Asking those who feel it - indigenous knowledge on climate risks in mountains: Transdisciplinary teaching to enhance student engagement

Mountain regions provide an excellent domain to teach complex risk concepts and management strategies to students. They are subject to especially pronounced climate change and a variety of complex hazards cascades. At the same time mountain populations exposed to these hazards are often especially vulnerable due to political marginalization and fragile infrastructure. We have taken the dual challenge of researching and responding to mountain risks and the lack of multidisciplinary teaching on the same to develop course material for students of a variety of disciplines. We do so by including other ways of knowing through external speakers and serious games.

To address this issue, we draw on our recent (2023 - 2025) teaching experiences at Global Awareness Education, which is part of the Transdisciplinary Course Program at the University of Tübingen in Germany. The program offers courses on global issues related to geosciences and beyond, engaging students of all disciplines from both the University of Tübingen and CIVIS (an alliance of 11 leading universities across Europe).

Here we focus on our two recent courses ‘Asking those who feel it - local and indigenous knowledge on climate change’ and ‘Climate Risk in vulnerable mountain regions of the world’ which were implemented in both online and in-person formats. These courses introduce students to climate risks in mountain regions, how they are addressed and the role of local and indigenous knowledge in the formulation of both research and response measures. These objectives are achieved using serious games and through interactions with knowledge holders and those researching in the domain. This provides a means to immerse students from a wide range of backgrounds in the topic and challenge them to approach the topic with critical thinking.

We assessed students’ learning using questionnaires before and after the course. Feedback suggests that different proficiency levels on certain topics (such as climate models, international relations, ethnographic methods) among students presents potential drawbacks but at the same time provided the potential for peer-to-peer exchange. Co-developing teaching materials with both academic and non-academic partners allowed for active student participation, particularly through sharing of personal experiences. This has proven especially helpful when teaching students from different generations about topics that are directly linked to activities they may be involved in (e.g., engagement through Fridays for Future or Gen-Z role in bottom-up policy making).

In this presentation, we will share results from student questionnaires as well as our observations from interactions with students during interactive exercises. We will discuss the challenges we faced and our plans for a more dynamic integration of current UN and intergovernmental negotiations in the domain of mountain risks into teaching material developed for higher education.