Today’s post is by Dr Melissa Glackin from King’s College London. Melissa Glackin is a senior lecturer in science education at King’s College London and former NAEE fellow. As ever with our blogs, the contents do not not necessarily represent the views of the Association.
Active hope: The re-worlding of education
How are you?
[…]
Seriously, how are you?
[…]
I am asking as I realise that there is a lot of noise out there with limited space to really think.
So, how are you feeling about 2023?
And how has your heart and mind departed from 2022?
How are you feeling about reaching net zero, keeping temperatures from rising above 1.5c or swimming locally in an unpolluted river?
Go on, I am interested to know.
[…. Long pause]
Me? How am I feeling? By the end of 2022 I felt tired. Imagine, if you will, being in a washing machine stuck on the spin circle. Noisy, rinsed out and wondering if a different programme might spring into life. Essentially, going around and around, meeting the same old red sock that shouldn’t be there, was how I experienced much of 2022.
The political spin of the government playing power with our unique, beautiful, and precious planet was at the heart of my exhaustion. Examined further, much of the blame could be placed at the foot of the DfE’s Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy. Before it’s launch there was some hope that having a policy was better than not. However, looking beyond the well-intentioned ‘to-do’ list presented, the strategy is a distraction. As though it presents as a call for environmental action in our schools, the fundamental levers driving education activity all remain intact. There is silence around the constraining assessment system, the curriculum dominated by knowledge content, and the real influence of inspections, league tables, and financial budgets on our education leaders and the decisions they make.
In describing the strategy as a distraction, what I have found both concerning and tiring is the noise and energy that the document generates. It brings a requirement to coalesce around it, to act pleased that the government has at last acknowledged the mortality of our species and the significant mitigating role that education might play. The result is, using the typology of O’Brien and colleagues (2018), that a ‘dutiful dissent’ has descended as (well intentioned) individuals working in education and environmental-related organisations attempt to make the best of it. The strategy promises government funding. It promises opportunities for partnerships. Organisations need to keep the lights on, and employees need to pay their household bills. However, in accepting the terms of the strategy, and the argument that compromises are mandatory, we are all complicit in preventing the real changes required. That is, the strategy does not provide, or even offer an opportunity to discuss, the fundamental, but painful and confusing, systematic reforms necessary to create a holistic and earth-centred education system which is relevant to young people today.
Though the washing machine is still whirling, I entered 2023 with ‘active hope’ as over the Christmas break I re-read the NAEE manifesto, launched at a similar time to the DfE’s strategy. Rather than a to-do list, the manifesto provides way-markers for education leaders and importantly foregrounds the role that institutional vision, mission and values play to enabling an authentic and resilient integration of shared principles for sustainable living across all subjects and all organisation activities. In doing so, the responsibility to become more sustainable is not left on the shoulders of leaders alone but teachers and students are also called to action, demonstrating the manifesto’s underpinning principles of partnership, integrity, building capacity and inclusiveness. Oh, and heartening too was the acknowledgement of the rights of other species, alongside our own.
In the words of Satish Kumar, ‘the re-worlding of education is what is required’. And whilst the manifesto alone will not be the sole key for the washing machine to stop and the door to open, it provides a more genuine and hopeful way forward towards a different wash programme, without the red sock, which I will happily accept.
Reference
O’Brien, K., Selboe, E., & Hayward, B. M. (2018). Exploring youth activism on climate change:
Dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent. Ecology and Society, 23(3). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10287-230342
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Melissa Glackin can be contacted at melissa.glackin@kcl.ac.uk