Why focus on the science curriculum?

We focused on the science curriculum for two reasons- Ghana’s developmentalist vision of science education and a global blind spot in science education as objective and without attending to social reality.

We focused specifically on the science curriculum in Ghana as opposed to other subjects such as history, geography, religious and moral and creative arts because; science education is exceptionally viewed by current and previous governments, stakeholders and policymakers in Ghana as a tool for national development (Ministry of Education, 2021). It occupies an important hierarchy in how policy makers view Ghana and largely Africa’s development (Brown-Acquaye, Reference Brown-Acquaye2004; Osseo-Asare, Reference Osseo-Asare2013; Tetteh et al., Reference Tetteh, Akon-Yamga, Jumpah and Omari2020). Recently, Ghana’s Minister of Environment, Science and Technology asserted “Our agenda is simple. We want to use science and technology to develop so the plan is to make our society science and technology-minded” (Ministry of Environment, Science & Technology, 2021). This developmentalist or perhaps instrumentalist vision of science is unfortunate because it elides cultural, ethical and moral quagmires of the scientific enterprise as well as the challenges to biodiversity and the environment. The developmentalist vision is also neoliberal; partly responsible for the capitalist and globalist exploitation of natural resources and labour of people in the global south (Fremstad & Paul, Reference Fremstad and Paul2022; Mikulewicz & Taylor, Reference Mikulewicz and Taylor2020).

The second reason for focusing on the science curriculum is because in a much broader conversation, science education, as compared to environmental education and the humanities and social sciences, has lagged in attending to sociological and cultural concerns (Hart, Reference Hart2002; Lucas, Reference Lucas1980; Gough, Reference Gough1993; Wals et al., Reference Wals, Brody, Dillon and Stevenson2014). There have been some attempts to expand the notion of science and science education to address social, cultural and economic realities and inequities. But we will argue that these efforts are mostly limited and inequities remain at multiple levels such as the lack of culturally relevant curriculum and instruction (Moura et al., Reference Moura, Alsop, Camel and Guerra2023; Tovar-Gálvez, Reference Tovar-Gálvez2023; Robbins & Cipollone, Reference Robbins and Cipollone2023) and inadequate access to material resources by education researchers in the global South (Hassan et al., Reference Hassan, Groot and Volante2022). In many resource- scarce contexts, science curriculum materials are the main guide or the lens for classroom instruction suggesting a greater need for paying attention to the science curriculum (Barton, Reference Barton2001; Boakye, Reference Boakye2015). Climate Change education presents an opportunity to create an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary science curriculum.

We need climate change education in the science curriculum to be inclusive of globalisation, the socio-economic realities of people, power and politics, indigeneity and local ecologies and histories. We know, children have the capacity to engage with the complexities of knowledge and ideas when educators recognise and support student ideas and identities. This means, children in science classes are not passive recipients of information, but rather they interact and engage with that knowledge. As Apple (Reference Apple1992) observed “Students bring their own classed, raced, religious, and gendered biographies with them as well. They, too, accept, reinterpret, and reject what counts as legitimate knowledge selectively” (p.5). Thus, the science of climate change needs to factor the lived realities of children into political and policy discourses in tackling climate change.

Coming to know: experiential and analytical

In this section, we discuss how we came to write this paper. We arrived at the underlying problem in this paper through five distinct and intersecting ways.

The novelist, Morgan (Reference Morgan2017) observed “The formation of personality is inextricable from place. It strikes me as an interesting example of dependent co-arising; land shapes the organism, which then reshapes—literally and figuratively—the land” (p.1). Morgan’s observations apply to all the authors of this article. First, we are writing this paper having been shaped by Ghana’s land, soils, biodiversity, sea, cultural practices and its people. We believe our footprints have also shaped whatever landscapes we have tread in our lives. We have a spiritual and ethical connection to Ghana. Climate Change poses a threat to the rich and heterogeneous ecosystems and cultural services that have sustained us, Ghana and its people for generations.

Secondly, we are writing this paper from a position of relationality with our families and friends. As Tynan (Reference Tynan2021), an indigenous scholar in Australia observed “Relationality is learnt from stories, watching our Old People yarn or sitting with Country – relationality is seldom learnt from academic journal articles” (p.1). As writers of this article, we are all part of different indigenous communities and families in Ghana. Through various informal and personal conversations and stories (Dinner table, Funerals, Naming Ceremonies) with family and friends, some of whom are parents and have children of school-going age, we have come to learn of their concerns for climate change education and broadly science education. They expressed the need for a sustainable education for their children and future generations. They want climate change education to empower their children. But at the same time, they recognise the larger global and political forces of capital and extraction shaping the world. They recognise that the current science curriculum lacks local and culturally relevant content or the curriculum falls short in addressing the lived realities of their children.

Thirdly, we came to this work through a reading of the published literature on climate change education. There is a paucity of scholarship on climate change education in Ghana (Appendix C). We used search engines such as ERIC, and African Education Research Database to locate studies on Ghanaian climate education as shown in Appendix C. We also conducted bibliographic and random Google searches and located works published about Ghana in the Journal of Environmental Education, Environmental Education Research and Australian Journal of Environmental Education (Appendix C). Our observation of the literature suggests that we need more studies on curriculum, instruction, evaluation and assessments and we need more locally affiliated Ghanaian researchers. We observed that a significant number of the studies were conducted by authors situated in Western institutions. The dominance of Western research means that other ways of being and existing in the world are relegated to the background. However, bringing into the academy bodies of work/literature from the global South expands and challenges our ideas about the purposes of schooling, educational policy and the human experience. The latter is particularly significant since climate change is not isolated to one country. Rather it affects people in different contexts, situations and geographies.

Fourth, we come to this work with decades of experience as teachers and educators in Ghana. We know; professional teaching experience is instrumental in how researchers frame the problem statement in their research (Kelsay, Reference Kelsay1991). As former and current teachers in Ghana, we have first-hand knowledge of the workings of the curriculum and the educational system in Ghana. Collectively, we have about 15 years of experience teaching in Ghana and environmental outreach. At the moment, one of the authors is an active science teacher in Ghana implementing the curriculum in their classroom. In our practice as teachers, we have observed the individualist framing of climate change that elides global capitalist systems. We acknowledge the technical emphasis on greenhouse gases.

Finally, we have come to this work through critical reading and reflection. Since the commissioning of Ghana’s Science Curriculum in 2019 by the government of Ghana, we have met over the phone and zoom and talked about its content. Following a critical reading approach (Sobe, Reference Sobe2023), we have reviewed the climate change content as individuals and have met as a collective to discuss its contents, sort out its objectives and unpack its learning objectives and address the problems discussed in this paper.

Climate change content in Ghana’s science curriculum

Before delving into the problems with Ghana’s Climate Change Content, we provide below, a summary of the content of Ghana’s climate change curriculum. Following our readings and reflections we observed; Climate Change Content in Ghana’s Curriculum follows three broad framings and these are the Causes of Climate Change, the Impacts of Climate Change and Policy Solutions. The causes of climate change are attributed to human activity and the role of greenhouse gases are discussed in detail. The curriculum satisfies a lot of the correct and technical details about carbon emissions. The curriculum also presents broad framings of climate impacts. There is a particular focus on fisheries and agriculture. Rapid urbanisation and economic shifts are absent. The threat of climate change is duly recognised with generic allusions to humans and the environment. Finally, the curriculum recommends some policy solutions to deal with climate change. Concepts such as green economy, climate mitigation, climate adaptation and global citizenship are used to frame the policy solutions. But as we argue in the section below, these concepts are loosely connected, poorly discussed and, we argue that the Ghanaian Climate Change Content does not attend seriously to the global forces shaping the climate crisis. Because the curriculum is the basis on which textbooks and other learning materials are developed in Ghana, the curriculum content at the very least needs to be comprehensive and educative. To this end, we argue that the curriculum and documents used in teaching from Ghana should embrace the format of an “educative” curriculum. An educational curriculum designed to support teacher learning and knowledge (Schneider et al., Reference Schneider and Krajcik2002; Davis et al., Reference Davis, Palincsar, Smith, Arias and Kademian2017; Krajcik & Delen, Reference Krajcik and Delen2017) by providing content, exercises and assessments that increase teachers' understanding and resourcefulness on any subject matter. Applying the concept of an educative curriculum to the curriculum from Ghana means, the curriculum should embody some affordances that deepen teacher knowledge about climate change.

Recommendations and new directions

The Science curriculum on climate change needs to move beyond technical language about green economy and personal/individual behaviours to curbing greenhouse gases to an appraisal of climate change as part of a larger discourse on global power and politics. Otherwise, climate change education will be a blunt instrument for cultivating resilience among youth. This means the science curriculum and its emphasis on individual and community actions, cannot be decoupled from the global market forces of capital and production. Globalisation, in practice, has opened up vast channels of communication, knowledge exchange, cultural engagement and influences, and financial capital across borders and geographies in Ghana. And while aspects of these intercultural exchanges have supported development in Ghana, they also come with structural inequities and power imbalances particularly, for children and youth.

To build resilience for climate change among Ghanaian young people, children and youth in Ghana must be educated on the links between globalisation, local conditions and climate change policy. This will provide them with the tools to navigate the economic and social transformations brought on by the global and local impacts of climate change. And while “local” can be an important description of particular communities, the complex identities that underpin how countries in the global South are organised must be acknowledged when it comes to climate change adaptation as such understandings come with implications for children and youth. Here, the science curriculum should engage seriously with local histories and Indigenous Ghanaian languages and arts as part of a broader conceptualisation of Ghana’s place in the world. This means that the individual should be viewed as part of Ghanaian linguistic cultures and histories and aesthetics. This presents an opportunity to recontextualize some of the prevailing ideas about climate change and interrogate and reconstruct indigenous visions of a sustainable world and one that considers the peculiarities of Ghana’s ethnic composition and accompanying languages. To promote and teach Ghanaian Language and history and art in the context of climate change education means we need local and international support for Ghanaian language curricula, literary texts, cultural monographs, movies, documentaries, theatre production, art studios within the context of science and broadly environmental education. The broader point here is that cultures in the global South at least in the case of Ghana retain some originality or distinctiveness. However, at the same time, they are constantly in transition, changing and borrowing; these shifts cannot be attributed solely to Western domination (Gyekye, 2014). Applying the above arguments to the climate change curriculum from Ghana, it is not the case that the West merely influences Ghana when it comes to climate change knowledge. Rather, Ghana and its people, despite our structural challenges, have exercised agency in recognizing that climate change is useful information/knowledge for future generations. Hence, we need an interdisciplinary science curriculum on climate change that integrates Ghanaian language, arts and histories. A significant number of countries in the global South such as Ghana have a history of colonisation and displacement of indigenous and native people. It is necessary to include these histories and their implications in climate change education, particularly concerning the distribution and use of physical resources such as land, water and minerals. A robust knowledge of the colonial enterprise is necessary for unravelling local and place-based environmental histories and remedies. Several scholars have noted the importance of place-based climate change education that contextualises the challenges at local scales (Littrell et al., Reference Littrell, Tayne, Okochi, Leckey, Gold and Lynds2020; Rousell & Cutter-Mckenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2020; Bang, Reference Bang2020; Hu & Chen, Reference Hu and Chen2016). It is important to mention that the recognition and inclusion of a robust history and colonial past can be an empowering framework for children’s education.

Despite some of the limitations discussed above, there are significant strengths in the curriculum such as the focus on technical details of the causes of climate change, emissions and greenhouse gases and the impacts of climate change such as drought. But as we pointed out in this paper, there is more work to be done.