Climate change education is still a patchwork in Canada with more work needed, say researchers

Melting glaciers, diving leopard seals, getting up close with a humpback whale: it's not the standard backdrop for a school field trip to the symphony.

But it's the kind of imagery Andrea Brown's Gr. 5 class saw on a recent visit to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for a composition blending music with powerful visuals showing the effects of climate change in Antarctica.

It inspired Vancouver elementary teacher Brown to introduce a new interdisciplinary unit: she's tasked her students to pick an environmental issue they're interested in to explore via an art form of their choice. The French Immersion students will also submit a write-up at the end.

The VSO trip "was such a great jumping off point.... When I saw their reactions and I saw this is something that they're also passionate about, I wanted to incorporate it into our learning," Brown said. 

"I really want to teach them about climate change through a positive lens ... [to have students] show their environmental concern and show that message, but also show the hope behind it and give them space to kind of sit with feelings that might come up."

Most Canadian students will encounter climate change during their elementary and secondary school education, but what that learning actually looks like in the classroom is inconsistent across jurisdictions, according to experts following the issue. 

With climate change education among the key topics in the spotlight at the annual United Nations climate change conference known as COP28 — continuing in Dubai through Dec. 12 — education researchers, teachers and students themselves are pushing to highlight what's needed now. 

Since education is a provincial and territorial responsibility, it can be challenging get a national view on how Canada is doing integrating climate change into its formal education systems.

However, the situation is worrisome, according to Lakehead University professor Ellen Field, who has researched climate change curriculum and policies across Canada.

She notes, for instance, that climate change often turns up as a topic in elective senior high school level classes, which means students can opt out of them. Across jurisdictions, there's inconsistency where the topic shows  up in the curriculum: predominantly it's covered in science units, but sometimes it's in social studies. 

Ontario has a mandatory climate change course, Field noted, while British Columbia and Nova Scotia are provinces with a strong climate curriculum overall. Yet only four school boards of the nearly 400 across Canada have actual climate action plans. 

Noting that ministers of education from many different countries have been attending COP28 this year, Field believes improvements require action from the top, by policy-makers and school board decision-makers alike.

"If we're in this moment that really we need to halve our emissions by 2030, we need to make sure that every institution ... is doing what they can," she said. "We just need to make sure that this is happening in all institutions — and school boards in particular have a role to play here."

Field is co-authoring an initiative for UN education agency UNESCO's Greening Education partnership. The goal is to create a climate change education curriculum for member states to adopt, one that drills down to which topics and concepts can be introduced and built upon in an age-appropriate way, from the youngest learners straight through to high schoolers, and a framework of how to do this.