  A major roadblock to effective climate education is the lack of radical
visions (Kwauk, 2020) for engaging with climate change and related
social-environmental crises in the classroom. Key aspects of the climate
system: its inherent complexity and transdisciplinarity, the entanglement of
social and natural systems, and the fact that it spans large scales of space
and time - all present serious challenges to our modern, compartmentalized
formal education systems. I present an argument for a justice-centered,
inter-to-transdisciplinary conceptualization of climate change at the nexus of
science, society and justice, which is designed to engage with the very
features of the climate system that make it challenging. Based on pedagogical
experiments in an undergraduate physics classroom for non-science majors, I
identify five general barriers to teaching climate change, and formulate four
dimensions of an effective climate pedagogy: the scientific-technological, the
transdisciplinary, the onto-epistemological, and the psychosocial action
dimensions. Within the context of a collaborative classroom culture informed by
transformational learning, I describe the use of a meta-conceptual framework
that, along with the issue of climate justice, seeks to realize all four
dimensions of an effective climate pedagogy. This broad holistic framework is
potentially adaptable to contexts and disciplines beyond undergraduate physics.
