This is a brief report from LEEF [ London Environmental Educators’ Forum London’s Professional Network of Environmental Educators ] on last month’s launch at King’s College London of the two research reports into environmental education in secondary schools. LEEF writes:
A big thank you to Melissa Glackin and Heather King for presenting their report and to Bill Scott for his commentary. The authors of the report are shown here: Melissa Glackin and Heather King (center), with Rachel Greer (left) and Rachel Cook (right) from King College London’s Environmental Education Research Group.
In case you missed the event, here’s what we heard:
After an introduction by Heather, Melissa discussed how environmental education is currently weakly supported in national policies. She outlined how environmental education is often seen as a ‘soft science’, which lacks a specific home subject and is mainly maintained by individual teachers’ dedication to the field. The full report is here. Bill Scott provided us with some comments on wider environmental education, and he emphasised the great challenges and questioned the usefulness of focusing on national and local governments. Bill wrote about the research reports between October 23rd and 30th 2018 on his blog which can be found at: blogs.bath.ac.uk/edswahs His talk was based on these blogs and others written in early November.
If you’d like an opportunity to continue or join in on the debate, why not come along to our quarterly discussion group on Tuesday 15 January? It’s open to everyone – click below for details. We’ll be reading a short excerpt from Bill Scott and Paul Vare’s book, The World We’ll Leave Behind, and talking about the possibilities for systems thinking in education.
If you’re not a member of LEEF already and interested in joining, you can read more about us at our website.