Conference Agenda

Climate change and sustainability education (CCSE) has become an increasingly prominent facet of national curriculum discussions globally, reflecting urgent ecological imperatives and calls for educational systems to equip young people with knowledge, skills and values necessary for sustainable futures (UNESCO, 2021; Sterling, 2010). Within this broad field, research has documented the importance of curriculum content and pedagogical approaches (Orr, 1992), but there remains less clarity around the agency of teachers as active agents in shaping, interpreting and implementing CCSE in situ (Priestley, 2019).

Teacher agency broadly refers to the capacity of teachers to make purposeful choices and take actions aligned with their professional beliefs and contextual opportunities (Biesta & Tedder, 2007). This conceptualisation emphasises teachers as not merely executors of policy, but as relational actors whose agency is shaped through interaction with institutional structures, cultural norms and material resources (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015). In the context of CCSE, agency is particularly salient given the interdisciplinary, evolving and contested nature of the subject: teachers must navigate not only scientific content but also socio-political sensitivities and pedagogical innovation (Adams & Frost, 2006; Hale, 2023).

Existing literature on CCSE in schools highlights three broad themes relevant to agency. First, curricular positioning and policy discourse affect how teachers perceive their professional autonomy. In England, CCSE has no mandated statutory position, leading teachers to interpret and integrate sustainability content alongside existing subject demands (Rickinson et al., 2014). Such curricular ambiguity may support creative pedagogical agency for some teachers while constraining others who lack institutional support or confidence. Second, professional knowledge and confidence are recurrent determinants of whether teachers enact CCSE with agency. Studies suggest teachers often feel underprepared to teach climate change and sustainability competently, particularly where initial teacher education and ongoing professional development lack robust coverage of ecological and socio-scientific issues (Wals & Corcoran, 2012). Empirical work indicates that teacher education that foregrounds reflective practice and collaborative inquiry can enhance teacher agency in CCSE (Dawson, 2019; McKeown et al., 2020). Third, material and structural conditions — including time, resources and leadership — shape teachers’ capacity to exercise agency. Research shows that workload pressures, lack of appropriate teaching materials, and competing accountability frameworks can limit innovative pedagogies for sustainability (Fletcher, 2021). Conversely, supportive leadership and communities of practice are associated with teachers feeling more empowered to adapt curriculum and pedagogy in line with CCSE goals (Llewellyn et al., 2018; Tilbury, 2011).

The gap in existing research is the limited integration of student perspectives alongside teacher experiences in studies of agency. While student voice research in environmental education affirms that pupils can articulate sophisticated understandings and pedagogical preferences (Hart, 1997; Barrable, 2013), this has rarely been connected to how teachers perceive and enact agency. There is thus a need to explore the relational characteristics of agency in CCSE: how teachers and students interact around content, pedagogy and classroom praxis, and where their perceptions converge or diverge. The research presented here builds on these discourses by drawing on a relational and emergent conceptualisation of agency, positioning it not solely as an individual attribute but as co-produced through teacher–student interactions and mediated by cultural, structural and material dimensions of schooling. It responds to calls for more nuanced empirical work situated in everyday classroom contexts, examining both teacher and student voices to illuminate how agency is experienced and enacted in the domain of CCSE (Priestley et al., 2015; Wals & Corcoran, 2012).

Research-policy relationships in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) are under-researched (Rickinson & McKenzie, 2021). This is especially true when looking at research-policy relationships of International Organisations (IOs), despite their increasing role in ESE governance (Lysgaard et al., 2016; Payne, 2016). Within global ESE governance, IOs frequently operate in “inter-network governance” (McKenzie & Stahelin, 2022), combining networks and influence. At the same time, IOs have been identified as major research-producing entities within education (Zapp, 2018). This suggests that looking at research sharing by IOs in ESE is an understudied topic.

This paper aims to contribute to filling the gap on research-policy relationships of IOs in ESE, by focusing on IOs that are part of the Greening Education Partnership (GEP). The GEP is a UN-wide climate change education initiative funded in 2022 led by UNESCO, bringing together UN agencies, NGOs, national governments, and private actors. More specifically, it examines how IOs involved in the GEP engage in research sharing to extend research, build consensus, and form part of a “shared construction of problems” (Grek, 2010).

The analysis focuses on several research reports on climate change education authored by the World Bank, the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), UNICEF, UNESCO, and announcements about a future climate literacy metric for the OECD’s PISA. By mapping when these research artefacts are shared and how they are mobilised in the GEP, the paper shows how IOs are connected through research and how knowledge circulates across the network.

This paper is part of a larger PhD study situated within education policy sociology that looks at the roles of research in the network governance of the GEP. It focuses on the intersection of two sub-questions: how research actors are involved in the Partnership and how research artefacts are used.

Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) faces significant challenges in what has been described as a poly-crisis. Climate change exemplifies a complex socio-scientific issue with consequences for ecosystems and human livelihoods, highlighting the need to empower young citizens. Therefore, education is tasked with fostering problem-solving capacities and contributing to broader processes of socio-ecological transformation. Climate change education (CCE) aims to promote conceptual understanding, critical and creative thinking, and competencies for accessing and communicating climate-related information, while encouraging active engagement (Nepraš et al., 2022). At the same time, it must contend with psychological distance, the knowledge–action gap, emotional strain, and limited opportunities for learner participation (Schulz & Brumann, 2025). Teachers play a central role in navigating these tensions but often report feeling inadequately prepared for their role in CCE (Winter et al., 2022).

In the context of teacher professionalism, it is assumed that teachers need corresponding beliefs to successfully apply their professional knowledge in classroom practice (König, 2012). Beliefs are defined as „implicit or explicit conceptions subjectively held to be true, which influence perception of the environment and guide action“ (Op’t Eynde et al., 2002, p. 24). Such beliefs are considered relevant to teaching, given that beliefs about teaching and learning are known to influence instructional practice (e.g. Dubberke et al., 2008). This study focuses on teachers’ subjective theories of teaching and learning, defined as beliefs concerning school and classroom processes that may be cross-curricular or subject-specific (Kunter et al., 2011). While previous research has examined (pre-service) teachers’ beliefs about climate change as a phenomenon (Nation & Feldman, 2021) and their intentions to teach the topic (Winter et al., 2026), empirical studies explicitly addressing beliefs about teaching and learning in CCE remain scarce.

Drawing on the literature on CCE, inquiry-based learning (IBL) can be considered a promising approach for addressing climate change in education. Structured around inquiry cycles of orientation, conceptualisation, investigation, and discussion, IBL engages learners in processes analogous to scientific inquiry and supports the development of epistemic and procedural skills (Brumann et al., 2022). Approaches closely aligned with scientific inquiry share key principles with transformative learning (TL), as both are grounded in constructivist perspectives and emphasize critical-reflective, partly open-ended learning processes. Transformative learning extends beyond content acquisition, aiming to initiate personal and societal change through reflection, dialog and perspective transformation (Wiesner & Prieler, 2020). When combined, transformative inquiry-based learning (TIBL) positions upper secondary students as active agents investigating climate-relevant issues in their local contexts while simultaneously fostering critical-reflective, and solution-oriented competences (Mäsgen, 2024).

In teacher education, experiential and participatory approaches appear particularly suitable for differentiating and actualizing teachers’ beliefs (Glazier & Bean, 2019). Pre-service teachers benefit from authentic, self-directed inquiry experiences, opportunities for critical reflection, and collaborative learning settings (Namdar, 2018). This suggests that integrating transformative and inquiry-based approaches into teacher education may provide fruitful spaces for reflecting on and potentially reshaping beliefs related to teaching CCE.

Against this backdrop, the present exploratory qualitative study examines a seminar intervention on TIBL within a university teacher education program. The guiding research question is:

How do pre-service teachers develop their beliefs on the characteristics of climate change education through experiencing a transformative inquiry-based learning seminar intervention?

Specifically, the study aims to (a) examine which characteristics of IBL and TL in CCE are considered relevant by pre-service teachers, and how these characteristics are prioritized within their beliefs; and (b) analyze how the perceived importance of these characteristics changes over the course of the seminar intervention.