April 2013

  • After Sustainability: denial, hope, retrieval

    This is the title of today's I-SEE seminar at Bath.  It marks John Foster's welcome return to the university after too long an absence. Here's the abstract of his talk: Why don’t we admit that dangerous climate change is coming?...

  • Higher education, sustainability, and London buses

    Just when you've getting tired of waiting for a half-decent book about higher education and sustainability to come along, like London buses, two of them arrive; and, just like London buses, they're from the same company. Routledge (Abingdon) has released...

  • Finns come bottom of an educational league table at last

    After tireless investigation, Department for Education apparatchiks have at last found an educational league table that those bothersome Finns come bottom in.   It's in a recent report from Unicef: Child well-being in rich countries: a comparative overview; Innocenti Report Card...

  • The hidden curriculum at Plymouth

    On the train last week for Debby Cotton's inaugural lecture, rounding off Plymouth's 2013 PedRIO research day.   I like Inaugurals; such grand occasions when newly-minted professors have the challenge of explaining what gets them up in the morning to,...

  • Developing the sustainable school: thinking the issues through

    Developing the sustainable school: thinking the issues through is the title of a paper that I have just been published by The Curriculum Journal.    You can access it here. This is the Abstract: This paper reports on a study...

  • NUS to save the planet and the world

    I've been watching the new promotional video from the NUS green (ethics & environment) team.  It's here,  and was well received at  the recent EUAC conference.  It's RSA-Animate in style, but more breathless (and Welsh). Now, like Hefce (but for...

  • ESD in England – less briefly ...

    As I wrote last month, I have been involved in some work for the UK UNESCO National Commission, part of a good team [Note 1], ably led by Steve Martin, writing an ESD Brief [Note 2] covering the UK which ......

  • Learning to care for the environment, but not the newspapers

    As I noted yesterday, I signed a letter that the Sunday Times published on 14th April.  In association with this, I was contacted by the Sunday Times last Thursday evening.  They said: "We also want to publish a news story...

  • Learning to care for the environment – and for the rest of humanity

    This is the text of a letter that the Sunday Times published today, April 14th.  It was timed to fit with the approaching deadline for commenting on the government's national curriculum revision proposals.  Specifically, this addressed unnecessary and quite inexplicable changes...

  • Not in the top 100

    I was not one of the 100 or so professors (or so) who wrote to the Telegraph the other week taking Mr Gove to task on his curriculum reforms, largely because I wasn't significant enough to be invited.  As such,...