This work is in collaboration with Lisa Steffensen, Ragnhild Hansen, & Kjellrun Hiis Hauge (Bergen University College).

Climate change is one of the most urgent global issues. Mathematics is used to describe and predict climate change as well as to communicate it, to scientists, politicians, the general public and children. Hence the teaching and learning of mathematics is important to not only get a sense of climate-change- messages but also to be critical about them. We are a research team of teacher educators at the University of Ottawa and Bergen University College, Norway, who implemented a survey to get a sense of elementary and secondary school teachers’ activities and aims in relation to climate change. Here, we present how mathematics teachers in Canada and Norway use the climate change as a topic in the mathematics classrooms, from varying degrees of critical view, for different aims and from different perspectives.

Bios:

Yasmine Abtahi is a postdoctoral fellow at L'Université du Québec à Montréal and a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. She is interested in the learning of mathematics, mediated by ”things/tools” kids think with. Yasmine likes nature and humans. Hence, in her current work, she is (re)searching how universality of mathematics might perpetuate social injustice and how environmental issues – that are harming our earth – are being looked at, with the children, in mathematics classrooms.

Richard Barwell is Professor of Mathematics Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa and a former editor of For the Learning of Mathematics. His research interests include linguistic and discursive issues in mathematics education, teaching and learning mathematics in bilingual or multilingual contexts, and environmental sustainability and mathematics education. His work has been published in journals of mathematics education, applied linguistics, and general education.

Lisa Steffensen is a PhD student at the Centre for Educational Research at the Faculty of Education, Bergen University College, Norway. Her PhD project concern how mathematic education can contribute to develop students’ critical perspectives by working with climate change in the mathematics classroom. Steffensen has a background as a mathematic and natural science teacher in lower secondary school.

Kjellrun Hiis Hauge is the Director of Centre for Educational Research at the Faculty of Education, Bergen University College, Norway. Her main research interests lie within critical mathematics education and inquiry based teaching and learning to promote critical citizenship. Her recent work has been on merging ideas and uncertainty topologies from post-normal science with critical mathematics education. Hauge earlier worked as a researcher at the Institute of Marine Research. Her field of interest was science for policy, in particular on interdisciplinary research on uncertainty in science based advice for environmental policy making.

Ragnhild Hansen is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education, Bergen University College, Norway. Her main research interests lie within critical mathematics education, in particular the use of mathematical modelling in education. Previously, Hansen worked as a researcher on different modelling projects at the Institute of Marine Research and Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, in Bergen. She holds a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Bergen. She can be contacted at rhan (at) hvl (dot) com.