Curriculum Development for Climate Change Education in Global South, 5 op

The course aims at enhancing curriculum design capacity for curriculum designers and teachers in different levels from basic education to secondary and vocational education in climate change education. The course will introduce the main organizational principles of climate change education and education for sustainable development. The course will be based theoretically on the so-called reconceptualist ideas of curriculum, which is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding curricula from multiple perspectives as cultural, social, and autobiographical. Accordingly, curricula will and should be developed and fitted to cultural and geographical contexts.

Recognizing education's pivotal role in tackling global challenges like climate change, it is vital to cultivate awareness and responsibility, prompting engagement in adaptive and mitigative efforts. Climate change has hit mostly countries in the Global South hard, making them more vulnerable. It is crucial to figure out why this is happening and work on more sustainable adaptive and mitigative strategies locally and globally.

This course provides an opportunity to cultivate a global understanding of the phenomenon, emphasizing the importance and interconnectedness of local actions. While discussing curriculum for climate change education in this course, our focus remains on teachers. They play a key role in implementation, with their knowledge, attitudes, and positioning within this context being imperative.

The course is organized around five central themes, each consisting of two sessions. These central themes for climate change education include the need for integrated, interdisciplinary curricula, understanding the causes and consequences of climate change (learning to know), action and necessary skills (learning to do), Sustainable development and climate change, thinking about new strategies to meet future challenges, and learning how to live together and be interdependent in a global society. The course will also provide practical examples, focusing particularly on Southern Asia.