Communicating Climate Change: A Content Analysis of Selected Coursebooks for Junior Secondary School in Kenya

The UN Sustainable Development Goal number 13 (Climate Action) asserts that education and innovation are at the core of our planet’s fight for survival. Against this backdrop, this paper sought to evaluate educational materials and co-curricular activities in Kenya that touch on the environment and climate change. We argue that the content and language of such materials are a window through which a nations effort to galvanize its school going population to action can be assessed. We began by noting that environmental education is no longer a stand-alone learning area at the junior secondary school level. A recent review of the curriculum has seen content in this subject being largely subsumed under the learning area of Agriculture. However, coursebooks in other learning areas such as English and Kiswahili are expected to cover the themes of environment and climate change through creative content such as passages, poems and dialogues. Coursebooks in religious education present environmental and climate change through scripture-based lenses. Our analysis revealed that cumulatively, various coursebooks achieve varied pedagogical and discourse goals. These include presenting factual knowledge, creating awareness about causes and effects, creating awareness about mitigation and adaptation as well instilling agency in the target audience. The materials frame climate change and climate action as a public health issue, as urgent and as threat to our collective future. Religious, economic and political frames of the issue are also evident in the materials. However, the analysis also notes weaknesses in authoritative scientific knowledge in some of the coursebooks.