Teachers' Sense of Place and Perspectives on Climate Change Education: Moving Toward Community‐Based, Justice‐Oriented Approaches

ABSTRACT Science education often approaches climate change as a scientific issue, disconnected from its multidimensional nature and lived realities. As climate‐related disasters intensify, teachers must help students confront climate challenges by connecting scientific learning to local contexts and addressing embedded systemic injustices. However, research is needed to explore how situated lived experiences shape teachers' pedagogical perspectives, responsibility, and hope toward community‐based, justice‐oriented climate learning opportunities. This study centers the voices and experiences of Bedouin indigenous teachers who are themselves minoritized and serve students living in the same context. Drawing upon critical narrative inquiry, we examine how these teachers make sense of place‐based climate change experiences as residents, parents, and community members, and how these experiences inform their pedagogical perspectives and the sociopolitical tensions therein. Our findings reveal that teachers' sense of place shapes how they experience climate change through their cultural connections to land, witnessing environmental degradation, and experiencing systemic vulnerability. They contextualize climate education in ways reflecting community concerns, lived experiences, and assets. However, their sense of place embodies tensions between cultural identity and social exclusion, with climate change acting as a threat multiplier that intensifies existing vulnerabilities. Teachers expressed the burden of confronting multiple oppressions that constrain their agency. They navigate complex positions as members of vulnerable communities, “a Bedouin living this tragedy,” while simultaneously operating within oppressive structures, including schools, policies, and colonial scientific frameworks. By foregrounding a sense of place, our study offers new ways for understanding how teachers position themselves within climate issues and what justice‐oriented climate education can look like in their communities. Place‐based perspectives can support locally grounded, transformative pedagogies by recognizing minoritized teachers as local knowledge holders. We argue that science education must recognize teachers as transformative agents and foster critical hope that enables them to navigate structural barriers while sustaining transformative possibilities.