Environmental Education Feature

Discover how the University of Gloucestershire embedded sustainability into teacher education, empowering future teachers with the knowledge, confidence and practical skills to deliver meaningful education for sustainable development.

We are living in unprecedented times. We face multiple interrelated problems, including soil degradation, forest fires, flooding, pandemics, plastic pollution, sea level rise, extreme weather events, mass migration, and widespread ecological collapse.

Whilst influencing wider curriculum reform – with high-impact examples including the Climate Education Bill and Shadow Curriculum and Assessment Review, and influencing the Francis Review – Teach the Future has developed Tracked Changes: Curriculum for a Changing Climate.

Facing the ecological crisis in education raises difficult questions about fear, grief, hope and action. This reflective essay explores how educators can nurture care, vulnerability and meaningful responses.

Explore how embedding Learning for Sustainability into photography education can connect students with their local environment, foster creativity and critical thinking, and inspire meaningful engagement with climate change, biodiversity loss and ecological wellbeing.

Connecting Water to Global Citizenship via Education for Sustainable Development (CW2GC) was an ESRC funded research project at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge that investigated the impact on young people’s learning through participation in community-based water regeneration projects.

The Earth Museum is an experimental not-for-profit enterprise with a vision to create a virtual learning resource which can be used in every home, classroom, museum and place, sharing and connecting the world’s cultural and natural heritage with people and places; empowering us to understand each other and look after the planet better.

The remit of a conservation educator is to connect audiences with the natural world and encourage the uptake of positive environmental behaviors. At Knowsley Safari, we are looking to achieve this more broadly in our community.

In 1985, sixty-two False Killer Whales [a species of dolphin: Pseudorca crassidens] stranded at Crowdy Head on the north coast of New South Wales. The whales were being thrown around and bashed to death on the rocks by the surf, with rescuers struggling in the appalling conditions.

Throughout the science programme of study there is opportunity for pupils to learn about this, but upon closer inspection it typically comes under the ‘Living Things and Their Habitats’ topic. This suggests a creative approach is needed in order to make effective links with other subjects.

The polar regions are immensely special, but are rapidly changing due to direct human disturbances, like fishing activity and habitat degradation. Penguins and other seabirds are key environmental health indicators as well as the most threatened group of birds globally.

With nearly 85% of the UK population living in urban city dwellings, it can become increasingly difficult for young people to understand the role and value of nature. When we think of wildlife, most of us think of wild animals such as tigers and leopards, but wildlife includes plants and animals that live around us, not just those in tropical rainforests or savannahs across the world.