Climate change education through the You and CO2 programme: modelling student engagement and teacher delivery during COVID-19

Abstract

Abstract While there has been an international call for action from the United Nations secretary general, individuals’ abilities to engage with climate change and actions to mitigate it can vary. In 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 and related school closures caused significant upheaval across the world; schools made immediate shifts to remote delivery, increasing workloads and decreasing access to outdoor spaces and opportunities to connect with nature. In this paper we will explore a rural, mid-Wales school’s approach to climate change education (CCE), and their experiences running the CCE programme ‘You and CO2’ through interviews with teachers and analyses of creative interactive digital narratives (IDNs) the students created on the programme. The paper will discuss what the school was doing before the COVID-19 pandemic, the effect of the pandemic on CCE in the school, and how the You and CO2 programme raised the aspirations and confidence levels of the school’s humanities department for teaching CCE. The findings in this study highlight the importance of localised knowledge, and engagement with local groups in successful delivery of CCE programmes, which was reflected in students’ IDNs.