Using a Wicked Problem for Inquiry-Based Fieldwork in High School Geology:Addressing Climate Change and Mass Extinction Events

In this chapter, we explore how the wicked problem of climate change can be used in high school teaching through a geoscience field inquiry on mass extinction events. The field inquiry uses the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event to provide high school pupils with knowledge and tools to discuss and engage in possible future such events caused by climate change. Hence, we posit climate change as a wicked problem, which arises when pupils are asked to hypothesize what a future mass extinction boundary following our current Holocene climate changes would look like. If current human activity results in another mass extinction in the coming decades, what might the resulting geological boundary between the Holocene and the next epoch look like in 10,000 years? And what might it contain? In the chapter, we show how the use of a wicked problem raises important learning opportunities in multiple reasoning processes where science does not have ready-made answers. The theoretical framing of the chapter is an inquiry model we have developed and used in a science teacher education programme at the University of Copenhagen. We outline the model and discuss how it resembles and differs from existing inquiry models.