Advancing Climate Education through the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey

• In Event: Comparative and Cross-National Perspectives on Climate Change Education

Proposal

To transform the next generation’s thinking and acting regarding environmental sustainability more broadly necessitates profound changes in teaching and learning. This includes the development of learning modules on sustainability topics and introducing sustainability themes in existing subjects. The realization of ESE may also include learning about school facilities (e.g. a visit to the heating/cooling room when learning about energy), field trips, teaching and learning outdoor/in nature, and guest speakers who are part of policymaking and/or the emerging green industry. To accomplish this, teachers need to be aware and motivated, and they need to collaborate with other teachers and with professionals working outside of school. The OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in 2024 will document the extent to which teachers across more than 50 countries are prepared to implement ESE in schools as well as how drivers and barriers affect their work.

Given that most education systems do not have (yet) curricular standards and guidelines regarding ESE and CCE, teachers are key agents in the realization of international aspirations into formal and informal learning opportunities. TALIS 2024 will be collecting information about how teachers: personally view ESE and CCE, perceive the climate crisis impacting their students, see themselves as agents to support their students’ concerns, integrate ESE and CCE across the subjects taught, and assess their professional barriers/needs to enhance their ESE and CCE knowledge.

Once collected, the data will allow policymakers to evaluate different domains: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. This information will be useful to assess the strengths and weaknesses of national plans around ESE and CCE. Further, the data will allow exploring variation across populations, school type, and teacher professional background (e.g. the subject they teach). This kind of analysis will be useful to document gaps and inequalities, which is a first step towards developing improvement strategy. Finally, using classification techniques, TALIS will be able to present a typology of teacher engagement with ESE and CCE. It may be possible to identify unique audiences within the teaching profession that respond to ESE and CCE in their own distinct way. Scholars have used this approach in public opinion research in the United States where they identified Global Warming’s Six Americas: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive (Yale Climate Communication, 2022). This analysis would be an important contribution to international knowledge and accountability infrastructure, and for the development of teacher training.

In this paper, we will also discuss the process used to advocate for this module in the TALIS 2024. We first needed to level-set that ESE is more than the sheer transmission of knowledge and information about environmental issues (e.g., environmental science education; Pizmony-Levy, 2011; Stevenson, 2007). Rather, ESE includes teaching and learning through outdoor experiences and raising environmental awareness and pro-environmental attitudes. In addition, ESE aims to motivate students to adopt pro-environmental behaviors and to participate in collective efforts toward addressing environmental challenges (i.e., environmental citizenship) which advances national goals of citizenry for sustainable economies of the future.

Author

• heather E price, Learning Policy Institute