Knowledge transformation from climate change science in Finnish school geography from 1985 to 2024. How are the impacts of climate change presented?
Abstract
Climate change has been a well-known phenomenon in science and the public press since the 1950s even if controversial positions were present about that period. The press and some publications wrote that the Earth was in a cool period and that a new ice age might emerge, but on the other hand, several publications were writing about temperature rise. In 1979, the WMO conference presented the causes and impacts of climate change almost as we know it today. Despite this, previous research has shown that climate change has only slowly transformed Finnish school geography. This article aims to interpret how the impacts of climate change have been presented from 1985 to the present. This study analyses Finnish National Core Curricula and textbooks for upper secondary school geography. The analysis is based on the conceptualisations of knowledge transformation and powerful geographical knowledge. Climate change was first time mentioned in the core curriculum of 2003. Textbooks in the 1980s and 1990s to some extent still presented climate change discourse from the 1970s. Textbooks based on the curricula of 2015 and 2019 give their readers a holistic perspective on the impacts of climate change, providing powerful geographical knowledge. According to our results, disciplinary knowledge can be found first at the classroom level in textbooks by the work of textbook authors and only later in institutional curricula.References
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