Activating Learner Agency in Climate Change Education

The Trouble with E-Bikes!

Climate change education faces a persistent challenge: translating knowledge and concern into meaningful action-taking by learners. While the Bicycle Model of climate change education (Cantell et al., 2019) provides a comprehensive framework encompassing knowledge, values, motivation, and action, we argue it remains insufficient to activate the purpose for learning as the achievement of action-taking. In fact, the current issues around the use of e-bikes on city streets capture the sociocultural complexity of using this model to explain the shortfall of a simplified climate change education model as bits on a bike.

The Pinisi Model synthesizes five theoretical frameworks to address this shortfall: (1) the PINISI Learning Model’s six sociocultural elements (Arifin et al., 2025), (2) the Bicycle Model’s holistic climate education components, (3) PISA’s Agency in the Anthropocene competencies (White et al., 2023), (4) Peircean semiotic pragmatism and abductive reasoning as mechanisms for teacher-curated learning spaces, and (5) Gibsonian ecological affordances as pragmatic markers of activated learner agency. We position Direct Instruction (Kirschner et al., 2006) and Project-Based Learning as complementary pedagogical strategies within this integrated framework. Our central thesis posits that the Bicycle Model’s components require sociocultural scaffolding provided by the PINISI Model’s six elements, and that learner agency becomes pragmatically visible through the perception and use of ecological affordances—mediated by teachers’ abductive semiotic curation of learning environments. This synthesis contributes a novel conceptual architecture for climate change education that bridges cognitive, sociocultural, and ecological-semiotic dimensions, offering practical implications for curriculum design and teacher professional development.

Keywords: climate change education, learner agency, PINISI Learning Model, Bicycle Model, ecological affordances, Peircean semiotics, abductive reasoning, sociocultural learning