Hannah Brennan Year 4/5 Teacher at Greenacres Primary School, Shropshire & Carolyn Drever English and Outdoor Learning specialist ……………………………………. Change the Story is an Erasmus+ project with partners in Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Austria and the UK. ‘Change the Story empowers pupils to create the future they want: to explore how climate change impacts their lives…
“We must have a curriculum role, or we have nothing.” NAEE is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year to mark its foundation in September 1971. The background to this was the growth throughout the 1960s of an interest in what quickly became known as “the environment”. The most significant educational aspect of this was the 1965 Keele conference…
Philosophy for Children (P4C) ‘in’, ‘through’, ‘about’ and ‘using’ the outdoors – Gina Parker (Mullarkey) There are lots of studies into the effectiveness of P4C, including evidence to show that it boosts results in reading, writing and maths but, for me, the real benefit is teaching pupils to think for themselves and articulate those thoughts…
Richard Sheldrake & Michael J Reiss UCL Institute of Education Engaging with nature has been found to be associated with various benefits, including benefits for physical health and self-reported wellbeing (e.g. Rogerson, Barton, Bragg, & Pretty, 20171). However, most of the research to date has been undertaken with adults and much less is known about…
Isobel Cammish Teach the Future team & Patrick Kirwan Hammersmith Academy Recent studies have shown that only 4% of pupils surveyed think they know a lot about climate change and the environment, 68% of students want to know more, but 75% of teachers feel that they have not received adequate training on the subject 1.…
Stephanie West, Angela Marmont Centre, Natural History Museum Back in 2011 the House of Lords discussed the ‘Taxonomic Skills Shortage’. This followed years of discussion within natural history: our natural historians are ageing, where is the next generation, who will continue this work? Historically the UK has had a wealth of amateur and professional naturalists, able…
Guy Willcock, young environmentalist I first realised I was living in the middle of a mass annual amphibian migration when I was nine. Every February, thousands of toads, frogs and newts would make their halting way across the road outside our house, all going in one direction. Their destination was a lake just below our…
Elena Lengthorn, Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education, University of Worcester What is the power of our words and how can we harness their power to create a better world for wildlife? Many of us will have heard the old adage of ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me’. It’s an…
Raichael Lock, Manchester Environmental Education Network (MEEN) As Maria Puig de le Bellacasa1 argued recently in her plenary at the Royal Geographic Society Conference in London, ‘soil’ is a perfect metaphor for our troubled relationship with the ‘Earth’. So, that means, for urban ES educators, teaching about mud is more important than ever. In Manchester, the…
Emily Munn, Urbanwise.London Urbanwise aims to promote active outdoor learning in the local area, help young people communicate their views and ideas on environmental issues which concern them and bring people together to examine issues around environmental change. Urban ES education is often associated with building social connections, trust and community, also known as social…
Beth Collier, Director of Wild in the City Wild in the City supports the wellbeing of urban residents through relationships with nature in London and beyond. We offer programmes in woodland living skills, natural history, walks and ecotherapy; using the skills of our ancestors to develop a deeper relationship with the natural world and a…
Nicola Simpson, Urban Wildlife Manager at Gloucester Wildlife Trust Gloucestershire is often considered to be a rural county, full of countryside and nature. So many people might be confused to find out that Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust (GWT) has an urban programme of work. The county has two major settlements and only one city, Gloucester, which…