When thinking about the kinds of ‘juicy opportunities’ referred to by Cherry (2005) that are entailed in wicked socio-ecological problems, climate change has much to offer. It is a subject about which there is much controversy but also a fairly large amount of public concern (Wibeck, 2015). Its controversial nature makes it a challenging topic for teachers to handle but it also adds to its potential to enhance learning if handled effectively. With this in mind, and particularly the challenging nature of the threats posed by catastrophic environmental change, we ask questions about how primary school children think about change in their localities and whether climate change figures in their musings. In this contribution I will describe a comparative study that has uncovered distinctions in the way that children in different countries address this pressing issue. This study of children’s perceptions and articulations of changing climates took place in ten primary schools in the UK, Mongolia, Mexico and Alaska. Without overtly asking about climate change we sought to find out whether it emerged in common parlance in the various different settings that we created for the participants. These settings included walks around local areas, interchanges through video conferences with schools in different regions of the world, trips to museums and group interview. What we found was that in the UK climate change was not commonly referred to. It only came up in conversations on rare occasions when prompted by an adult. Moreover, when asked directly in interview about the term, more often than not children professed very little knowledge about it. In contrast, children in Mongolia, and to a lesser extent Mexico, appeared more familiar with climate change and more likely to refer to it. In Alaska children talked about changes in their daily lives that might be attributable to climate change but did not tend to make the connection themselves. This contribution aims to set out some of the contextual divergences influencing these and other distinctions and to suggest how these distinctions might be useful in helping children navigate the wickedness of climate change.

Nita Lilian Cherry (2005) Preparing for practice in the age of complexity, Higher Education Research & Development, 24:4, 309-320, DOI: 10.1080/07294360500284649 Victoria Wibeck (2014) Enhancing learning, communication and public engagement about climate change – some lessons from recent literature, Environmental Education Research, 20:3, 387-411, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2013.812720