Teaching history and the climate crisis: missed opportunities in Finnish textbooks?

Amid escalating ecological disruptions, history education holds significant value in helping students to make sense of our present predicaments and future projections. This article examines how Finnish secondary-level history textbooks engage with the climate crisis, one of the most pressing concerns of our time. Through qualitative content analysis, nine digital textbooks were analysed to assess both the prevalence and framing of the phenomenon, particularly in relation to industrial societies, drawing on the concepts of climate justice and multispecies justice. Of interest was whether textbook narratives foster historical thinking – the core aim of history curricula – to provide students with access to subject-specific powerful knowledge on the climate crisis. The findings suggest that Finnish history textbooks often overlook crucial opportunities to develop historically grounded, as well as socially and ethically nuanced, knowledge of the phenomenon, perhaps highlighting a need for more explicit integration of the climate crisis into history curricula.