CLIMATE ACTION IN SCIENCE CURRICULA

Abstract

BACKGROUND

The United Nations has had the environmental damage being done by humans, i.e. ‘the problems of the human environment’, on its agenda since the late 1960’s (UN, 1969). Recent commentary from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change positions transformative education as the means to raise awareness of the scale of the issue, to empower people to engage in social justice climate action, and to find solutions to the challenges of climate change.

Multidisciplinary curricula as educational interventions not only afford ways for researcher-teachers across diverse disciplines to work together with students to effect change (Sommier et al., 2022) but multidisciplinary teaching allows for the social justice agenda to be co-taught with science to students across sciences and humanities. Sustainability Majors are offered at a number of institutions (e.g. University of Tasmania, University of Sydney, University of Newcastle). These degrees and majors implicitly or explicitly champion multi-disciplinarity.

Effective means to knowledge-share across multiple disciplines i.e. between researcher-teachers with disciplinary specialisations and between students who are just beginning to specialise is of paramount importance as curricula spanning the sciences and the humanities may lead to conceptual confusion on the part of the students (Briguglio & Moncada, 2019).

DISCUSSION

Are science researcher-educators already including multidisciplinary approaches in their science teaching? If so, what does this look like for students (see Abbonizio & Ho, 2020); if not, how to build researcher-teacher capacity to transform education by including the social justice agenda in the face of climate change and so build climate resilient communities in our institution of higher education (Leal Filho & Hemstock, 2019)?