Paradigms in Climate Change Education: A Taxonomy as a Reflexive Tool for Educators

Universities have a fundamental role in enabling students to cope with sustainability challenges, such as climate change. They are expected to educate a comprehensive understanding of the complex biophysical, social, and political facets of the ongoing climate crisis. This task entails more than transferring factual knowledge through courses. We argue that normative paradigms and worldviews about how we relate to the natural world, what climate change is, and how to possibly cope with that are underlying the design of university curricula, the content of courses, and the way students learn about and understand climate change. While the relevance of normative paradigms is recognized in literature, there are no specific tools that can help educators and universities reflect on the paradigm that is (tacitly) conveyed to their students when participating in a course. By building on literature, this chapter proposes a taxonomy of paradigms influencing education for climate change, which can be used as a tool to reflect upon (or even transform) paradigms embedded in university climate change courses. The different ways of socially constructing nature and the world and the role of humans in interacting with nature and the world are articulated across the presented paradigms. Drawing from course guides of a Dutch university, this chapter also includes examples of how those paradigms are embedded in climate change course content.