A Reflective Exploration of an Integrative Approach to Teaching Climate Change and Sustainable Development: A mediated flipped classroom design

Climate change is arguably a complex issue that is affecting different forms and aspects of life on Earth. Climate change challenges manifest as ‘wicked problems’. They also manifest as development concerns impacting socio-ecological systems through extreme weather events that include tornados, severe storms and ensuing floods, high temperatures and droughts. This requires inclusive and holistic knowledge of climate change and its relationship to other development concerns, such as those represented by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This way of coming to understand climate change can potentially assist students to develop capacity for addressing locally experienced climate change risks and impacts. In the past, I taught climate change, biodiversity, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in isolation which tended to make students see these as isolated rather than relational concepts. This enquiry into my own teaching and mediation practice, seeks to respond to this problem. This article is constituted as a qualitative reflective analysis by me, a teacher educator, who explored some classroom activities on how SDGs can be used in an integrative way to advance climate change education. Document analysis of teaching notes on PowerPoint, lesson recordings, and my reflective diary used during the teaching process, constituted the main sources of data for generating a narrative description of the teaching experiences of using a ‘flipped classroom’. I used socio-cultural theory of mediation to reflect on the mediation process catalysed through the flipped classroom design. The study showed that it is possible to start off with developing understanding of the relationships between SDG13 (Climate Action), biodiversity (SDGs 14 and 15) and other SDGs by helping students to relate prevailing climate science to their own environment and development experiences as a precursor to integrate and understand the other SDGs. An integrative learning framework that has potential to mediate effective learning for two progressive zones of proximal development is suggested.