Decolonizing Climate Change Education: Evidence from an Empirical Study in Ghana

Abstract

Climate change education plays a significant role in the fight against climate change. Yet the knowledges of Indigenous Peoples who have been disproportionately impacted and are at the frontlines of climate change have not been given enough attention in climate change education. To enhance the capacity of communities to adapt to climate change, calls are increasing for climate change education to be decolonized. Contributing to this call, the researcher partnered with a rural community, Boania, in Northern Ghana to integrate Indigenous Ecological Knowledge into environmental and climate change education in a rural primary school. A community-based research approach and an Indigenous research methodology in the form of two-eyed seeing were adopted to guide the project. The purpose of the study was to decolonize environmental and climate change education by integrating Indigenous Ecological Knowledge into programs. It emerged that the consideration of holistic Indigenous epistemologies in climate change education re-emphasized our inseparability from non-humans and improved the children’s knowledge about the community’s local environment. Additionally, decolonizing the concept of climate change created the space for acknowledging community-led climate adaptation efforts. Broadly, the study provided a model for decolonizing climate change education in Ghana. Keywords:community-based research; climate change education; decolonization; Indigenous Ecological Knowledge; Indigenous epistemologies DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-32-06 Publication date: November 30 th 2022