A complex issue at the intersection of science, emotion, and politics, climate change is on the minds of young people across the globe, as evidenced through worldwide climate strikes. This manuscript presents an analysis of letters written by 350 young people across the US during the 2016 Presidential election season. These letters, submitted through a digital platform called “Letters to the Next President,” demanded public attention to climate change. Using mixed-methods, we identified in these letters three distinct discourses, or ways of discussing climate change: a solution-oriented discourse, a climate politics discourse, and a discourse of doom. These discourses give insight into the types of knowledge and emotions that intersect for youth about climate change, while also demonstrating the politicization of climate change for some youth in the US. We offer research and pedagogical implications, noting the need for educators to consider the politicized contexts that shape climate change learning.

Despite improvement to the public’s awareness of climate change, we have yet to achieve the necessary transformations to our planet’s future–we believe that educators can and should be an influential catalyst in the shift. Educators around the world foster people with a deep understanding of climate change and the capacity to address it. In this paper, we synthesize the existing climate education literature to put forward a clear definition of the concept of climate literacy. We then draw attention to a significant problem with climate literacy, agency, which is often un or ill-defined in climate change education scholarship, resulting in substantial impacts on climate educators’ efforts. We conclude this paper by offering a reimagined vision of climate education that shifts away from acceptance of climate change to empowerment for meaningful climate action.

This study adds to the construct of science teacher noticing through an analysis that integrates concepts from pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) frameworks. It examines 929 instances of science teacher noticing made via video annotation tools (VATs) over the course of 38 early-career, secondary science teachers’ participation in a two-year professional learning experience. This study asked specifically about: 1) interacting elements of a classroom (students, practice, content) teachers noticed in videos of their own practice, 2) patterns in knowledge-based reasoning evidenced in noticing, and 3) the role of content knowledge in such knowledge-based reasoning. Using mixed methods analysis, we found that the majority of annotations exhibited a singular focus (i.e. students, teacher practice, or content) and tended to focus on students and/or practice, with less attention to content. However, we also identified a statistically significant relationship between complexity of noticing (i.e. attention to multiple foci) and the presence of knowledge-based reasoning. Further qualitative analysis of the subset of annotations that attended to content suggested that such attention to content could be an important link within teacher noticing to connect practice to student thinking. This study highlights the value of scaffolding attention to content and to multiple foci within science teacher noticing. It also demonstrates the potential for VATs to facilitate noticing.

Civic engagement that leverages scientific concepts and reasoning is cited as a goal of science education, yet little research has attended to authentic enactments of science-related civic engagement that youth undertake currently. We shed light on this understudied area by investigating youth letters written to the (then unknown) future US president in 2016. Using qualitative text analysis, we examined youth scientific reasoning via argumentation about climate change, aiming to clarify how youth use science in conjunction with other forms of reasoning within civic engagement, specifically around two popular icons of climate change—polar bears and the Great Barrier Reef. We describe several observed trends including a high frequency of logical appeals and their co-occurrence with implicit ethical appeals. We use these findings to offer implications for science education research and practice, suggesting explicit attention to the role of morals, ethics, and politics in science-related civic engagement.