Schools struggle to teach climate change without triggering political backlash
A comprehensive review of environmental education research reveals that teachers face significant obstacles when addressing climate and sustainability topics in class—including emotional escalation, bias accusations, and institutional pressure. The findings suggest that how educators frame these discussions fundamentally shapes students' engagement, making pedagogical strategy decisions a critical business and policy consideration for education systems.
Originaltitel: Teaching and learning controversial issues in environmental and sustainability education: a systematic literature review and proposed heuristic
<p>Sustainability issues intertwine scientific, ethical and political dimensions, and their treatment in education often turns them into controversial issues rather than neutral subject matter. In Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE), controversy is not incidental but central, as it exposes the tensions between expectations that education should contribute to sustainability transitions, sustaining pluralistic inquiry, and delineating which positions are legitimate in light of well-established scientific consensus. Based on a systematic literature review, this article synthesises how controversial issues are conceptualised, framed, and addressed in ESE. Findings show that controversy arises at the intersection of epistemic uncertainty, ethical and political value conflicts, governance considerations, and identity‑related attachments. Teachers face challenges related to emotional escalation, perceived bias, and institutional constraints, while their stance – often dynamically enacted – shapes the political dimensions of classroom interaction. Pedagogical strategies include structured deliberation, ethical reasoning frameworks, experiential immersion, and dialogic design, often requiring careful affect management and safe yet challenging spaces. Based on these findings, a heuristic is proposed that integrates epistemic and behavioural criteria with distinctions between sustainability as a partly scientifically describable state and sustainable development as a normative process. The heuristic is intended as a structured yet flexible support for teachers’ professional judgement by clarifying which issues warrant anchoring in scientific consensus and which should remain open for pluralistic deliberation. It thereby aims to provide guidance on whether and how to take a stance with intellectual honesty and pedagogical care.</p>