Natural England’s recent update on research identified a number of books. Here is a selection: 1. Children Learning Outside the Classroom: From Birth to Eleven edited by Sue Waite. Learning outside the classroom is increasingly seen as beneficial in both early years and primary settings, and it is becoming embedded in the curriculum, but what are…
British Wildlife is an utterly brilliant collation of illustrations sure to prove irresistible to children and adults alike – it has been a constant companion to my three children since its arrival on our doormat for review! The book professes to document the wildlife of the British Isles; its poetic introduction invites the reader to…
The last part (The Path Ahead; page 122) of WWF’s 2016 Living Planet report says this: The facts and figures in this report tend to paint a challenging picture, yet there is still considerable room for optimism. If we manage to carry out critically needed transitions, the rewards will be immense. Fortunately, we are not starting…
There is a growing realisation that children benefit by being involved in ‘wild’ spaces; that so many children today grow up in a city environment – far from any ‘natural encounter’ – with youngsters who simply do not know what ‘nature’ they are missing. These are the new generation of kids experiencing ‘nature deficit disorder’,…
Why Animals Can’t Save the Planet is a compact, colourful book that shows children what they can do to “save the planet“. The book is written in rhyme and features bold, colourful illustrations of animals trying – and obviously failing – to carry out actions that are easy for humans to do: a gorilla struggling to…
NotDeadFish, a social change consultancy, recently announced a new report: Work on the Wild Side. You can download it here. This, NDF says, attempts to debunk the myth that outdoor learning and residentials are not viable teaching mechanisms. It adds: “As accountability within schools increases and budgets decrease, it is easy to see how outdoor learning can…
Meadowland was published to wide acclaim in 2015 and duly emerged as the Thwaites Wainwright prize winner for the year. Lewis-Stempel chronicles his observations of a meadow in Herefordshire month by month through the year in stunning prose, drawing the reader in to share with him his intimacy with the landscape and its wildlife. From…
The Worldwatch Institute has, today, published Earth Ed: rethinking education on a changing planet. There are 25 chapters with the first and last ones (both by Erik Assadourian, senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute and director of State of the World 2017) available as no-cost downloads. The whole thing will cost you $20 or so, plus shipping. The last chapter is…
This is a new book from palgrave macmillan, and this is what the publishers have to say about it: This book provides a critique of over two decades of sustained effort to infuse educational systems with education for sustainable development. Taking to heart the idea that deconstruction is a prelude to reconstruction, this critique leads…
If you want to really understand the climate, and how it is changing, to what extent do you have to understand weather? I thought about this question, and similar ones such as: how much do you have to understand about the weather, and anyway what’s the difference, as I read this new book edited by…
Routledge has announce the publication of: Environmental Education, a major works collection in the Critical Concepts in the Environment series. Its editors are Alan Reid and NAEE President, Justin Dillon. Routledge says: “Addressing the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing subject and its multidisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature, ‘Environmental Education’…
This is a beautiful book (I could not put it down), as well as being an important work about a very important subject. Bees pollinate more than 130 fruit, vegetable, and seed crops that humans rely on. Bees are crucial to the reproduction and diversity of flowering plants; their economic contributions are measured in the…