Welcome to this month's edition of Researching education: Five further readings. In this series, we take a look at some further readings available on a particular topic, including open access research papers from various online databases, and Teacher archive content you might not have come across yet.
As an educator, how do you approach talking to your students about climate change? Can you identify key gaps in students’ knowledge? How will you respond to the social, emotional and logistical challenges related to climate anxiety in the classroom? In this edition of Researching education: Five further readings, we’re sharing five readings on the topic of climate change education from Australian researchers.
- Snapshots issue 15: How aware of global issues are Australian 15-year-olds? Published by the Australian Council for Educational Research, this Snapshot breaks down data from PISA 2018 which looks at Global Competence, and in particular, student awareness of global issues. The data show that on average, Australian students have a greater awareness of climate change and global warming than the OECD average. Findings are further broken down by gender, socio-economic background, and self-efficacy by task. Last year at Teacher, we published an infographic exploring some of these findings, which you can view here.
- Educators' experiences and strategies for responding to ecological distress.
This article examines the issue of climate anxiety in educational spaces, and how educators seek to respond to the increasing ecological distress, eco-anxiety and climate grief of students. Through a survey of environmental educators in eastern Australia, the researchers report on a number of strategies teachers use to respond to their learners’ needs, and identify the social, emotional and logistical challenges for educators in this area. - A plan to repower our schools: Victoria. Published by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition with research undertaken by the Community Power Agency, this report maps out a seven-point plan to repower Victoria’s 418 public high schools to become 100 per cent powered by renewable energy. The authors identify multiple benefits of solar energy power for schools, including innovative student education, and opportunities to take clean energy action from the classroom to the broader community.
- Introducing Argumentation About Climate Change Socioscientific Issues in a Disadvantaged School. This article reports the findings from a mixed methods analysis of Year 10 students’ argumentation skills on the topic of climate change in a disadvantaged Australian school. The researchers measured the effects of an early career teacher’s professional development course in Earth science argumentation on their students’ socio-scientific argumentation skills.
- Reflecting on place: Environmental education as decolonisation. Published by the Australian Journal of Environmental Education, this paper argues for the need to consider schools as a site of reframing climate change education. In particular, the authors suggest an integration of philosophy into curricula, to rethink human connection to nature through the Indigenous conceptualisation of environment as Place. By doing so, the authors suggest that educators can start to challenge dominant narratives around the ‘human-nature’ divide.
Some of the resources featured in this article can be found through Cunningham Library Catalogue and EdResearch Online. At the links below, you can search for more resources on the topic of climate change in these two online databases.
- Climate change: Cunningham Library Catalogue
- Climate change: EdResearch Online
You can also browse other topics at this page.
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