This paper explores climate change education as a living and responsive field of didactic inquiry, drawing on empirical findings from two complementary studies on students’ and teachers’ understanding of climate change. Together, these studies illustrate how climate change education evolves at the intersection of knowledge, emotion, and action, revealing both the potential and the tensions inherent in teaching for climate literacy and action competence.

The first study, a large-scale survey of upper secondary students (N=582), examined relationships between climate literacy, risk perception, and climate-friendly intentions to act. The results demonstrate that risk perception significantly improves predictive models of climate-friendly action, more strongly than climate change content knowledge. This suggests that how young people feel and interpret risks is a crucial component of climate action competence, although excessive perceptions of risk can also induce anxiety and disengagement. These findings highlight the didactic challenge of cultivating an informed, balanced sense of risk that motivates meaningful engagement rather than paralysis.

In the light of students’ perceived anxiety in relation to climate change, the school board of a municipality in Sweden took initiative to a collaboration with didactic researchers on how such emotions can be addressed. The second study employed action research together with science and social science teachers at three lower secondary schools. Teachers and researchers co-designed teaching sequences focusing on local risks of flooding linked to climate change. Data from meetings, classroom observations, and interviews reveal disciplinary tensions and differing didactic orientations: science teachers emphasized the physical phenomena underlying climate change, whereas social science teachers prioritized emotional engagement, value discussions, and civic participation. Students appreciated learning about concrete, local climate impacts but expressed weak emotional engagement and low perceived personal risk. The study revealed large differences in perspectives on climate change among the teachers and researchers in the project team, the school administration that initiated the project, and the students that took part in the teaching. One reason for the different perspectives might be the rapid changes in the media focus, turning from sympathies with Greta Thunberg when the project was initiated to a concern about petrol prices when the teaching was planned. However, there might be more fundamental reasons behind the differences between science teachers and social science teachers. The science teachers tended to prefer a focus on students’ knowledge of climate change as a physical phenomenon, adhering to a traditional Vision I (Roberts, 2007) of scientific literacy. In contrast, the social science teachers had an ambition to address consequences for how the students lead their everyday lives and can engage in the community, which relates more closely to an alternative Vision II (Roberts, 2007) of scientific literacy.

Our experience from these two studies is that climate change is an educational topic that calls for a transdisciplinary approach, where teachers move beyond their disciplinary boundaries, to target students’ values and emotions. However, in the current research it was challenging to adopt a joint perspective on climate literacy, and disciplinary boundaries remained. We propose that powerful knowledge as a notion could be a way to ensure relevance of climate teaching in society and students’ lives, while not losing sight of core content.