Teachers Against the Climate Crisis reimagine climate education

Madhulika Banerjee (MB) teaches political science at the University of Delhi, India. Sonali Sathaye (SS) teaches Sociology and Theatre in schools and is a consultant on planetary health and sustainability at St John’s Research Institute in Bangalore, India. Vandana Singh (VS) teaches physics and environment at Framingham State University in the US.

Praveen Gupta: Could you please tell our readers about Teachers Against the Climate Crisis (TACC) and how the Vision Document on Climate Education came to be.

MB, SS, VS: TACC is a non-funded, non-party collective of over 120 teachers, scholars, academics and school teachers primarily based in India. We came together more than five years ago, out of our concern for the complex existential crises we face, and due to the paucity of discussion and action forums for climate education.

Very broadly, our aims are two-fold – among teachers, to deepen understanding of, and engagement with key aspects of the climate crisis: its science, impacts, systemic roots, state policy, political economy, and ways forward. Among students, we hope that such an improved understanding will catalyse more active engagement outside of the classroom and university, to demand the systemic changes needed at different levels to tackle the crisis. We have organized over 30 talks on various aspects of the subject. We also on occasion issue public statements on issues related to climate change and the environment.

Our Vision document came about through discussions within TACC starting more than two years ago. We three co-editors have collected thoughts and ideas from our membership, drafted multiple versions, obtained feedback from TACC members, and finalized the statement that we released in July 2025. The TACC Vision Statement on Climate Education is meant to be a living document, that is, we will continue to solicit feedback from the wider society and revisit the document at regular intervals. Our release event on July 19, 2025 sought feedback from five experts outside TACC and their comments will help inform the next version.

PG: What is your hope and motivation for the Vision Document?

MB, SS, VS: We hope this document will stimulate much needed conversations about what meaningful climate education is, why it is necessary, and what it entails. The unique aspect of the TACC vision statement is that instead of trying to fit climate education into existing frameworks, the frameworks that have failed us, we begin with the question: what does the climate crisis and related crises demand we do, as educators? And, as a group, we attempt to answer it. This entails examining the roots of the crisis and being able to distinguish lip service and greenwashing from genuine engagement with the polycrisis, which must be both just and efficacious.

It is our hope that those who engage with this document will use the material to find their own pathways to discussion/teaching…

Specifically, it is our hope that those who engage with this document will use the material to find their own pathways to discussion/teaching that work for their particular context, materially, socially and economically, and thereby enable them to connect with global processes. For example students could begin by examining the natural world (or lack thereof) in their own setting, or considering how waste is generated and disposed of. Students might visit a landfill or a trash pile and observe what kinds of waste are there, and what that can tell them about consumption/consumption patterns. This can be a jump-off point for exploring how this impacts the world beyond them.

Students could observe their local natural environments, the local species and the changes they are undergoing, and connect these observations with larger scale trends. Pathways to meaningful action could emerge from such local-to-regional-to-global interconnections. In fact, such pathways are already being worked out by groups of people in many different contexts – either community organisations working on specific issues like waste recycling or social movements demanding better interventions from the state. Our Vision Document recommends a deep study of such social-ecological movements so that educators and students can draw from them inspiration, hope, and ideas for their own pathways toward change.

PG: What does the document mean by ‘meaningful Climate Education’ and why is it necessary? What are the key aspects of the TACC Vision?

MB, SS, VS: Conventional education has failed us in the very important function of informing and preparing students for wicked problems like climate change. Much lip service is paid to environmental issues, climate action and climate justice, while the problem continues to get worse and worse every year. Here’s a quote from the document:

“Meaningful education should help create citizens who can think critically and ethically, question conventional ways of thinking, understand and contextualize current problems and issues, and collectively contribute their knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the world.” Our vision rests on four pillars that are essential to meaningful climate education:

1. It must be holistic and inter/transdisciplinary.
2. It must foreground justice and critique the current consumerist socio-economic system which is at the root of the climate crisis.
3. It must be experiential, action-based, service-based and connect the local to the regional and global.
4. It must be Nature-immersive.

The document elaborates on each of these, but briefly, what it entails is to recognize that the climate problem doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that it transcends disciplines, that it is related to other major social-environmental problems like species extinction, and that its root cause is inequitable, extractive and exploitative socio-economic system.

A “meaningful climate education” must demonstrate the intertwined nature of the current crisis.

Thus, a “meaningful climate education” must demonstrate the intertwined nature of the current crisis. This includes a solid understanding of the scientific processes that underlie the causes and implications of climate change – for instance, the nature of greenhouse gases, the links between various aspects of earth systems and the ways in which human activity has changed those systems. Students would learn how climate change is connected to other violations of planetary boundaries resulting in species extinction, chemical pollution, nitrogen cycle imbalance, etc., which constitutes a polycrisis rooted in our socioeconomic system.

This system entrenches systemic inequality in access to resources and opportunities, legitimized through long-entrenched patterns of custom and tradition (such as, for example, class, caste and patriarchy) along with increasing economic inequality and the legacies of colonialism (coloniality of power and knowledge). Students must therefore learn how issues of social justice and equity are inextricably intertwined with the crisis in the earth’s biogeophysical systems.

Educators have a responsibility not only to bring out these key aspects, but to re-imagine the classroom as a space where hierarchy and conventional wisdom are questioned, and where attention is paid to both the cognitive aspect of learning and the psychosocial aspects. This requires engendering collective agency among students through meaningful practical projects. All of this, of course, has major implications for teacher training. The document lays out seven recommended steps toward change in this regard.

PG: Despite well-established basic science and evidence – is it still business as usual (BAU) with regard to climate change?

MB, SS, VS: Given that the climate crisis and its attendant ills are not only getting worse every year but accelerating, it may be more accurate to state that we are beyond business as usual, at least looking at it in 2025. Despite some real (but inadequate) strides toward needed change, the problem is that global economies continue to operate on the basis of endless exponential growth that is completely at odds with Earth system boundaries. Although some systems have grown more efficient in terms of energy use (and with a burgeoning RE sector), the fundamental belief in greater consumption as a cornerstone of a richer life – and the inequalities that such an approach engenders – has not altered.

Global economies continue to operate on the basis of endless exponential growth that is completely at odds with Earth system boundaries.

Thus it is that climate emissions have gone up, not down over the years post-Covid, that the Earth has crossed the 1.5 degree C threshold set by the Paris Agreement in 2015 over many days of the last year – so that now scientists, politicians and businesses are talking of limiting warming to 2 degree C, which, even if we could reach it by 2100, would be likely to unleash a number of catastrophic feedbacks. The “circular economy” remains a distant dream. Our Vision Document needs to be read against such a backdrop.

PG: “These problems are particularly acute in the Indian context”. Could you please elaborate?

MB, SS, VS: In India, there are two broad dimensions of the acute nature that need to be a part of climate education. The first, is that the carbon-intensive nature of our industry and the chemical intensive nature of our agriculture have significant impact on those who do not have a say in making the decisions in deploying these processes, while there is a continuous powerful narrative of their value in national development. On the other hand, there are many, albeit scattered interventions of sustainable practices in all kinds of sectors, often by those that are neglected in the trajectory of development, and they remain without a voice.

So it is the contestation between the two that needs to be addressed by climate education. In addition, India and South Asia in general are especially susceptible to climate impacts due to their geographical location and the vulnerability of large populations of marginalized peoples.

PG: What in your view should students get from climate education?

MB, SS, VS: Students need to get the big picture of the interconnectedness of all problems across disciplines, as also the ability to understand the micro pictures at their local scale, and comprehend how the two are connected. At the same time, they need to recognise that there are multiple ways of knowing, and that certain local knowledge traditions can be both useful and inspiring. The real achievement of climate education lies in a belief in hope and action, rather than the cynicism and despair of the privileged – which is the case with a lot of the educated in general, the climate educated in particular.

PG: What are the recommendations in the document with regard to first steps toward change?

MB, SS, VS: Near the end of the Vision Statement we recommend seven ‘first steps’ toward change, which focus primarily on the teacher as changemaker. Because we have inherited from colonialism a siloed education system, it is necessary to train teachers in inter/transdisciplinary thinking and teaching, which, of course, requires high quality education research in this area. This also implies training in systems thinking, so that both the scientific understanding of climate change and the polycrisis and the sociopolitical implications can be elucidated. We call for training in Nature-immersive education at all scales so that students can have an experiential appreciation for the web of life to which we belong.

Because we have inherited from colonialism a siloed education system, it is necessary to train teachers in inter/transdisciplinary thinking and teaching…

None of these things is possible without addressing two major barriers, one of which is the hierarchical classroom structure, where the teacher is the ‘sage on a stage’ and where, in India in particular, societal inequities like caste, gender and religion can further exacerbate hierarchical divisions in the classroom. Beyond the classroom itself, especially for K-12 education there is a lot of pressure on teachers to conform, and the power differential at the larger scale cannot be ignored.

So, it is not just teacher training toward a radically different classroom dynamic that is necessary, but school administrators, principals, and university administration also need training in engendering and enabling flattened and shared-power structures. The second barrier is the lack of resources for teachers, especially in rural India, where poor compensation, lack of opportunities for training and motivation, and lack of materials are serious issues. So, we point out that these need to be addressed.

There are two other factors at the larger scale. One, we need radical curricular changes to accommodate transdisciplinary, nature-based education, so that anyone from any discipline can teach/ collaborate with a teacher from another discipline on climate change, and so that there is also room for overarching, cross-connecting courses that pull all the threads together. Two, we need to establish a tradition of high quality research on climate and environmental education in the Global South. Much of the work on climate education emerges from and is centred in the Global North, and the South needs our own experiments, conceptualizations and actions embedded in our own contexts.

But also, centuries of colonialism and the current crises are bringing into question dominant conceptualizations of climate change, and Global South perspectives on climate education can add fresh perspectives and ideas of benefit to the world.

PG: MB, SS, VS – Congratulations for an excellent articulation! This can be a playbook for what much of the world ought to do for addressing the biggest existential crisis we have brought upon ourselves.

This article is also published on The Diversity Blog. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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