It is widely understood that climate change is among the greatest challenges facing humanity, and that knowledge of climate change should play a key role in the curriculum. As Singh (2021) writes, ‘The failure of the education sector to take on the climate challenge is deeply problematic, since effective climate education can be a crucial component of climate mitigation.’
Despite this, climate change content within the English curriculum remains patchy and although there are references to climate change in the science curriculum, ‘those references do not make it clear that there is a crisis or an emergency, nor that society (including students) should act on it’ (Greer & Glackin, 2021).
Over the past few years, campaigns such as Teach the Teacher and Teach the Future have bolstered calls from educators, education unions and academics to embed climate change into the curriculum. Despite these claims for ‘more’, climate change education is not easily defined (Greer & Glackin, 2021). Often, climate change is incorporated under the broader context of environmental education (EE), education for sustainable development (ESD), or even ‘subsumed as an undefined topic under the undefined notion of sustainability’ (Eilam et al., 2020).
This lack of clarity about what climate change education consists of, particularly within the discipline of science as it currently exists in the curriculum, is problematic. Activists can call for ‘more!’, but the question remains ‘more of what?’
