Flagging Up Green – The Eco-Schools Programme is changing. The Bronze and Silver Awards will no longer be available, application will be on-line with no assessor visits for 2021/22, and green flags will now have to be renewed annually. More details here.
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Minecraft – The Sustrans Education & Young People webinar on August 24th will be showcasing a Minecraft project and the Let’s Go Zero campaign. Sustrans Scotland Education and Places for Everyone teams collaborated with A Place In Childhood to run a pilot project in place-making with children at a Glasgow primary school through the medium of the computer game Minecraft. The webinar will give an overview of this pilot project, how it was run, pitfalls and learning points. More detail and registration here.
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Climate Education – The University of Reading is holding a Climate Education Summit on September 15th. Working with the Office for Climate Education, the Royal Meteorological Society, the Met Office, EAUC and Ashden, the summit aims to bring together young people, scientists, teachers and educationalists, policymakers and campaigners to create a new, nationwide action plan for better climate education in schools and colleges. The focus will be on climate education for children aged 8 to 18. You can book a place here and you can also pose questions to the expert panels involved.
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#GenerationEarthshot – An invitation to 10 to 15 year olds and their teachers around the world to discover the best solutions to help repair our planet. The initiative is the result of a partnership between The Earthshot Prize and The World’s Largest Lesson. Sign up here to use the free teacher toolkit with your students, share their ideas via the website and use #GenerationEarthshot on social media.
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Connection and Restoration – Registration for the NAAEE annual conference is now open. The research symposium runs October 7–8 and the conference, October 12–15. NAAEE says: “Join us as we mark an NAAEE milestone! Our 50th-anniversary conference—to be held virtually—will celebrate the power of connection and the profound, restorative role of the natural world in our lives. Together, we’ll reflect on all we’ve learned about the power of environmental education to bring people of all backgrounds and disciplines together to solve our most pressing problems and to create more just and sustainable communities.”
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Inspiring Curious Minds – Make Believe Ideas has published new books in its Precious Planet series. These are books that set out to educate young children on the issues we face in the world today. They aim to engage children, inspire curious minds and challenge the way we think. We need to declare an interest as NAEE was involved with the their writing and design.
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Great Adaptations – There’s information here on the Glacier Trust’s Great Adaptations book project. These are “the lesser-told stories of good, bad, ugly and very ugly adaptation to climate change and will be the inspirations for the positive adaptations of the future – and the forewarnings of the mal-adaptations that must be avoided.” Morgan Phillips is the organiser of the project, which you can support financially here by crowdfunding.
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Poli Nation – Learning through Landscapes has 5 tips on protecting pollinators in the garden whether at home or school. And there’s an update on LTL’s Natural Nations initiative.
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Climate Justice – The Climate Justice Messaging Guide is for campaigners, activists, spokespeople, and anyone trying to talk about climate justice. The guide brings together learnings from Framing Climate Justice, a participatory movement framing project that was coordinated, alongside 350.org , NEON, and campaigners and activists seeking to centre justice in climate change communications.
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Slow Fashion and the Jeans Revolution – The Conversation has an article on how clothing businesses could lead us away from the problems of fast fashion. Elaine Ritch from Glasgow Caledonian University explores whether the pandemic is an opportunity to move towards a circular economy in clothing. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has a feature on jeans re-design with the circular economy in mind.
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Environmentally Positive – There is also a The Conversation feature on tackling plastic pollution from marine scientists at the University of Hull who offer a guide to help making environment-positive choices at home, school, or out shopping.
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Grasslands+ – The Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Butterfly Conservation, and Plantlife have formed the Grasslands+ coalition and are trying to persuade the UK government to make grasslands and meadows a priority at COP26. They says that 30% of the Earth’s carbon is stored in grassland sinks, meaning that they are as important as forests and other ecosystems in the fight against greenhouse gases. The Grasslands+ website notes that the UK has lost 97% of its meadows and other species-rich grasslands over the century.
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#GlobalCitizens Educators – Teachers working in global education have the chance to participate in research that examines the role and impact of social media as a platform for young people to learn about and engage in global issues. Just complete this survey to contribute to the project coordinated by Dr Madeleine Le Bourdon at the University of Bath.
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Living with Elephants – Africa Geographic explores southern Africa’s ‘elephant problem’ and asks whether it’s real. It argues that we should “we need to take a holistic view of elephants and their long term effects on an entire system while considering changing landscapes, human beings living with elephants, anthropogenic changes to the land and the elephants themselves.”