Learning to explain environmental crises: A dialogic analysis of teacher professional learning between Chile and the United States

Abstract Many studies and initiatives are animated by the potential for science education to intervene in the climate crisis and crises of environmental degradation and disinformation. For science teachers to learn to address these issues in their classes, their teaching must expand beyond scientific facts and face controversial social aspects. Dealing with these crises' complexity and politics implies substantial teacher education and professional development shifts. Intending to contribute to understanding how to prepare teachers to engage in critical teaching, this article describes a collaborative cross‐study dialogue to analyse science teachers' artefacts. Pre‐service science teachers from Chilean universities participated, creating explanations about the climate crisis and mutually giving peer feedback. Likewise, we explore the storylined relationships between local issues of industrial pollution and chemistry content written by experienced teachers who were organised in a collective around issues of environmental racism in a large city in the United States. Through our dialogue, we refined a tool for formative feedback that contributes to research and teaching on environmental crises by supporting awareness of ideological issues in climate change and sustainability education (CCSE) and pedagogies of hope. We discuss how teachers in different global contexts address (or not) scientific and social justice concerns within environmental problems created by extractivist economies. Our orientation is towards horizontal dialogue and epistemic humility that recognises the problematic historical relationship between our nations and moves towards imagining more just futures. We conclude by reflecting on orientations for practice to critically address climate and environmental crisis education in different stages of teacher preparation and development. We argue that through noticing controversies, possibilities, and questions, we can transcend the barriers of dominance and dichotomy between the Global South and North and between individual and collective action in climate change and sustainability education.