ABSTRACT
Pedagogy capable of teaching climate change will need to counter the issue’s dominant framings, which are shaped by the politics of science and educational expertise. Climate change does not result from a single cause, nor is it amenable to a one-dimensional fix, despite how common it is to hear simple explanations or dismissals of it. To be successful, pedagogies need to foster abilities to think ecologically and to discern how human agency is implicated in this “natural” disaster (Claus et al. 2015). After all, climate change is but one aspect of global change, which, although it has accelerated over the past 300 years, has a longer history throughout the Holocene (Kirch 2005). Global change involves other alterations such as land-use changes, changes in the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, biodiversity loss, stratospheric ozone depletion, global freshwater depletion, and atmospheric aerosol loading (Rockström et al. 2009). All these anthropogenic global changes and the potential ways to affect their course by definition lead back to human action. Thus, pedagogy is not a secondary activity confined to the classroom but an active verb that describes the way people can deal with the multiple social roots of climate change in order to meet its epochal challenges.
