Climate breakdown represents an existential threat – and is just one of the many challenges facing students, universities and the wider world. Within education, there is increasing talk of adjusting our traditional subject-based curricula so students are more able to learn about the challenges we all face – and how to tackle them.
Dr Miles Thompson, Professor Alpesh Maisuria and their student co-researchers recently published a new study exploring university students’ views on:
- the importance of different global and local challenges
- if students feel their current curricula will help them meet these challenges
- whether they would like optional challenge-based learning
- how this learning should be delivered
Data was collected from 61 students who rated 30 statements representing global and local challenges from previously published research (Thompson et al., 2023). Statements were rated in terms of both: i. their importance, and ii. the extent to which current learning will help students understand and tackle the challenges.
All 30 challenges were, on average, rated as important. The challenges rated highest in terms of importance concerned:
- mental health and well-being
- prejudice, intolerance and inequality
- the climate and wider ecological emergencies
Despite high importance ratings, students were generally less sure that their current curricula would help them understand and tackle these challenges. In a similar way, while students were clear that they wanted to explore more challenge-based learning, there was no consensus on what format this learning should take.
Interestingly, multiple challenges had noticeable gaps between their: i. importance and ii. learning will help ratings. It is possible this is because our “current learning will help” question asked about both whether learning will: i. help them understand and ii. help them tackle the challenges. These are potentially quite different things. In terms of climate breakdown, students may understand the topic more, but understanding by itself will not resolve the issue. There are multiple, complex issues at play.
This taps into the potential importance of broader economic, systemic and political factors that are central to many challenges and their solutions. This echoes Markwick and Reiss (2025) who, in a recent review that sought to reconceptualise the school curriculum to better address global challenges, spoke of the importance of moving beyond “powerful knowledge” to increasing “knowledge of the powerful” (p.5).
Some of these broader factors were explicitly represented in the challenges rated by students. Indeed, a cluster of 5 of them fell within the bottom 7 items in terms of their overall importance ratings. They involved areas such as: capitalism / neoliberalism; distrust in politics; populism and the far-right and; an increase in individualism. These relatively lower importance ratings highlight the potential significance of ensuring all of us are better able to “read the world” in order that we are more able to change it (Freire, 1970/2005, p.26).
In another sign of the importance of explicitly exploring both power and politics some of the qualitative comments highlighted the wider political context both of individuals, and of higher education itself. Reflecting on the list of challenges, two participants suggested there was a left-wing bias in the survey. In terms of universities being able to tackle such challenges, another participant wondered if universities are able to tackle these challenges as they are run as businesses.
Universities position themselves both as global and local challenge solvers – and are commercial businesses operating in a competitive, international, corporate marketplace. Does this create tensions about what challenges can be tackled and through what means?
The Markwick and Reiss review mentioned earlier concludes by saying: “we need an urgent educational reform that formulates and delivers curricula that engage students in acknowledging and exploring current and potential global issues” (p.11). Adding to the quote above, Thompson and Maisuria wonder: do we just need learning that increases understanding? Or do we also need learning that helps lead to meaningful positive change in the real world?
The open-access article is freely available to read and download from the following link.
References:
Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1970).
Markwick, A., & Reiss, M. J. (2025). Reconceptualising the school curriculum to address global challenges: Marrying aims-based and ‘powerful knowledge’ approaches. The Curriculum Journal, 36(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.258
Thompson, M., Blumer, Y., Gee, S., Waugh, L., & Weaver, Z. (2023). Climate change and community psychology: Exploring environmental and wider social challenges. Psicologia di Comunità / Journal of Community Psychology, 1, 13-33. https://doi.org/10.3280/PSC2023-001002
Thompson, M. Maisuria, A., McCartney, S., & Hamilton, R. (in press). Exploring university student perspectives of a challenge-based curriculum. The Curriculum Journal, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.70013