Over the past two hundred years, anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a major scientific and societal issue (Incropera, 2016). In this context, the latest Glasgow Climate Pact (UNFCCC, 2021) reiterated the importance of climate change education as a lever for action to mobilise the population. The problem is: whereas many countries integrate the topic of “climate change” in their national curricula, teachers very often face this topic alone, when they come to address it in class.

This paper focuses on the diversity of teaching postures in formal climate change education. It is positioned at the crossroads between a sociology of teaching practices, and a comprehensive sociology, studying the meaning given by practitioners to their own practice (Weber, 1965). It aims to highlight the diversity of teachers' postures when they address "climate change", by identifying their personal approaches and understanding of this topic, and investigating a possible distance of the teachers’ from the official instructions. 

The research question can be formulated as follows: what is the diversity of postures amongst teachers regarding their personal approaches to and understanding of climate change, and how does this translate in formal education? The theoretical framework of this research includes the definition of Kelly's teaching postures (1986) on the teaching attitude in class around a controversial issue, and Jean-Marc Lange's postures (2008) on positioning oneself in relation to the object being taught. To answer the research question, the methodology is based on a qualitative survey in the form of semi-structured interviews, all conducted in 2022 with seventeen secondary school teachers from different disciplines, carried out as part of my Masters in educational sciences’ research.

The first part of my results concerns the teaching postures. They are translated by the transitive verbs used to express their action: to raise awareness, to give the keys to understanding, etc. These postures translate actions. The eight postures identified are those of: the facilitator (who gives the keys to understanding the phenomenon on the basis of scientific knowledge), the awareness-raiser (who relies on communication and awakening emotions regarding the topic), the thought-provoker, the illustrator (who uses the topic to give a "concrete" meaning to his usual theoretical teachings), the promoter of sustainable development solutions, the project coordinator, the posture of awakening to complexity, the awakening to the living environment, and finally the posture of neutrality towards the issue.

The second part of my results concerns the goals or “objectives” of these postures, i.e. what the teachers aims at for their pupils: that the children find solutions, that they change their habits, that they get involved in actions... The objectives reflect the teacher's intentions. For example: to inform (posture) in order to exercise critical thinking on media discourse (objective); to inform (posture) in order to adopt eco-responsible behaviour (objective); to make students think (posture) in order to propose solutions (objective). I identified eight predominating objectives in the following order:

1) adopting of eco-gestures,

2) orientating the pupils' choices as future "responsible" citizens,

3) that pupils find solutions and get involved in projects,

4) that pupils be able to think critically about media information,

5) awakening pupils' interest for a theoretical class through a “concrete” topic,

6) to have the pupils form their own opinion on the issue,

7) to get them to understand the complexity of the climate issue,

8) to get the pupils to feel a relationship with their environment.

The traditional role of the teacher as a "cultural mediator" (Hannah Arendt) is coupled here with the possibility of transforming the world by encouraging the younger generations to take action, but most often at the domestic or school level.

The sociology of teaching practices, traditionally associated with direct observation (Tardif & Lessard, 1999; Bru, 2002), can also be conducted through interviews, as was the methodological choice in this research. Yet, the literature demonstrates that comparisons between declared practices and observed practices frequently reveal a distance, which inclines the researcher relying on interviews to be modest about his or her results on practices. But it is the meaning given by the teachers to these practices that interests us most here. The choice of a comprehensive sociology is explained as follows: in a context where the common school project, or the school "ideal" referred to by Durkheim (1938, L'évolution pédagogique en France), has tended to crumble since the 20th century (Derouet, 1992), it is the teachers themselves who are called upon to produce and legitimise the meaning they give to their own activity. An understanding of teaching practices therefore calls for a comprehensive approach, as close as possible to the teacher's personal experience of it. Indeed, comprehensive sociology is based on the conviction that individuals are not "simple agents of the structures" but also "active producers of the society", and therefore "depositories of an important knowledge that must be grasped from the inside through the system of values of individuals" (Kaufmann, 2016, p.24). The first function of the interview is precisely to "reconstruct the subjective meaning, the lived meaning of the behaviours of social actors" (Blanchet, Gotman, 1992, p.27). The goal of this method was to produce knowledge about the meaning given to practices by the practitioners themselves: what meaning do teachers give to their teaching of the topic of climate change? My interview requests initially targeted History, Geography, and Science teachers, because of the frequent presence of climate change in the curricula of these subjects. But as teachers recommended me to interview their other colleagues involved in ecological issues, the corpus diversified with two other French teachers. On the other hand, since Life and Earth Sciences teachers answered favorably more frequently, the final corpus for this survey is composed mainly of Science teachers: - Life and Earth Sciences: 10 (6 women, 4 men) - History and Geography: 4 (2 men, 2 women) - French: 2 (1 man, 1 woman) - Physics and Chemistry: 1 man I asked them the question: what message, if any, do you try to convey to your pupils when you discuss climate change with them?

The most recurrent postures in my corpus are those of the facilitator (knowledge) and the awareness-raiser (emotions), to the detriment of the postures of awakening to complexity and the posture of awakening to the relationship with the living environment. The incitements to "reflection" and "awareness" are most often focused on the individual impact of the pupils on their environment, and rarely concern the political inaction about climate nor the inequality issues linked to it. I noted the predominance of the objective of orienting behaviour towards an "eco-responsible" model, i.e. behaviours such as sorting waste, using tap water as opposed to bottled water, etc. in an eco-prescriptive approach. This objective is predominantly carried by women (8 women/4 men). These results confirm those of other research studies which note a predominance of behavioural diction in education for sustainable development (Alpes, Barthes, Zwang, 2014), even if here, climate change education appears to provide more scientific content. This didactic strategy corresponds to what Jean Simonneaux calls the "praxeological strategy" (Simonneaux and Simonneaux, 2014), which consists in imposing individual behavioural norms and incentives for direct action, without making explicit the genuine scope of these actions. The diversity of postures shows the richness and potential of secondary school teachers' engagement with the topic of "climate change". Nevertheless, the predominance of eco-prescriptive postures, and the near absence of a critical or problematised posture informs us of a gap in climate change education in formal education. This result corroborates other researches' (Sauvé, 1997, 2005, 2011; Bruxelle, Hortolan, 2008; Alpe, Barthes, Zwang, 2014; Lange, 2015; Pereira, 2022). These findings open up perspectives for research on implementing a critical posture in climate change education, which is currently the focus of my thesis: how to adopt a critical pedagogy posture in climate change education in an interdisciplinary learning unit?

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