TEESNET 2022 – An early bird notification that the popular TEESNet conference will be on September 28th this year at Liverpool Hope University’s Hope Park Campus. Its focus is Re-Imagining Teacher Education: Transforming Learning for a Just and Sustainable World. The deadline for proposals is May 23rd. There are more details and registration forms here.
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Linking to Nature – The 64 organisations within Wildlife and Countryside Link are calling for a legal right to access to nature to be a key facet of the levelling-up agenda. The Link has written to the government to seek funding to provide nature-rich spaces in every locality. They also seek legal duties on developers and public bodies to provide equal access for everyone to green spaces. The Times quotes Dr Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link: “The government says levelling up means pride of place and equal opportunity. But for many people this ends the moment they step out of their door. So many lives are worsened or shortened by disconnection from nature. Unless levelling up includes a legal right to healthy local natural spaces, it will surely fail.”
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Green Funding – One of our blogs last week was by NAEE Fellow, Henry Greenwood, Director of the Green Schools project. It is the text of the Project’s response (with recommendations) to the Department for Education’s draft Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy. Green Schools welcomed the strategy as a step in the right direction after more than a decade of inaction. It thinks that there are many good aspects to the strategy, but knows that much will depend on the funding that will be made available to support schools to enact it.
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The Countryside’s for All – Muslim Hikers is an organisation that encourages spending time in the natural world. It was founded in 2020 by Haroon Mota after he went on a geography field trip to north Wales and realised many others from Muslim backgrounds had not been introduced to the countryside in the same way. He told The Times: “I started hiking 15-20 years ago and back then it was even less diverse than it is now. I hiked for several years before I even bumped into someone of brown-coloured skin. There’s a huge level of underrepresentation in the outdoors from our communities. It’s not within our sort of DNA … and that’s something that I’ve been working on.”
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Park Prescriptions – Across four Canadian provinces, doctors can now prescribe free annual passes giving people access to more than 80 national parks, historic sites and nature reserves. Doctors each only have 100 passes and have been urged to prioritise patients who might not otherwise be able to afford them. This builds on doctors’ experience of prescribing nature therapy (such as spending time in nature twice a week for at least 20 minutes at a time) as a treatment for anxiety, depression, high blood pressure, immune function and insomnia.
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Model Roles – The Green Stories project is launching a new video competition in partnership with BAFTA. This will involve creating 5 minute videos that raises awareness of the role of fictional role models in promoting sustainable lifestyles, and highlight writers, producers and characters that implicitly promote excessive consumption as an aspiration. The best videos will be shared across networks and the one with the most views will win. The submission deadline is 31st May.
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Land of Hope and Life – Hope in the face of climate change is the focus of a webinar on March 8th . The organisers say that hope has to remain possible, because life insists on it. In the webinar Rupert Read will be “in conversation” with John Foster on themes from his new book Realism and the Climate Crisis. Together, they will consider whether we now need a different approach to the demands of the climate emergency. You can register here.
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Lakes Futures – The Inkcap journal had a feature last week on the rewilding of a small part of the Lake District on the eastern side of Haweswater – a lake just about as unnatural as you can get. It follows the work of RSPB and United Utilities in changing the features of the land. Written by Lee Schofield, you can read it here. Meanwhile, this is Inkcap’s background to the feature.
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Teaching Difficult Issues – A webinar organised by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy (0-11 years) and the Primary PGCE programme at the UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, will include talks on alternative methods for teaching around difficult issues. Talks will explore a range of topics related to teaching about the environment and climate change including subject content and research-informed pedagogy. It runs on March 17th (1630 to 1730) and registration is here.
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Beyond Declarations, What’s the Plan? – This is the title of a webinar orgaised by The Edge on March 16th 1600 to 1700. The speakers are Sir Dieter Helm, Professor of Economic Policy, University of Oxford and Chair of the Natural Capital Committee 2012-20, Dame Fiona Reynolds, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Chair of the National Audit Office, and Shaun Spiers, Executive Director of the Green Alliance. The session will pose three questions for the speakers and the audience: [i] What are the policies required and how can we influence them? [ii] How can we ensure that policies, once enacted, achieve their aims? [iii] How do we ensure that the pace of change is sufficient? There is more detail here and you can register here.
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Ocean Ed 1 – Dive Project Cornwall is setting out to work with thousands of young people educating them about the importance of the planet’s marine environment and its vital role in our very own existence. It’s working in partnership with the Marine Conservation Society. Secondary schools across the UK are being invited to join in. As part of this, 400 youngsters will have a 6-day trip to Cornwall where they will learn to scuba dive, enjoy outdoor adventures, take up beach-related activities and attend presentations from leading marine industry experts. Details here.
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Ocean Ed 2 – During the recent One Ocean Summit, UNESCO announced it’s goal of including ocean education in the school curricula of its 193 Member States by 2025. To achieve this, UNESCO unveiled a “common repository of educational content for policymakers and curriculum developers, giving them all the keys needed to integrate ocean education at every level of the educational chain: from the drafting of national curricula to the preparation of lessons by teachers.” Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education said that thanks to this toolkit, all countries were now on an equal footing, and “rapidly able to place the ocean at the heart of education and increase students’ knowledge in this area so that they become responsible and committed citizens.” Click here to discover more.
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Canada Outdoors – The Outdoor Learning Store is a social enterprise that offers outdoor learning equipment & resources for educators & learners while supporting Canadian outdoor learning non-profit organisations. It runs workshops and podcasts. The latter cover issues such as Water insights from the headwaters to the open ocean, Playing in the muck, art activities, and the walking curriculum, Reconnecting with the land through a child’s eyes, Fables from The Field series, and Gardening as an entry point to thinking big. It also has a range of publications.
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Communicate Innovate Communicate – Green Project Expo is an exhibition platform in support of green world information projects. Its main idea is to connect and communicate projects, innovators, and experts from different sectors of the economy to build a more sustainable world. Registration and presentation are free.