Confronting Reality: Climate Change and Opportunities for Educational Research

• In Event: 31.027 - The Failure to Act: Climate Change Injustice, Denial, and Education

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a dominant global challenge (IPCC, 2013). Despite the growth of literatures in other fields of study, a dearth of climate change research exists in the broader field of educational studies (USNRC, 2011). This paper addresses this lacuna by reviewing the state of knowledge on the human dimensions of climate change as it relates to potential educational research and praxis. The review identifies places in the broader climate literature for educational researchers to engage across a broad array of research contexts.

The paper begins by reviewing relevant natural science findings that warrant claims of anthropocentric global climate change. The emergent climate trend is situated within the larger fields of geoscience and anthropology to provide a historical trajectory. The purpose is twofold. First, educational researchers are often unaware of the fundamental geoscience concepts that underpin climate science, and second, explicating these ideas for an educational audience helps explain how humans are connected to, and implicated in, larger climate dynamics. Such anthropological connections are sociocultural with material implications, thus requiring study into how education relates to the specific nature of these coupled human-environment interactions. For example, energy consumption is a fundamental driver of complex society, resulting in deleterious climate conditions (Tainter, 1990; Tainter & Patzek, 2012), yet energy education remains in its infancy and is both under-examined and frequently absent from formal and informal curricula (Henderson & Duggan-Haas, 2014).

The paper reviews an emerging literature on public understanding and acceptance of climate change science (e.g., Leiserowitz et al, 2014), how scientific evidence interacts with political and cultural affinities (e.g., McCright & Dunlap, 2011), and subsequent challenges for educationalists interested in studying teaching and learning dynamics relative to climate science (e.g., Wibeck, 2014). Given that the causes, impacts, and understandings of climate change are geographically and institutionally uneven, such an approach is necessarily connected to the larger social and environmental justice literature (e.g., Carmin & Agyeman, 2011).

The paper finally pivots away from the general climate change literature and toward broader engagement with educational research. Because educational research has barely addressed the issue, only a small number of initial studies are reviewed and implications for future research and practice are developed. Subfields of educational research are addressed, including: higher education, educational policy, curriculum studies, indigenous education, social justice education, learning theory, informal education, and school architecture and design, among others. Recommendations for inquiry are then developed after reviewing the state of these subfields and their relationships to climate change.

Given the paucity of educational research and the lack of institutional uptake within AERA (the 2014 conference held one session on climate change), this review paper ultimately argues that the educational research community risks self-imposed irrelevance due to its ambivalence toward what is arguably one of the greatest issues currently facing humanity. Therefore, the overall goal of this paper is to address this oversight by reviewing the current state of the art in climate change education research with the goal of beginning to address the injustice of this omission.

Authors

• Joseph A. Henderson, University of Delaware

• Constance L. Russell, Lakehead University