Teaching history during the climate and nature crisis: Assessing scale, human agency and historical-planetary change

Abstract

The climate- and nature crisis has gained increased attention in the public sphere and within the field of education in recent years. In this context, history as a school subject has the potential to play an important role by developing pupils' insights into the historical, and thus the human-driven, aspects of the climate- and nature crisis. This article explores the debates about the discipline of history in the Anthropocene age and examines if perspectives and concepts from this literature can be operationalized into valuable tools for analyzing and assessing history teaching. The exploration has resulted in three theoretical tools in the form of analytical questions concerning scales for time and space, human agency, and historical-planetary change. The tools have been used to analyze three Norwegian textbooks in history for upper-secondary schools. The analysis is oriented towards exploring if the textbooks make the historical dimension of the climate- and nature-crisis tangible. The result of the analysis indicates that the climate- and nature crisis constitutes a challenge in Norwegian history teaching, where central disciplinary perspectives and categories disappear when questions concerning climate and nature are addressed.