Collaboration and care in climate education: Brave responses to an uncertain future

Abstract

An effective educational response to the climate emergency requires disrupting existing ideas about universities' roles, curriculum design and the relationship between educators, students and communities. This study examines an approach to curriculum development taken by academics at The Open University, UK whilst developing the postgraduate short course ‘Teacher development: Addressing the climate emergency’. We sought to challenge hierarchical models of knowledge transfer by working in collaboration with disciplinary experts, grassroots leaders, and young climate activists and foregrounding online and local grassroots practices, students' civic participation, citizen science and intergenerational dialogues. We report on our collaborative autoethnographic study, which we conducted with respect to the course development. This collaborative ethnographic approach has allowed us to externalise and acknowledge the ways in which approaches of collaboration and care have underpinned our course production process, as well as being essential to the ways in which we enable our students to support their own learners. This paper aims to raise awareness of the significance of embracing uncertainty and adopting pedagogies of care and adds to the literature that employs Noddings' Framework of Moral Education to critically examine pedagogical practice. The insights gained will be useful for educators seeking to develop climate‐related curricula and the collaborative approach taken will be of interest to those developing new curricula in teacher education.