Immersive technology and play in climate change education: Reflections from the ESERA Doctoral Summer School

Muhammad Zulfadhli Kamarudin, postgraduate researcher from the School of Education, shares his experiences attending the ESERA Doctoral Summer School 2026 at the University of Luxembourg.

 

My research focuses on co-developing spatial computing in a climate change play curriculum with Indonesian and Malaysian children in the UK. Rather than positioning children only as learners, the study involves them as curriculum co-developers whose pedagogic voice helps shape the lesson design (Martinez Sainz et al., 2024). The research stems from the need to move beyond top-down, science-based models of climate change education towards interdisciplinary, participatory, creative and digital approaches (Cutter-Mackenzie & Rousell, 2019) and to form culturally responsive and globally informed climate change education (Zhai et al., 2025). This research aims to report the co-development process that results in the formation of a student toolkit as the curriculum output, and the changes in children’s mental models throughout that process.  

ESERA Doctoral Summer School

The ESERA Doctoral Summer School is an annual programme organised by the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA). The highlight of the summer school is the mentor session, where each PhD student shares their research in a supportive academic environment with around seven fellow PhD students, together with two experienced science education researchers who serve as mentors. These sessions provide the foundation for in-depth discussions that continue throughout the week, allowing students to receive constructive feedback, exchange ideas and explore different perspectives on their research. The programme also includes a poster session, where participants showcase their research to the wider summer school community. This interactive event offers rich opportunities to engage in conversations with fellow researchers and receive feedback from both experienced science education scholars and peers, helping students strengthen their research and presentation skills. For the 2026 summer school edition, 49 PhD students representing 23 countries, were selected from 78 applications. I was in Group 7 with mentors Assoc. Prof. Eliza Rybska from Adam Mickiewicz University and Prof. Sabine Fechner from Paderborn University. Our group included PhD students researching climate education, physics education and science teaching practices in the context of school students, science teachers and local communities.

 

My reflections

As I was in the middle of analysing my data and writing the findings chapters, the summer school came at a particularly useful time. It gave me the opportunity to share my preliminary findings with mentors and fellow PhD students, receive constructive feedback, and learn from a wide range of research in science education. These discussions helped me reflect more clearly on the structure of my thesis, the role of children in the co-development process, and how I position play and spatial computing within climate change education.

I appreciated the feedback from members of the SciTeach Centre at the University of Luxembourg during the poster session. As the centre focuses primarily on research into early years and primary science education, they recognised the value of my research, which combines immersive technologies and play to support children’s conceptual understanding of climate change. During the mentor session, the mentors and PhD peers highlighted the potential of my research to contribute to curriculum co-development with children, rather than using immersive technologies solely as teaching tools. They also recognised the value of incorporating Global South children’s lived experiences to strengthen climate change education in multicultural contexts.

The conversations about my work-in-progress also gave me valuable food for thought. The feedback helped me clarify conceptual background, especially in explaining how mental model development, spatial computing, play-based pedagogy, participatory action research and the Mosaic approach connect. I was also encouraged to make the role of children’s ideas more explicit, showing how their contributions were not only evidence of learning, but also resources for shaping the student toolkit design. This clarified how two parts of my study connect: children’s ideas both shaped the curriculum and provided evidence of how their understanding developed throughout the workshops.

Beyond the mentor and poster sessions, there were also workshops and open discussion sessions to introduce the PhD students to emerging research in science education, such as ‘Doing and researching teacher-researcher collaboration in primary science’ and ‘School activism across borders: global perspectives and local realities’. One of the workshops that caught my interest was ‘Navigating your PhD journey’, led by Prof. Alexander Kauertz from RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau. We were introduced to mapping our study using Toulmin’s schema (Toulmin, 2003), before collaborating with peers to gain external perspectives related on it. The activity encouraged us to consider how our evidence, theoretical framework, claims, limitations and possible alternative explanations were connected within the wider argument of the thesis. I was able to see the overall structure of my research more clearly and recognise similarities with the work of other researchers by creating this map and discussing it with my peers. 

Moving forward

Overall, the summer school was a valuable part of my PhD journey. The feedback helped me see where I need to restructure parts of my thesis, especially to make the links between my conceptual framework, methodology and findings clearer. It also made me think more carefully about how I analyse children’s ideas, both as evidence of their developing understanding and as contributions that shaped the curriculum and student toolkit. This has also strengthened my view that immersive technologies and play can support children in exploring, building and discussing complex climate change ideas. The direction connects with the work of Imaginative Curriculum Centre, particularly its focus on imagination, creativity and new ways of thinking about the curriculum.

References

Cutter-Mackenzie, A., & Rousell, D. (2019). Education for what? Shaping the field of climate change education with children and young people as co-researchers. Children’s Geographies, 17(1), 90–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1467556
Martinez Sainz, G., Devine, D., Sloan, S., Symonds, J., Moore, B., Barrow, N., Crean, M., Donegan, A., Greaves, M., Samonova, E., Gleasure, S., & Ioannidou, O. (2024). A rights-based exploration of children’s pedagogic voice in the classroom. Education 3-13, 52(6), 874–890. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2024.2331953
Toulmin, S. E. (2003). The Uses of Argument (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511840005
Zhai, J., Dillon, J., & Dawson, V. (2025). Climate change education: Cross-cultural perspectives. ECNU Review of Education, 8(1), 49–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311241237243