Learning and Teaching of Climate Change, Sustainability and Disaster Risk Reduction in Teacher Education in England and Japan

This paper reports the study which explored the learning and teaching of the topics of climate change, sustainability and disaster risk reduction in secondary-level teacher education programs in England and Japan. Through interviewing teacher educators, the study particularly probed how teacher education programs used local knowledge and collaboration in discussing the above topics. Geography tends to be the main subject area for these global agendas, but its crammed curriculum is “an ongoing challenge” for teacher education. Some researchers demonstrate that university-based initial teacher education has “ignored” training teachers on how to implement environmental and sustainability education at schools. Besides, the inquiries into how initial teacher education equips geography teachers for the learning and teaching of disaster risk reduction are still scarce. This paper aims to fill this gap by bringing together the fields of geography education, climate change and sustainability education, disaster risk reduction education and initial teacher education.