Embracing Complexity and Uncertainties to Deal with Climate Change Challenges: An Interdisciplinary Module for Preservice Teacher Education

Climate change is the biggest threat humanity is facing and will face in the future. In teaching, its interdisciplinary and complex nature raises conceptual, epistemological, relational, and institutional challenges. We present a module aimed at preparing preservice teachers to deal with some of these challenges: embracing complexity and managing scientific uncertainties. The module is part of the IDENTITIES project, and it is designed for pre-service teachers’ education as an interdisciplinary boundary zone. Its main novelty concerns the emphasis on complexity and uncertainty, implemented as conceptual contents fundamental for climate change and, more in general, for developing a sustainability mindset, as “epistemological activators” to activate a meta-reflection on the nature of science, and as “boundary objects” to foster a dialogue among disciplines. The module was implemented in an international summer school (June 2022) with 14 preservice teachers coming from France, Greece, Italy, and Spain. The analysis of the implementation has been carried out to investigate the type of knowledge that pre-service teachers activate in dealing with these themes. Findings show that an interdisciplinary environment can help unveil disciplinary presuppositions that prevent the embracing of complexity and uncertainty in science. The module implementation showed how complexity and uncertainty can be considered powerful boundary objects to explore and navigate climate change from different perspectives. The trust in Newtonian classical linearity and determinism still represents an important obstacle to developing sustainability competences. Criticalities that emerged from the implementation are our piece of evidence that contributes to arguing to what extent climate change represents a deep epistemological challenge, avoiding in this way stereotyped ideas of science or artificial barriers between scientific disciplines and Social Science and Humanities.