‘Owning’ climate change for moral education

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that anthropogenic climate change is already having severe adverse effects on our planet and poses an existential threat to many species, including our own. National curricula and schools and other formal educational settings have been slow to address the issue of climate change, despite the deep traction that it has with many young people. This paper introduces the papers in a Special Issue that arose from a four-day residential symposium on how schools for 5–19 year-olds and other sites for learning should address climate change in both their taught and wider curricula. As an invited symposium of the Journal of Moral Education Trust, contributors were asked to pay particular attention to the moral/ethical/civic dimensions of climate change education. In this paper, we also emphasise that a key purpose of this Special Issue is to ‘own’ climate change education as an important issue for moral education.