Teaching climate change: An interdisciplinary challenge
Robin Engelhardt's poster for the conference Our Common Future during Climate Change, 7th-10th July, 2015 in Paris.
Abstract: Climate change education is inherently interdisciplinary. It requires teachers to possess a broad range of competencies and to apply a variety of teaching methods, bringing into play the skills and knowledge of the whole classroom. If one defines interdisciplinary learning as the ability to know and coordinate a growing number of perspectives, it becomes the teacher’s primary task to support students in their explorative and coordinative efforts. Preliminary findings from a research project at the University of Copenhagen highlights several barriers as well as opportunities. In general, there is weak institutional support for interdisciplinary teaching, and a lack of teacher coordination among topics covered in the curricula. At its worst, teaching becomes a kind of ‘serial disciplinarity’ where modularly formatted perspectives produce mutually incomprehensible monologues. At its best, lead instructors use a variety of inductive teaching methods and provide an impartial overview of the conceptual schemes involved.