Green Pedagogy and Climate Literacy in the Nigerian Secondary School Chemistry Curricula
Keywords:
Green Chemistry Education, Climate Literacy, Chemistry Curriculum, Nigeria, Education For Sustainable DevelopmentAbstract
Nigeria's chemistry classrooms sit at the intersection of two urgent educational imperatives: the need to prepare scientifically literate citizens capable of designing and evaluating environmentally benign chemical practices, and the need to cultivate climate-literate individuals who understand and can respond constructively to, a rapidly warming and increasingly unstable climate system. This theoretical paper examines the conceptual convergence between green chemistry pedagogy and climate literacy and interrogates the extent to which the Nigerian senior secondary chemistry curriculum, as administered under the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC) and assessed by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), accommodates this convergence. Drawing on constructivist learning theory, Socio-Scientific Issues (SSI) pedagogy, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) framework, the paper synthesises international and African scholarship on green chemistry education, climate science literacy, and context-based science teaching. The paper further identifies structural barriers to implementation in the Nigerian context, including examination-driven teaching, under-resourced laboratories, limited teacher professional development, and the near-total absence of climate change content in the formal science curriculum. It offers curriculum, teacher-education, and policy recommendations. The paper contributes a theoretical scaffold for future empirical and design-based research on sustainability-oriented chemistry teaching in Nigeria and comparable under-resourced contexts
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