Push to highlight climate change in tertiary curricula

As Zimbabwe becomes more vulnerable to climate change, calls have been made to heighten awareness through the teacher education curriculum at universities and colleges.

A panel of education experts has proposed to the Zimbabwe Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development that climate change be offered as a subject and horizontally introduced in all subjects at teacher training in universities and colleges.

The ministry, with support from the United Nations Climate Change Learning Partnership (UN CC:Learn), is leading efforts to develop national climate change learning strategies.

Kudzai Ndidzano, the deputy director of the ministry’s climate change department, said that, while significant progress has been made in integrating climate change into the basic education curriculum from early childhood development up to advanced level, there was weak integration of climate change into the higher and tertiary education learning system.

“The responsible university faculties and teacher training colleges are yet to integrate climate change into their teacher training programmes as a cross-cutting theme to meet the needs of the new competence-based education curriculum,” he said.

Harmonisation of climate curriculum

Dr Crispen Dirwai, a lecturer in the department of science design and technology education at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) told University World News that the current curriculum for training teachers required harmonisation and the mainstreaming of climate change.

Dirwai said that, even within the disciplines mostly associated with climate change, it is climatology that is taught and not climate change in particular.

“At the faculty of education at the UZ, we are coming up with new programmes, and within the new programmes we have tried to come up with modules on climate change. For example, in the bachelor of education degree, we have a module called ‘Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation’, as a module and not just as a topic,” he said.

Professor Fanuel Tagwira, the permanent secretary for higher and tertiary education, innovation, science and technology development, said the mainstreaming of climate change into higher education curricula is important, but universities were at different stages of the process.

Curriculum change process

“Curricula change cannot be achieved in a week or month. Curricula are planned by experts and presented to the stakeholders before being taken to the curriculum review committees who scrutinise the submissions before presenting [them] to academic boards, and finally to senates, in the case of universities and teacher training colleges,” he told University World News.

“These changes must also be included in the minimum bodies of knowledge reports for universities. This is the journey our institutions are following. On a more positive note, most of our institutions are already revising their curriculum to align it with the Heritage Based Education 5.0 policy.

“This policy encourages mainstreaming of environmental issues, including climate change, so we are on course,” he said.

Once the curriculum is reviewed and mainstreamed, universities and colleges will be able to start teaching using the adjusted curriculum, he said.

Material development in the form of teacher guides has been identified as a priority if the exercise is to be successful, as well as level-specific climate change handbooks and local research publications.

However, Tagwira points out that universities do have experts on climate change who can assist in the process so, while training may be necessary in some cases, by and large it is not a problem.

In keeping with the move to bring climate change into the mainstream of education curriculum, Stellenbosch University in South Africa will be opening a School of Climate Studies in June. This will be the first of its kind in that country, and will be “in support of the transition to a climate-resilient society and a low-carbon economy”.