Climate Change Education in Curriculum Documents by The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training: A Content Analysis

The education sector has increasingly been involved in informing learners about the issue of climate change (Reid, 2019), given that this issue represents an existential threat to young people and, generally, to the human race (Sears, 2020). The education sector has responded to the urgency of climate change by proposing the notion of “climate change education”. It can be defined as the process of learning in the face of climate change-related risks and uncertainty (Stevenson et al., 2017). Climate change education is argued to aim at raising primary and secondary school students’ awareness of climate change and its consequences (Tang, 2024). Climate change education is embraced by the education sector in a number of Nordic countries, in particular, Norway (Seikkula-Leino et al., 2021). In Norway, for instance, climate change education seems to fall within the scope of The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (henceforth – The Directorate), which is responsible for the governance of the education sector from kindergarten to secondary school (Kapranov, 2021). To-date, however, there is no published research on how climate change education is represented in The Directorate’s curriculum documents that pertain to pre-primary, primary, and secondary school curricula. Seeking to bridge the current research gap, the article presents a study that looks into this underresearched aspect by means of analysing a corpus of The Directorate’s curriculum documents available on its official homepage https://www.udir.no/. The corpus of The Directorate’s curriculum documents is investigated in the study by applying an approach to content analysis developed by Krippendorff (2004). The results of the content analysis indicate that climate change education appears to be represented in the corpus in a rather disproportionate manner. Specifically, climate change education is addressed, predominantly, in the curriculum documents in sciences in upper secondary school, whereas it is substantially underrepresented in curriculum documents on pre-primary and primary school levels. These and other findings are further discussed in the article. The article concludes with a range of practical suggestions that arise out of the present findings.