Vol. 17 No. 2 (2026)
Special Issue: SI_TGEO

Climate Change and Geography Education: A Qualitative Study of Expert and Novice Teachers’ Conceptions and Geographical Thinking

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Juan Mar Begueria
ARGOS-IUCA Research Group, Department of Social Sciences Education, University of Zaragoza, Spain
María Sebastián-López
ARGOS-IUCA Research Group, Department of Social Sciences Education, University of Zaragoza, Spain
Ondrej Kratochvíl
ARGOS-IUCA Research Group, Department of Social Sciences Education, University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Rafael De Miguel González
ARGOS-IUCA Research Group, Department of Social Sciences Education, University of Zaragoza, Spain | European Association of Geographers (EUROGEO), Belgium
Methodological Process Scheme (Source: Authors’ own elaboration)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.j.mar.17.2.200.220
Categories

Published 2026-05-16

Keywords

  • Climate change education,
  • Geographical thinking,
  • discourse analysis,
  • Systems thinking,
  • complexity education,
  • qualitative case study
    • ...More
    Less

How to Cite

Mar Begueria, Juan, María Sebastián-López, Ondrej Kratochvíl, and Rafael De Miguel González. 2026. “Climate Change and Geography Education: A Qualitative Study of Expert and Novice Teachers’ Conceptions and Geographical Thinking”. European Journal of Geography 17 (2):S.200-S.220. https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.j.mar.17.2.200.220.

Copyright (c) 2026 Juan Mar Begueria, María Sebastián-López, Ondrej Kratochvíl, Rafael de Miguel

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Received 2026-01-10
Accepted 2026-05-03
Published 2026-05-16

Abstract

Climate change education represents a significant challenge for geographical education and educators. While there is a a large body of research focused on students’ alternative conceptions, in contrast there is little attention paid to how teachers construct geographical reasoning about climate change. This study aims to analyse how expert and non-expert teachers articulate geographical thinking in relation to climate change education. An interpretative qualitative design was adopted, based on the analysis of two focus groups differentiated by teaching expertise, conducted in the context of the evaluation and discussion of a teacher training course on climate change and GIS. Qualitative data were analysed using a combination of deductive categories derived from the literature and inductively emerging codes due to the thematic analysis. The results reveal clear differences between the two groups. Expert teachers generate a higher density of qualitative data, mobilise systemic and multiscalar reasoning more consistently, and display explicit strategies of epistemic regulation, particularly through theoretical prudence and evidence-based argumentation. In contrast, non-expert teachers tend to frame complexity as a problem to be reduced, relying more frequently on linear or axiological explanations. Importantly, axiological elements are not absent from expert discourse but coexist in tension with non-axiological approaches.

Highlights:

  • Expert teachers mobilize systemic and multiscalar reasoning more consistently.
  • Theoretical prudence emerges as an exclusive feature of expert discourse.
  • Axiological and non-axiological registers coexist within expert reasoning.
  • Non-experts frame complexity as a problem to be reduced or simplified.
  • Climate change education benefits from powerful geographical knowledge.
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