Climate Change and Geography Education

Climate change education represents a significant challenge for geographical education and educators. While there is a a large body of research focused on students’ alternative conceptions, in contrast there is little attention paid to how teachers construct geographical reasoning about climate change. This study aims to analyse how expert and non-expert teachers articulate geographical thinking in relation to climate change education. An interpretative qualitative design was adopted, based on the analysis of two focus groups differentiated by teaching expertise, conducted in the context of the evaluation and discussion of a teach-er training course on climate change and GIS. Qualitative data were analysed using a combination of deductive categories de-rived from the literature and inductively emerging codes due to the thematic analysis. The results reveal clear differences be-tween the two groups. Expert teachers generate a higher density of qualitative data, mobilise systemic and multiscalar reasoning more consistently, and display explicit strategies of epistemic regulation, particularly through theoretical prudence and evidence-based argumentation. In contrast, non-expert teachers tend to frame complexity as a problem to be reduced, relying more frequently on linear or axiological explanations. Importantly, axiological elements are not absent from expert discourse but coexist in tension with non-axiological approaches.

Climate change · Habitus · Prudence · Qualitative research · Thematic analysis · Thematic map · Geographic Information Systems Studies · Geography Education and Pedagogy · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought