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Climate change is a fundamental phenomenon and challenge of our time and it should be dealt with in all areas of life. However, climate change education is being implemented very limitedly. During recent years there has been increasing amount of research on climate change education, but climate change education in early childhood education has been studied very sparingly. According to previous research, news about climate change can arouse many kinds of emotions and thoughts in children. Based on research, it has been proposed that through art-driven teaching methods it is possible to deal with emotions and thoughts aroused by climate change and strengthen hopefulness and belief in one’s own influence. Of the forms of art education, drama education as a method of climate change education has hardly been studied. The aim of this study was to add knowledge of what climate change education could be in early childhood education. The study investigates early childhood education specialists’ definitions of climate change education and their views on what possibilities drama education methods can offer for implementation of climate change education. I designed and implemented climate drama workshops for early childhood education specialists and collected the research data in the context of the workshops. Participants of the study produced short writings and in addition two of the workshops were videotaped. I analyzed the writing data and the video data qualitatively using the method of theory-based content analysis. Aa a basis for the analysis I used primarily the holistic bicycle model on climate change education (Tolppanen ym. 2017). The early childhood education specialists who participated in the study defined adding knowledge and understanding, encouraging to action, developing values and conceptions of the world and dealing with emotions as contents of climate change education. Specialists’ uncertainty and worries about arousing difficult emotions in children appeared as barriers for implementing climate change education in early childhood education. From the perspective of the study subjects, drama education methods seemed to have possibilities for implementing several parts of climate change education. Drama educations possibilities related to adding knowledge, developing thinking skills, building conceptions of the world, empowering and dealing with emotions were brought up. Methods of drama education offer practical ways for implementing and developing climate change education in early childhood education.

Objectives. The aim of this case study is to find out whether negative climate appears in primary school drama lessons. Previous research has shown that climate has a huge impact on schooling. A positive climate in school gives pupils a better opportunity to learn and provides pupils with more opportunities to be creative. Drama and creativity are strongly linked together because in drama, pupils work in creative way. A negative climate in turn reduces pupils' chances to learn and to be creative. Therefore, studying negative climate in drama lessons is of importance. In this study, I compared negative climate in drama lessons given by graduated classroom teachers' with those given by student teachers. I measured negative climate with The Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ (CLASS). During the study I also evaluated how the CLASS-scoring system worked in measuring the negative climate of the drama lessons. Methods. My study was a qualitative case study and the method was video analysis. I analyzed eight drama lessons with another student, Pauliina Kivi. The lessons were videotaped during the autumn of 2013 and the spring of 2014. Kivi used the same videotapes as material for her study. The level of the pupils in the videos varied from pre-school to third-grade. Four of the teachers in the videos were graduated classroom teachers who all had some kind of qualification for teaching drama. Other four were student teachers who had studied drama education as their minor subject. The videos were analyzed by using the CLASS-scoring system. A negative climate score was given to every exercise of every lesson. Results and conclusions. The results showed that negative climate took place in the observed lessons but the scores were low. One exception aside, the lessons of the teacher students received higher scores in negative climate than the lessons of the graduated teachers. However, none of the scores reached even the middle of the CLASS scale of negative climate. Therefore, according to this study, drama lessons do not have a negative climate in general. CLASS-scoring system turned out to be suitable for observing the negative climate in drama lessons. CLASS-scoring system can also be applied to evaluate how teacher or students create negative climate.