Discourses on the climate crisis, hazards, and disasters in Korean social studies education research: toward ecological citizenship

This study examines discourses on the climate crisis, hazards, and disasters in Korean social studies education research. A total of 39 scholarly articles including the concepts of climate crisis, hazard, and disaster, which were collected from major journals in the fields of social science education, history education, and geography education, served as a source of analysis. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling and semantic network analysis (SNA) were employed to investigate the discourses related to climate crisis, hazard, and disaster in the articles. The findings indicate that research on the climate crisis, hazards, and disasters first appeared in 2009 and increased substantially from 2022 onward. The majority of studies were theoretically oriented or conducted in the form of literature review (87.2%), indicating a lack of empirical evidence and the absence of articulated research methodologies. Based on the keywords derived from the LDA analysis, two core topics of research in each subject area emerged as follows: reconstruction of environmental and ecological learning in the climate crisis eraand citizenship, disaster literacy, and sustainability educationin social science; human narratives and reflection on disasters and inquiry into regional disaster responses in history; and curriculum and textbook-focused natural hazard and preparedness educationand climate justice and Anthropocene-based problem inquiry in geography. The SNA visualized subfield-specific structures of conceptual linkages, highlighting policy-oriented citizenship discourse in social science education, reflective narratives in history education, and human–Earth system interdependence in geography education. These findings suggest that education for ecological citizenship in social studies would move beyond discipline-isolated approaches toward interdisciplinary inquiry that connects historical, spatial, and civic perspectives in convergent ways.