Chang, Chew Hung

Climate change is taught explicitly as a topic in the Singapore school geography curriculum. In responding to the city state’s desired outcomes of education and meeting its standards of twenty-first century competencies, it is important for learners to develop criticality and dispositions to engage climate change issues. Based on previous studies conducted by the PI over the last four years, it has been found that geography students have misconceptions about this topic that are similar to those found in other students around the world. In reviewing the literature on methodologies that examine how best geography can be learned, the Learning Progression (LP) approach offers an empirics-based roadmap for building students’ holistic knowledge base and in confronting the fragmented and often incomplete understanding of the climate change issue. The study endeavours to answer the key question of how school geography curriculum can be designed for learning about climate change and how it can be enacted in the classroom based on the outcomes of this research study. The methodology is adapted from the common practice of establishing a hypothetical learning progression (HLP), testing and validating the HLP to develop the empirical learning progression (ELP) before determining intervention strategies to test if students can learn climate change better through this approach. The findings will contribute towards the curriculum design and development of the climate change topic, offer a case study in geography teaching and learning informed by the OER’s instructional core model, provide opportunities for evidenced-informed delivery of NIE’s pre-service and in-service programmes on geography education, and foster deeper professional collaborations between NIE, MOE-HQ and schools. More importantly, the research study will inform the teaching and learning of climate change within the wider context of geographical and environmental education in the international community.

Research literature on climate change education has been primarily focused on reporting how programmes are designed to help students learn the topic of climate change better. The aim of such education programmes invariably endeavours to educate a globally informed citizenry in response to the contemporary climate crisis through effective teaching and learning. While there have been literature to show how students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour have changed for the better with effective teaching and learning, this article seeks to curate some of these practices, especially those published by the author to exemplify how we can achieve the UN Delors report’s (1998) suggestion that education needs to help students to learn to know, learn to do, learn to be and learn to live together. These desired outcomes are also aligned with the aspirations of geographical education as set out in the International Charter on Geographic Education (CGE, 2016). The article will draw on published works by the author, review the relevance of these studies and compare them with other published works to provide an argument for using the Delors Report to help teachers in their curriculum planning and lesson designs. While education is inherently future-oriented, there needs to be some coherent and contiguous treatment of the way education practices can be used. To this end, the article’s approach to curating the published work will provide a critical discussion using a known framework to advance the discourse on best practices for climate change education. Ultimately the aim of climate change education should be to provide students with the capabilities and opportunities to flourish in society now and in the future, particularly in the face of the challenges brought about by global climate change.

In balancing the role of assessment as an integral part of the curriculum and teaching process and that of a measurement and reporting tool, practitioners are often challenged to design good assessment tasks that fulfil these purposes as well as developing cognitive skills and abilities. While there are many research studies on inquiry in fieldwork and on assessment in geography education, there is little recognition on how the whole process of inquiry acts as a form of fieldwork assessment within geographical education. This chapter proposes that inquiry can be a mode of assessment for and as fieldwork and need not be solely administered at the end of fieldwork activities.

The concept of “waterscapes” is examined, with a focus on applications in secondary schools and the pedagogy for undergraduate geography students. The waterscape emphasis on external flows of capital, political relations, and policy that interact with the physical watershed, as well as the hydrosocial cycle, are particularly well suited to support teacher pedagogical content knowledge because of the flexibility in interpreting and applying concepts using what we have termed “the shallow sustainability approach”. Employing case studies from the Singapore geography curriculum, we explore new pathways for the traditional interpretation of waterscapes that include linking mathematical modelling of hydrologic systems with rich local narratives.

For over 30 years, the Southeast Asian Geography Association (SEAGA) has provided a dynamic platform for the exchange of knowledge, research findings, and ideas among academics, policymakers, and educators from Southeast Asia and those working on Southeast Asia. Using Marsden’s (1989) notion of the politicization of geography by significant power groups, this article describes a critical narrative of the key trends, themes, and topics defining scholarly discourse in the community of SEAGA and its potential impact on school geography in the region. For each of the three decades (1990-1999, 2000-2009, and 2010-2019), the authors analyzed significant themes and issues for each period. Employing purposive sampling of conference proceedings and topics presented between 1990 and 2017, the authors found the following trends over the years: i) the pluralization and diversification of themes and topics; ii) an increasing interest for cross-thematic studies, and iii) a greater emphasis on sustainability and environmental issues in recent years. Based on these observations, the authors acknowledge that the evolution of discourses in SEAGA conferences is also a part of broader thematic shifts in international publications such as the Journal of Geography and has a direct bearing on changes in the geography curriculum in schools in other places around the world. In addition, there is a natural confluence of academic geographers and geography educators in the region in discoursing topics that matter to Southeast Asia.

The previous chapters provided examples on how theory can be translated into practice and how some countries’ schools and Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) are carrying out EfS. This chapter revisits some of the key learning points from the chapters and how they contribute to the three themes of knowing, doing and being in Education for Sustainability.