Conference Agenda

Climate change influences contemporary educational agendas in Europe and worldwide by affecting children’s lives through extreme weather events, heightened social vulnerability, migration, and increasing inequalities. Disadvantaged families are disproportionately affected, facing elevated risks, limited access to reliable information, and reduced capacity to apply climate knowledge in daily life (1-3). Consequently, climate change constitutes a critical context for educational research examining the relationship between knowledge and action in the presence of inequality.

At the same time, scientific knowledge is produced, disseminated, and evaluated within rapidly evolving and complex ecosystems shaped by digital platforms, algorithmic curation, politicized discourse, commercial interests, and informal networks. Families are exposed to both scientific explanations and misinformation, as well as skepticism and conflicting narratives (4, 5). Therefore, educational challenges extend beyond raising awareness to include how individuals evaluate evidence, interpret uncertainty, and determine which sources to trust, particularly in disadvantaged communities where experiences of exclusion and survival pressures influence relationships with science and public institutions.

This paper contends that families' interpretations of climate change are grounded in two principal dimensions: epistemic trust (6), which involves assessing the credibility of knowledge sources, and understandings of the nature of science (NOS), encompassing how knowledge is produced, what constitutes evidence, and how uncertainty and consensus are managed. Rather than framing climate understanding as an individual deficit, this study conceptualizes families’ sense-making as socially situated, shaped by lived experiences and power dynamics, which in turn influence children’s engagement with science and civic activities.

The present study examines how families living in disadvantaged conditions interpret climate change information, specifically through the perspectives of the nature of science and epistemic trust. The primary objective is to clarify how epistemic trust and NOS influence these families’ engagement with climate-related scientific information. To achieve this objective, the study addresses the following research questions:

1. How do families in disadvantaged socio-economic conditions interpret and evaluate scientific information about climate change?
2. Which forms of epistemic trust, including trust, distrust, and conditional trust, influence how these families evaluate climate change knowledge claims and their sources?
3. How do families’ understandings of the nature of science shape their interpretations of climate change?

The significance of this study is in its examination of climate change as both a global and locally differentiated crisis. While European policy emphasizes climate education, sustainability, and civic engagement, these objectives are pursued within contexts of socio-economic disparity, varying levels of institutional trust, and diverse national debates. By focusing on disadvantaged families as key interpreters of scientific knowledge, this paper contributes to discussions on equity in climate education, highlighting strategies that promote literacy and epistemic trust, avoid deficit perspectives, and support democratic participation.

The COVID-19 pandemic constituted a turning point for education systems worldwide, significantly affecting the ways in which schools, families, and communities relate to one another (Gubbins & Campillay, 2024). Prolonged school closures, the implementation of remote education, and the intensified use of digital technologies transformed the pedagogical, organisational, and affective bonds that sustain school life, making visible pre-existing structural tensions, particularly regarding the delimitation of responsibilities between schools and families (Gómez-Navas & Marín-Rivas, 2023).

This paper analyses these transformations from the perspective of early childhood education teachers, positioning the family–school relationship as a key axis for understanding the articulation between care, teacher professionalisation, and the social function of schooling in contexts of crisis. The study forms part of a broader research project focused on care and teacher professionalisation, based on life narratives of Chilean and Spanish teachers. Through these experiences, the pandemic reconfigured pedagogical practices and relationships with families, revealing the deepening of social inequalities and the relevance of the school as a space of social regulation (López et al., 2021).

During this period, relationships with families acquired unprecedented centrality, becoming essential for sustaining teaching and learning processes and for guaranteeing the pedagogical bond in a context of high uncertainty, particularly in early childhood education and situations of social vulnerability (Wilinski et al., 2022). However, the configuration of this relationship varied according to social contexts, revealing differentiated educational responses to the crisis (Gómez-Navas & Marín-Rivas, 2023; Gubbins & Campillay, 2024).

In the Chilean case, characterised by profound educational inequalities, teachers describe an expansion of the school’s role as a space of care and social support. Teaching work incorporated functions of accompaniment, emotional support, and containment, positioning the school as a key community actor in contexts of social precarity (Hunter et al., 2022). This expansion of the professional role was linked to an ethics of care and to an understanding of education as a collective responsibility, while also generating high levels of emotional overload and blurring traditional professional boundaries.

In the Spanish context, more heterogeneous responses can be observed. While some teachers assumed a strong commitment to accompanying students and families, these actions were developed mainly as individual initiatives rather than as institutionalised responsibilities, generating tensions around the meanings of the teaching role and the limits of pedagogical responsibility (Gaspar et al., 2025).

Across both contexts, the pandemic intensified a crisis of pedagogical authority associated with the redefinition of school spaces and times, the increased presence of families in educational processes, and the fragility of institutional frameworks that historically delineated the functions of school and home (Haisraeli & Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2023).

In both countries, the pandemic transformed modes of communication between schools and families, levels of parental involvement, and the boundaries between domestic and school spheres. While these new forms of interaction strengthened pedagogical relationships in some cases, they also exposed tensions in teachers’ professional recognition and in the distribution of educational responsibilities, particularly in the absence of clear institutional guidelines (Guerrero et al., 2021).

Taken together, these findings contribute to understanding how crises operate as catalysts for change in school–community relationships across different territorial contexts. By contrasting experiences from a European and a Latin American setting, this study highlights both shared challenges and context-specific responses in early childhood education, revealing how care, professional responsibility, and institutional support are unevenly distributed across educational systems. In this sense, the paper underscores the relevance of analysing the effects of crises beyond national frameworks, emphasising the importance of comparative perspectives to rethink the family–school relationship as a key space for care, wellbeing, and the protection of the professional role of teachers in contexts of polycrisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted societies worldwide, with the education sector facing particularly disruptive challenges. In response, governments and schools across countries implemented a wide range of measures to maintain educational continuity. Synthesizing international experiences, Liu (2021) identified key strategies: ensuring equitable learning opportunities under the principle of "suspending classes without suspending learning," safeguarding conditions for school reopening, strengthening the resilience of education systems, promoting digital learning cultures and transformation, expanding community and cross-sector partnerships, and so on. Consistent with these observations, Yen and Foo (2021) noted that the pandemic fundamentally transformed classroom-based instruction by accelerating the shift toward remote and home-based learning, thereby extending learning beyond traditional temporal and spatial boundaries.

As students' primary learning environments shifted from schools to homes, parents' roles in children's education changed substantially. While direct interaction between teachers and parents became more limited, the amount of time parents spent with their children increased. Consequently, parents assumed expanded roles as "teachers," providing more individualized learning support at home (Liu, 2021). This transformation underscored the growing importance of family-based parental engagement in students' learning processes. To strengthen parental involvement and mitigate educational disruptions, European countries introduced policy frameworks, financial measures, and remedial programs during the pandemic (European Commission, 2022). Most European education systems issued top-level guidelines to support families in organizing distance learning and invested in digital infrastructure to reduce the "digital divide," particularly for low-income households (European Education and Culture Executive Agency, 2022). In Taiwan, the government raised the nationwide epidemic alert to Level 3 on May 19, 2021. This led to the suspension of on-site instruction at all educational levels until the end of the semester. Schools rapidly transitioned to online teaching, and the Ministry of Education (2021) granted greater flexibility in curriculum design, instructional strategies, and assessment practices. Nevertheless, teachers encountered multiple challenges, especially in maintaining effective parent–teacher collaboration in online learning contexts (Lin & Huang, 2021).

A large body of literature has examined parental involvement; however, the global spread of COVID-19, combined with diverse national contexts, created a distinctive dual contextual condition that may have altered the nature and quality of parental engagement. Thorn and Vincent-Lancrin (2021) synthesized evidence from 10 countries, suggesting that parental help with schoolwork declined as students progressed to higher grade levels and that mothers generally spent more time assisting with schoolwork than fathers. Knopik et al. (2021) identified three dominant parental approaches to supporting primary school students’ online learning in Poland: the committed teacher, the autonomy-supporting coach, and the committed teacher-intervener. Jones and Palikara (2023) found that primary school teachers in England used more individualized and proactive approaches to parental involvement during COVID-19 school closures than before the pandemic, while half of the teachers still maintained the deficit model of parental involvement. In Taiwan, middle and high school teachers reported that the COVID-19 pandemic led to more consistent parental involvement in their children’s at-home online learning, which improved the children’s learning motivation and performance. However, parents faced challenges in providing consistent support for online learning due to time constraints, difficulty balancing work and home responsibilities, and insufficient content knowledge (Chang, 2025). Nevertheless, how parents themselves experienced and interpreted these expanded roles during and after the pandemic requires further study.

The pandemic, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to examine whether these changes represent temporary adaptations or signal a more enduring shift in parent-school relationships. Accordingly, this study aimed to explore parents’ experiences of grades 1-12 students in supporting their children’s education since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan. By examining parents’ lived experiences, this study seeks to generate insights that may strengthen home-school collaboration.

The challenges of digitalisation as a process of mediatisation affect both public and private life. Initially regarded as the technical conversion of analogue signals into digital ones, digitalisation is now characterised by the omnipresence of digital media in everyday life (Herzig & Martin 2018). The digital transformation process affects schools and teaching to such an extent that they cannot be (re)constructed without taking this process into account. Meanwhile, the experience of the social crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic was associated with a comprehensive push for digitalisation in schools (Lorenz et al. 2022). Schools were not only tasked with addressing the challenges but also with playing a constructive role in shaping the changes that have taken place. In Germany, for example, financially robust emergency aid programmes were established as part of educational policy measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. These programmes invested in hardware equipment and, in some cases, the development of media education concepts and strategies for schools and teaching. Teachers are assigned a central role in school and teaching development processes. In this context, cooperation between teachers is considered to be a key resource for responding to these challenges. In theoretical models and empirical studies, teacher cooperation is considered a relevant indicator of school quality and school effectiveness in educational research. According to German specialist literature, teacher cooperation is considered a valuable resource for overcoming various school-related issues (e.g. Drossel 2015). Overall, international research on digitalisation-related teacher cooperation and the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic is scarce, and the empirical database is correspondingly limited (Heldt et al. 2020; Engemann 2025). Insufficient research has been conducted on digitalisation-related teacher cooperation, particularly in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This project aims to investigate the importance of digital cooperative working relationships among teachers, using the subject of educational science as an example. The subject is primarily established in secondary schools in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It is assumed that digitalisation offers opportunities for cross-school collaboration in ‚smaller‘ subjects (Engemann 2025). While these subject teachers can cooperate within their own school, the number of colleagues they can work with is limited. Digital media now offer them the opportunity to cooperate more closely with counterparts at other schools. The study addresses the following questions: Taking digitalisation into account, how does teacher cooperation manifest itself in terms of form and framework conditions? What conditions for success and obstacles to digital media for cooperation have been identified by teachers? How have pandemic-relates schools closures and distance learning affected attitudes towards cooperation and cooperative practices? Did the Covid-19 pandemic give digitalisation-related teacher cooperation another boost? This study is based on Spieß‘s (2004) organisational psychology definition of cooperation. According to this definition, cooperation is based on common goals and mutual trust, and requires reciprocity autonomy from those involved (Spieß 2004). The organisational psychology concept developed by Gräsel et al. (2006) distinguishes between three forms of cooperation: ‚exchange‘, ‚synchronisation‘ and ‚co-construction‘. This concept serves as a reference for forms of teacher cooperation. ‘Exchange’ refers to the mutual transfer of information about professional content and teaching materials. The primary purpose of this form is to provide advice and support. The second form of cooperation ‘synchronisation’ requires teachers to be more willing to cooperate. It refers to the coordination of teaching units, the division of labour in preparing and marking written assessments, and the division of labour in creating teaching materials. ‘Co-Construction’ aims to enhance school quality and foster the professional development of teachers. In this approach, lesson content is developed collaboratively. Observation and team teaching methods are also classified as ‘co-construction’.