Teaching sustainability and climate change in Canada and Norway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how sustainability and climate change are positioned and enacted in lower secondary classrooms in Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada) and Finnmark (Norway). Guided by each jurisdiction’s curriculum, we ask how teachers understand the curricular place of these topics and how they describe teaching them in practice. The study employs a qualitative design, consisting of one focus group with Canadian teachers and three individual interviews with Norwegian teachers. Findings indicate that both systems signal sustainability as an interdisciplinary priority; however, classroom uptake is concentrated in science/natural science, with other subjects participating through teacher initiative. Teachers relied on low-overhead, place-responsive routines—such as gardening and hydroponics cycles, short outdoor inquiries, large-format mapping, and local energy or food system tasks—that fit existing timetables and made participation visible. Spread was constrained by timetable rigidity and thin cross-subject assessment structures. We contribute practical implications for timetable design, shared assessment artefacts, and partnership infrastructures that distribute responsibility beyond single teachers or subjects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".