It is our view that all teachers have a role to play in preparing young people for a climate-unstable present and future. But taking on that role is not easy. Teachers encounter a wide range of demands, like focusing on solutions rather than only on describing the problems, engaging in action while avoiding partisanship, emphasising local priorities such as food sovereignty, or teaching truthfully without leaving learners overwhelmed. While teachers are aware of these many expectations, they may still feel uncertain about how to meet them in practice. In our article Pedagogical approaches for climate justice orientations to teaching history and social studies we ask: What would be happening in a history and social studies classroom that is oriented to learning about, and responding to, issues of climate justice?

Teachers and researchers in other subject areas and disciplines, such as those who lead environmental education programs, have expertise that history and social studies teachers may be able to learn from, if we are not held back by subject-area silos. Thus, we reviewed recent international literature (published 2017–23) in the fields of climate change education and climate justice education to identify pedagogies potentially most relevant to teaching history or social studies. Our findings informed the development of 11 climate justice education pedagogies. For example, one approach highlights the use of historical study to question and disrupt anthropocentric progress narratives that uphold unsustainable consumption. Another promotes moving social studies away from a focus on individual climate actions, and towards enabling students to work authentically in community.

Climate justice-focused education demands that we try new things. We hope the pedagogical approaches for climate justice education in social studies and history education that we identified can support teachers in honouring and celebrating the contextual differences that define teaching. Recognising that climate change is a transnational issue, and that climate response demands transdisciplinary strategies, we submitted this article to the History Education Research Journal to inform and provoke conversations among history and social studies educators and researchers globally.

Pedagogical approaches for climate justice orientations to teaching history and social studies by Heather E. McGregor (Queen’s University, Canada) and Rebecca S. Evans (Queen’s University, Canada) is published in History Education Research Journal, volume 23

Heather E. McGregor is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Theory in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She previously taught history methods in teacher education programs, and now teaches environmental education in teacher education, in alignment with her research interests at the intersection of climate change education and history and social studies. Dr. McGregor leads the Social Studies and History Education in the Anthropocene Network, is a co-investigator on the Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future research project, and recently received a 5-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to create and study a professional learning community in climate education for teachers in eastern Ontario.

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