classrooms and contexts.

Bridging the social and natural sciences, this book will be an essential resource for all climate change educators practicing in both formal and informal settings, as well as for community climate activists.

chapter 1|14 pages

Introduction

The Climate as Teacher

chapter 3|15 pages

Science, But Not Just Science

Whys and Wherefores of a Transdisciplinary Approach

chapter 4|29 pages

Science and More than Science

Three Transdisciplinary Meta-Concepts

chapter 5|25 pages

The Power of Stories

Foregrounding Justice in the (Science) Classroom

chapter 6|29 pages

On Thin Ice

Applying the Framework to the Cryosphere

chapter 8|20 pages

Insights from Other Educators

Reimagining Formal Spaces

chapter 9|20 pages

Insights from Other Educators

Climate Education Outside the Walls

chapter 10|24 pages

Reflection-Diffraction

Endings and Beginnings