{"id":7975,"date":"2021-09-19T07:35:46","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T07:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7975"},"modified":"2021-09-19T07:35:46","modified_gmt":"2021-09-19T07:35:46","slug":"high-flying-environmental-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2021\/09\/19\/high-flying-environmental-education\/","title":{"rendered":"High-flying environmental education"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I noted the other day, the University of Reading held a Climate Education Summit<\/a><\/em> on September 15th. \u00a0It aimed to attract young people, scientists, teachers, policy wonks and activists in order to create \"a new, nationwide action plan for better climate education in schools and colleges.\"<\/p>\n

There were two on-line sessions. \u00a0I attended the first, but gave up on the second. \u00a0You can catch up with what went on\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The format for each session was an introduction by a senior Reading academic which was followed by an introduction from a media moderator (Tom Clark (session 1) and Laura Tobin (session 2)). \u00a0In each session the moderator was followed by two 10 minute presentations: Josh Tregale and Baroness Brown \u2013 Julia King as was \u2013 (Session 1) and Serena Bashal and\u00a0Craig Bennett (session 2). \u00a0This left 25 to 30 minutes for the presenters to respond to questions posed by members of the audience. \u00a0This was a relatively generous allocation of time compared to many such conferences, but, of course, the questioner had no come-back on what the presenters said, and we were all limited by what the moderators felt were the best questions.<\/p>\n

The main messages were that young people ought to be given greater opportunities to learn about climate change at school, and that this should be holistic, joined up, systemic, etc, etc, and involve critical thinking etc, etc. \u00a0This was, unlike climate change itself perhaps, not Earth-shatteringly novel in curriculum terms.<\/p>\n

Then there was the notion that the environment \/ climate ought to be \"a golden thread\" running through a child's experience of schools. \u00a0This clich\u00e9d suggestion was received with more enthusiasm than it surely warranted. \u00a0As I am writing this I am sure that the new secretary of state is being inundated with this same idea on behalf of a host of special interest groups. \u00a0It was a great pity that the sort of critical thinking that everyone was calling for wasn't applied to this suggestion. \u00a0But then, none of them had much experience of thinking about curriculum.<\/p>\n

I gave up on the second session half-way through as it got repetitious. \u00a0Laura Tobin, the moderator, had literally got it off to a flying start when she said that although she's hoped to hear the first session, she'd been flying back from the Arctic where she'd been broadcasting for Good Morning Britain<\/a><\/em>\u00a0about climate change.<\/p>\n

You really had to admire the chutzpah of this, and surely many would have found it jarring at an event focusing on climate change. \u00a0Indeed, as I subsequently discovered, there had already been criticism of the\u00a0GMB stunt<\/a>\u00a0by viewers.<\/p>\n

But on thinking about it, these armchair twitter critics had surely got it wrong as it was \"good\" carbon dioxide\u00a0that Tobin and her team were producing as they flew to Svalbard and back. \u00a0This was because it was created in a good cause: that of educating the hoi polloi<\/em> about climate change. \u00a0We surely all need to remember that this CO2 is quite unlike the bad gas that gets made when kerosene is burned to allow you and yours to pop down to the Costa Whatever for a frivolous holiday, or when natural gas is burnt merely to keep us warm.<\/p>\n

Well done Laura Tobin: you truly are a high-flying environmental educator in every sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I noted the other day, the University of Reading held a Climate Education Summit on September 15th. \u00a0It aimed to attract young people, scientists, teachers, policy wonks and activists in order to create \"a new, nationwide action plan for...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}