STUDENTS’ CONCEPTIONS ABOUT MATHEMATICS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE AND RELATED ISSUES

In recent PME and ICMI conferences, a need for curriculum innovation that takes into account the role of mathematics in understanding and contrasting climate change and related issues has been stressed by prominent scholars, taking a rather cognitive stand. In this paper, we focus on the affective side of the phenomenon, arguing that the students’ conceptions both about mathematics and about climate change and related issues need to be taken into consideration in order to make such an innovation effective. Hence, we report and analyse the narratives that a small sample of students enrolled in an Environmental Sciences program produced during the activity of writing a letter to a fictitious class of students living in the future describing how mathematics has helped humans to survive in the next 200 years.