‘Let’s talk about the weather’: the activist curriculum and global climate change education

Activist movements have garnered significant global attention on a range of sustainability issues, often involving collectives of citizens coming together. Invoked is the idea of citizens informed to act, emerging not from a common-sense understanding of everyday life, but rather from a deep political understanding of the world - one that is underpinned by a level of civics knowledge that provides the intellectual basis for engaging in public discussions and planning citizen action. Here, the possibility of transformative activist curricular movements for climate education arises and whether to change the curriculum, or to see curriculum as change in itself. This paper examines what schools and teachers can do to develop children’s understanding of and engagement with the issues, and to address their concerns, informed by John Dewey’s notion of social action and his ideas on democracy and thinking. The discussion draws on a global movement in climate education, and a case of a group of schools in England. The two cases, chosen as illustrative, are theorised by means of Maton’s semantic variation theory to identify how the systems of meaning in these, and similar, contexts can be made accessible. How the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of quality education (SDG4) and climate action (SDG13) can be achieved, including the design of the curriculum by teachers, is examined. The need for an activist curriculum is discussed, one that is integrated and embedded rather than inserted, in which young people can engage with and respond to the issues that they face. Such a curriculum posits the school as both democratic and open, in the sense of having boundaries that are fluid and permeable to the concerns of society, while also giving access to disciplinary knowledge that is the basis of conceptual understanding of the problems of, as well as the solutions to, climate change.