Teaching (super) wicked problems: authentic learning about climate change

ABSTRACT

Climate change is a ‘super-wicked’ problem associated with challenges including food security, mass migration and biodiversity loss. Young people are increasingly expecting their university education to prepare them to address these challenges. This requires universities to go beyond scientific accounts of climate change, and to engage students in the complex interactions between social, economic and environmental systems. Authentic learning develops students’ understanding of ‘real-world’ challenges and is well aligned with pedagogical traditions in geography. We researched the extent to which climate change is framed as a wicked problem and how students undertake authentic learning about it in UK and Ireland undergraduate geography programmes. Our findings show that while authentic approaches to teaching climate change can be well developed at module level, programme design lacks coherence. Teaching focuses on climate problems rather than progressively scaffolding students’ skills for finding effective solutions. We propose that academic developers have significant potential to enhance climate change teaching. We present seven principles for geography programme teams to improve climate change teaching in degree programmes. The wicked problems concept emerged at a time of social unrest and growing environmental consciousness and so remains a powerful way to frame teaching about global challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• climate emergency
• wicked problems
• authenticity
• curriculum design
• higher education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our survey respondents and interviewees for being so generous with their time with all of the other challenges they were experiencing in the spring of 2020. We are grateful to the editors (David Simm, Alan Marvell and Alexia Mellor) of this symposium on teaching wicked problems in geography for bringing such a timely collection of papers together. We also thank them for their helpful comments on our research. Two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments on our paper. Dr Cross also thanks Jenny Morgan for her thoughtful insights and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The RPTI (Royal Town Planning Institute) accredits planning degrees in the UK.

2. POSTnotes are short communications for policy makers, written by subject experts and published by the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology. See https://post.parliament.uk/briefing-type/postnote/.