Wicked from the Start: Educational Impediments to Teaching about Climate Change (and How Geography Education Can Help)

Abstract

Climate change is a wicked problem, defying simple resolution. Education in various forms and at various levels has sought to improve understanding and stimulate climate change action in young people. There exists, however, a certain wickedness in education systems as well that makes climate change education difficult to enact successfully. These include an unsupportive education environment where academic standards related to climate change are missing, the lack of an inquiry-based pedagogy that can be well-suited to investigating topics like climate change with no easy answers, and ill-prepared teachers who do not fully know both the physical science and social aspects of the topic. A review of education standards in the United States and the literature on the latter two issues is used to make the argument that it is the geography classroom that can serve as the best unifying space that is most supportive of holistic and meaningful climate change education. This future is possible should we be successful in amending standards, pedagogy, and teacher preparation.

The Anthropocene and the sustainable development goals: key elements in geography higher education?

“…Geography is an ideal discipline to address issues related to the Anthropocene and the planetary boundaries and tipping points derived from them, because it has traditionally been characterized by its holistic approach (Pitman, 2005; Meadows, 2020) and its capacity for synthesis (Demerit, 2009; Maude, 2022). Both aspects can be added to the long tradition of geography in the study and teaching of human–environment or society–nature relations (Maude, 2022; Mitchell, 2022), which has caused some authors to consider it the science of sustainability (Žalėnienė and Pereira, 2021; Olcina Cantos, 2022). This binomial needs to be updated because of the important and rapidly changing earth system, which marks the future of the discipline (Haubrich, 2007; Dryzek, 2016).…”