New Vandana Singh Book — from Routledge

Wed 10 Apr 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Teaching Climate Change coverI just came across Vandana Singh’s recently published textbook Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice. You can read the introductory chapter and part of chapter two on the Routledge page and I’ve pasted in their description of the book below. Despite not being a teacher, I was drawn in — I’m interested in just about anything Vandana is interested in enough to write about.

Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice shows educators how climate change can be taught from any disciplinary perspective and in a transdisciplinary way, drawing on examples from the author’s own classroom.

The book sets out a radical vision for climate pedagogy, introducing an innovative framework in which the scientific essentials of climate change are scaffolded via three transdisciplinary meta-concepts: Balance/Imbalance, Critical Thresholds and Complex Interconnections. Author Vandana Singh grounds this theory in practice, drawing on examples from her own classroom to provide implementable ideas for educators, and to demonstrate how climate change can be taught from any disciplinary perspective in a transdisciplinary way. The book also explores the barriers to effective climate education at a macro level, focusing on issues such as climate misinformation/misconception, the exclusion of social and ethical concerns and a focus on technofixes. Singh uses this information to identify four key dimensions for an effective climate pedagogy, in which issues of justice are central: scientific-technological, the transdisciplinary, the epistemological and the psychosocial. This approach is broad and flexible enough to be adapted to different classrooms and contexts.

Bridging the social and natural sciences, this book will be an essential resource for all climate change educators practicing in both formal and informal settings, as well as for community climate activists.

“This highly original and radical book addresses the rapidly growing need for an accessible climate pedagogy which represents the different dimensions of the climate-change challenge and can be adapted to a variety of contexts.”