ABSTRACT
In the face of political, emotional and practical challenges to teaching on climate change, this chapter offers a hopeful message for educators: teaching on climate change can be enhanced, focused and even transformed by attention to place. To make this argument, we bring together emergent literature on climate change education with the relatively more established pedagogic field of place-based education. The chapter presents insights from a research project conducted with secondary teachers and students in ethnically diverse contexts in Manchester, England, and Melbourne, Australia. Teachers’ reflections show the ways that they are using place to make sense of climate change, that is, to bring an abstract and potentially overwhelming topic to life in different contexts. As the dynamic lens of place draws different scales into focus, teachers’ reflections are organised into three sections: making sense locally, making sense globally and making sense relationally. Each section ends with a series of tried and tested pedagogic strategies. Throughout the chapter, we consider the ethical challenges of teaching with students who live in and have ties to places affected by climate change.
