Education about climate change and sustainability is essential to respond to a rapidly changing world, including the negative effects of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.
Teachers, including in Brazil and England, help young people live with a future marked by local and global environmental challenges. However, despite expressing great concern about issues related to climate change and sustainability, many teachers do not feel qualified to teach them in schools.
Urgent action is needed from policymakers to support them.
Teachers influence the way young people understand and respond to environmental crises. Without adequate support, students risk leaving school unprepared for some of the most pressing challenges of our time – this is a social risk, not just an educational issue.
Despite public demand for action in response to climate change, schools often lack the expertise and resources necessary to achieve this. Empowering teachers means building stronger communities: when well-trained teachers encourage initiative and action, not just knowledge and skills.
Young people can bring ideas home, influence families and drive local change. In this way, climate change and sustainability education becomes a catalyst for resilience and transformation, essential to prepare the next generation to thrive in an ever-changing world.
Leaders from around the world are meeting in Brazil to discuss progress and negotiate measures in response to climate change, within the framework of the annual UN climate summit (COP30). This meeting provides a vital opportunity to highlight to world leaders the support that teachers and schools need.
Over the last few years, we have worked with hundreds of teachers in both England and Brazil to explore their experiences of teaching climate change and sustainability. Teachers have shared with us the barriers they face in relation to climate change and sustainability education, and the support they need to overcome them. Although there is diversity in terms of geographical context, there are many commonalities.
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Barriers in educational systems for sustainability
Education systems with a rigid national curriculum, with an emphasis on high-stakes testing, create barriers for teachers in both England and Brazil. Existing systems require teachers to prioritize exam content, which often has little focus on climate change and sustainability issues.
Teachers in both countries reported difficulties in teaching about climate change and sustainability, highlighting its practical relevance to the lives of the young people they teach.
Another limitation is the lack of professional development opportunities that support teachers in integrating climate change and sustainability into their teaching. This gap exists throughout their careers, so they often share insufficient or uncertain knowledge and understanding of climate change and sustainability issues. This reduces teachers’ confidence and limits their classroom practices.
Impulses
Governments can better support teachers by ensuring that climate change and sustainability are explicitly recognized and valued in local, regional and national policies governing schools. This could include national curricula, professional standards for teachers and school leaders, and school inspection frameworks.
Teachers in England and Brazil recognize the importance of having school leaders who value climate change and sustainability, and how when school leaders promote a culture of support across the school community, this is transformative for climate change and sustainability education.
All teachers can benefit from high-quality professional development focused on climate change and sustainability education from the beginning of their careers and throughout their professional lives. When teachers have the time and support to co-design learning, both with each other and with their students, that draws on different ways of understanding climate change and sustainability issues, it strengthens teacher confidence and provides richer learning experiences for children and young people.
Education about climate change and sustainability is essential to prepare young people to navigate and shape an ever-changing world, but teachers cannot shoulder this responsibility alone.
By integrating climate change and sustainability into curricula and supporting teacher professional development throughout their career, classrooms can be transformed into spaces for local action. This can amplify the influence of young people in their communities and reduce the social risk of leaving a generation unprepared.
*Nicola Walshe is Professor of Education at UCL; Denise Quiroz Martínez is a Professor of Education in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling; and Luciano Fernandes Silva is a professor at the Institute of Chemistry and Physics at the Federal University of Itajubá.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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