Toward a Transdisciplinary, Justice-Centered Pedagogy of Climate Change

Along with scientific and technical open questions, climate change presents unique epistemological, sociological, psychological, and ethical challenges, including climate justice. These are reflected in the education sector as well, manifesting as roadblocks and barriers at both the macro level and in the microcosm of the classroom. 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. This chapter presents a re-conceptualization of the climate crisis at the intersection of science, society, ethics, justice, economics, philosophy and history of science that seeks to overcome the above-mentioned barriers. Drawing from a close study of the implementation of this framework in an undergraduate physics classroom for non-science majors over nearly a decade, I articulate four dimensions of an effective pedagogy of climate change: the scientific-technological, the transdisciplinary, the epistemological and the psycho-social. Three transdisciplinary “meta-concepts” constitute the foundation of this approach, utilized in the classroom via repeated use of visual tools. Student responses indicate that this still-developing framework has promise in the classroom