Irish primary school teachers’ engagement with climate change education: balancing connection and criticality

Climate change education (CCE) is increasingly recognised as an essential response to addressing the climate crisis. However, research that examines how CCE is conceptualised and enacted by primary school teachers is limited, particularly in the Irish context. Therefore, this paper seeks to examine how CCE is conceptualised and enacted by primary school teachers in Ireland. Through an online survey, this research assessed engagement with CCE-centred content and pedagogical approaches focused on 1) fostering connection with the wider web-of-life 2) nurturing critical engagement with structural drivers of climate change (CC), which extended to include teachers’ perceptions of the importance of, and frequency in which they encourage, individual and collective climate actions and 3) teachers’ overall engagement with CCE. Results indicate that pedagogies positioned to stimulate connection were engaged with more than those aimed at fostering criticality. Moreover, low-impact individual actions (e.g. energy-saving behaviours) and low-impact civic actions (e.g. discussion with family/the local community) were rated as more important and encouraged more frequently than high-impact individual or politically oriented collective actions. Overall, engagement with CCE was intermittent, reflecting both the age of primary school children and broader neoliberal constraints. Neoliberal-influenced education intensifies curricular pressures and prioritises outcome driven logics, impacting the implementation of slow and reflective pedagogies that enhance CCE. Findings highlight the need to support teachers in enacting CCE that nurtures connection and criticality, while also supporting them to empower children to question and challenge the sociocultural system underpinning the climate crisis.