Expanding the Foundation: Climate Change and Opportunities for Educational Research

Abstract

Human-caused climate change is a dominant global challenge. Unlike other disciplines and fields, there has as yet been only limited attention to climate change in educational research generally, and in educational foundations in particular. Education is key to assisting humanity in mitigating and adapting to climate change, and educational researchers working within diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions and a broad array of research contexts need to engage in this most pressing of challenges. We argue that the field needs a new commitment to a form of educational justice appropriately scaled to the size of the challenge we face. We address this gap by reviewing current thinking on the human dimensions of climate change and summarizing what research has been conducted in the area of climate change education as a means of identifying a range of possibilities for educational research and praxis.

FUNDING

Henderson and Drewes' contributions were supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1043262. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material were those of the author(s) and did not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.