Teaching About Issues of Climate Change in Mathematics Classrooms: Empowerment of Critical Citizenship

• In Event: 15.048 - Is Another Mathematics Possible? Mathematics and the Living World

Abstract

Considering mathematics role in understanding and responding to climate change, learning mathematics can empower citizens to understand and to reflect critically about mathematics based information about climate change. Yet, incorporating climate change in mathematics classrooms includes tensions. For example, the mathematics in climate change is often too advanced, hence it requires competences from teachers and students to raise relevant critical questions without understanding the details (Authors, 2017). The research question of this paper is how teachers' reported challenges provide insight in incorporation of climate change in mathematics education, for empowerment of both students and teachers as citizens. We use the term empowerment to refer to mobilizing self-activation against social constraints (Ibrahim & Alkire, 2007). For example, teachers actively preparing and organising to include issues of climate change into their teaching of mathematics.
To invite teachers to share their experiences, we developed an online questionnaire with focus on teachers' goals, the grades they taught, time spent as well as their experiences of success and/or failure. For the purpose of this paper, we analysed the responses to investigate teachers' reported challenges. Teachers in both countries reported practical challenges, i.e., lack of time and resources and the demands of the curriculum. However, many brought up controversial tensions, such as the divide behind the significance of the issue, the media coverage and possible students' feeling of helplessness. One Canadian teacher mentioned the incorporation of this subject as "inappropriate before Grade 7 because it creates fear without them being able to do anything about it is self-defeating" and a Norwegian teacher said: "It is a challenge that the students have strong opinions related to certain political issues that sometimes is an obstacle for thinking critically on different sources, especially on the media coverage".
Earlier, we grouped two major strains in teaching of climate change: its sensitivity due to ongoing political debate and that climate change is a socio-scientific topic with complex and unresolved socio-scientific problems, involving moral and ethical challenges in the teaching of the subject (Authors, 2017).
We believe that the two strains perpetuated teachers' disempowerment, since the overly-complex issues related to attending to climate change in mathematics classes disturbed the self-activation against teaching climate change as a social constraint. We further discuss how to proceed to overcome these struggles and why teachers should be empowered to empower their students in facing climate change.

Authors

• Yasmine Abtahi, WesternNorway University of applied science

• Kjellrun Hiis Hauge, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

• Lisa Steffensen, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences

• Richard Barwell, University of Ottawa