Teaching climate change: Understanding K-12 educators’ personal perspectives on climate change through latent profile analysis

Climate change is threatening the environment and communities globally, yet in the United States, it is not consistently taught in formal education. Understanding teachers’ personal perspectives about climate change and whether they feel capable of teaching the topic is critical to supporting their efforts to integrate it into their curriculum. This United States-based study looks at K-12 educators’ knowledge, personal values, concern about climate change, and self-efficacy beliefs, and analyses how these traits relate to teaching climate change. Using 393 questionnaire responses, findings suggest there are moderate to strong positive correlations between knowledge, ecological values, concern, and self-efficacy, while individual, egoistic values have weak to moderate negative correlations with the other characteristics. A latent profile analysis suggests a range of climate change educators, categorized into five profiles based on the variables of interest. Implications of this work include ensuring different types of support are available for teachers with different perspectives.