Textbooks provide a key source of information for teachers and students alike on a range of topics. Because they often serve to anchor lessons, the perspectives they espouse can be enormously, and at times disproportionately, influential in terms of how they affect beliefs and knowledge about ideas. Therefore, it is important to understand how textbooks convey scientific content, particularly with regard to issues that some may perceive to be controversial, such as climate change.
This study investigated how textbooks frame climate-change information. Specifically, the authors analyzed the language used in four sixth-grade science textbooks adopted in California. The authors asked (1) how the language used in science textbooks reflects how confident scientists are that climate change is occurring, and (2) how human beings are positioned, or not, as the causes of or the solution to climate change.
The authors used Systemic Functional Analysis, a linguistic method that seeks to identify patterns in how language conveys meaning in various content areas, such as mathematics or science. The authors also drew from framing theory to investigate the language choices textbooks use in presenting climate-change information. Specifically, the researchers investigated whether the textbooks align to the scientific discourse (i.e., climate change is an environmental problem that poses an immense risk that is in need of urgent action) or to the public discourse (i.e., climate change is an unsettled science with high levels of uncertainty among the scientific community).
The authors found that textbook language around climate change was tentative, rather than assertive, and contained several instances of modal verbs, such as “would,” “could,” and “might.” The authors also found that textbooks were not specific in the percentage of scientists who agree that climate change is occurring, and used determiners such as “some” and “not all” to describe the agreement among the scientific community around this issue. By using vague determiners instead of exact percentages, textbooks leave up to student and teacher interpretation what “some” and “not all” mean, rather than echoing scientific reports indicating that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is happening due to human-induced activities.
In relation to framing theory, the authors report that, when textbooks discussed climate change, they do not mention human-related causes of this phenomenon or, if they do, they describe those causes generally. Omitting this connection between human-related causes and climate change in sixth-grade textbooks contrasts with how scientific circles discuss the issue. Similarly, when the textbooks mention “scientists,” they describe their actions as “thinking” or “believing” in the reality of climate change. Rarely did the textbooks describe what we know about climate change as based on concrete evidence gathered by scientists through measurement and experimentation.
Finally, the authors indicated that the textbooks in the study do not present climate change in a confident or urgent tone. Yet, the preponderance of the scientific community believes that climate change is the most pressing issue of our times. In fact, the language in these textbooks underestimates the catastrophic consequences of inaction around climate change. The authors conclude that this use of inactive language is mostly aligned with the public discourse and reinforces the public's misconception that climate change is distant in time and place, rather than a current problem that we, as a society, need to act upon and address in the short-, medium-, and long-term.
The Bottom Line
Although teaching materials, such as worksheets, activity guides, interactives, and textbooks, can be helpful supports for educators, it is important to be aware of biases and representations that the materials include. In particular, with topics such as climate change, which some may perceive as controversial, educators should be aware that textbooks' language and content might not depict the subject matter in a way aligned with the scientific consensus. Educators who are aware of such discrepancies can guide in-classroom discussions that probe questions around aspects of climate change, including it being a phenomenon related to human activity, widely agreed upon by scientists, and an urgent and timely matter.