Don’t Look Up: Teachers Navigating Between Different Global Educational Movements in Times of Climate Crisis

Speaker: Dafna Gan & Oren Pizmony-Levy

Date: Wednesday, Dec 7th, 2022

Climate Change Education (CCE) is a global movement that seeks to transform teaching and learning as means to empower climate action and enhance climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Like many other educational movements (e.g., Environmental Education and Human Rights Education) CCE does not operate in a vacuum. Rather, CCE works in the context of other movements, such as test-based accountability and child-centered pedagogy. Yet, we know little about how teachers navigate between these movements. We present results from a survey experiment in Israel (n=500) that examines how common descriptions of school culture (i.e., orientation towards test-based accountability or child-centered pedagogy) and teacher characteristics shape teachers’ engagement with CCE. We find that although the majority of respondents endorse the scientific consensus about climate change and support CCE, less than one-fifth of respondents (16.9%) report teaching about climate change. Experienced teachers, science teachers, and teachers who are more concerned about climate change are all more likely to report teaching about climate change. Further, we find that teachers perceive CCE is more challenging when schools focus on test-based accountability, compared to child-centered pedagogy. Analysis of open-ended responses indicates the effect of test-based accountability is attributable to the perception of the movement as narrowing down the school curriculum. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the development of CCE policy in Israel and worldwide

TIme: 9 AM EST