Climate change is no longer just for ecologists to study and teach – it affects us daily. Education for Sustainability (EfS) aims to address the climate crisis as a 21st-century challenge. Holistic pedagogy addresses this challenge through interdisciplinary co-teaching and cooperative learning. Accordingly, this research studies an interdisciplinary course, aimed at 100 second-career students who study for K-12 teaching certificates in a higher education institute. Entitled “Climate Change and Education Here and Now,” this mandatory online asynchronous course explores the global phenomenon and its effects on the entire ecosystem. Drawing on a holistic education framework, this research aims to examine the application of both content and pedagogies acquired in the course, including the call for climate change action. Additionally, we investigate the application differences according to participants’ specialty field as well as in relation to their pupils’ age group.

The study’s context is a course in which participants learn, through elective and mandatory units, how climate change manifests in historical, political, and cultural contexts, and reflect on the psychological responses it triggers. Their final product is a lesson plan and a reflection. The mixed-method study includes a qualitative analysis of the course syllabus and participants’ products, as well as a quantitative analysis of their participation in the course’s different activities. We analyzed the products of 100 participants, who were very diverse in terms of age, racial profile (Jews/Palestinians, secular/religious), and specialty fields. The qualitative part includes an inductive and deductive analysis of the participants’ final project – detailed lesson plans and a reflection. The quantitative part comprises descriptive statistics comparing the different participants according to their characteristics. Additionally, using logistic regression, we examined which characteristics could predict the participants’ inclination toward climate change activism.

We found that the interdisciplinary units increase the learners’ engagement. Additionally, the opportunity to choose learning units of their interest increases the participants’ motivation to apply what they have learned. Apart from these advantages, we found that the participants’ knowledge is deficient due to the elective units. Moreover, the applicative assignment challenged future kindergarten teachers more than high and middle school teachers. As for the course’s aims, most participants understood their educational role regarding climate change, yet only 23% of the participants implemented the lesson plan in the field. Finally, the course’s pedagogy encouraged all learners to communicate with one another and be active users of various digital educational tools, resulting in the creation of multidimensional climate-action-directed learning units.

Keywords: Teacher Training, Climate Change Education, Multidisciplinary, Activism, Digital Pedagogy.