Given that we only have ten years to turn things around so that we don't hit 2 degrees Celsius in global warming and there is a very real chance that civilisation will not survive 3-4 degrees warming, Greta Thunberg's comment that What is the point in going to school if there is no future? becomes very prescient. I have been thinking about what a school curriculum for the climate emergency future would look like because I don't think our current one is preparing our students for an uncertain future.
In the Guardian Edward Stubbs considers secondary education but I as a primary school teacher and grandmother of a primary schooler would like to look at the lower end of education. After all my granddaughter will only be 17 years old when our ten years are up.
One thing I am certain is the the current system is not giving our kids the skills they need to survive the climate emergency. Yet if you look at the Australian Curriculum it has a cross curricular priority of Sustainability which is supposed to be taught across all strands of education. So really the curriculum has everything we need to teach the skills and knowledge we need.
The Climate Reality Project has a resource for talking about climate change age appropriately to children.
Now I don't want to scare primary age children about something they can't do anything about but I do want them to have skills and attitudes that will help them survive a world that is going to be a lot less safe and secure that the world we grew up in.
I also understand that teachers are already cracking under the current workload and don't want more stuff they have to teach. The aim is to swap current content for content that teaches climate adaptation, using the current Australian curriculum.
I also understand that climate change has become a political football so teachers are reluctant to mention it. You are not doing your students any favours by this silence. However it is possible to teach climate adaptation skills, knowledge and behaviours without mentioning climate change because they are also essential for health, safety, general knowledge and waste reduction.
Physical
The physical skills of swimming, biking and walking can be taught in school as part of Physical Education. Swap other sports for these. Take students for walks around their community. This aids their spatial memory as well as their fitness. Some children have been driven everywhere and don't have a mental map of their area in their mind. How many children are being driven less than a kilometre to school? This causes traffic jams near the school everyday. Yet if more children walked or rode then it would be safer for everyone. Can you get funding to pay some parents to guide a walking or bike train to school each day? You can use the current obesity crisis as the reason to advocate for this and not even mention climate change.
Natural disaster training
Do your students (and parents) know what to do in the event of a natural disaster? Do your students and parents know what your school plan for natural disasters is? I'm assuming that your school actually has a plan. Many schools have incursions from fire brigades already. Why not collaborate with fire/ emergency services and have some lessons that look at bushfires, floods, storms and emergency preparations, what to do during the natural disaster and safe behaviour afterwards. Include parents and what your school would do under different circumstances so that in the event of a natural disaster everyone knows what to do and eliminates panic. Again since this is only an improved and localised version of what currently happens (the generic fire brigade visit) you don't even need to mention climate change.
Years 5-6 do a unit on natural disasters. Rather than choose a disaster a long way away find a local flood, bushfire or storm to study in depth. Look at the effects it had and plan responses to it. Connect natural disasters to their own lives. Would the roads get cut to your town? How much food is in shops? What would happen if the power was cut for days? Telecommunications? Where is the emergency safe place in your town?
Food
Children are disconnected from the sources of food. In all grades we can work to connect them. Have a school vegetable garden and kitchen and teach children to grow and cook food. Teach children where food comes from and make it local and relevant. Expose children to different tastes of fruit and vegetables by bringing in some to try (obviously avoiding tree nuts and peanuts and any known allergies). Can your students recognise food growing on trees or on plants? There are numerous opportunities to bring fruit and vegetables into the school day eg books about fruit and vegetables in English, fractions and length/mass in Maths, Science, PDHPE.
Look at the labels of processed food in Maths to look at percentages, investigate the cost of processed food compared to the main ingredients eg cost brushed potatoes, washed potatoes, pre-cut frozen chips, packet chips, packaged dried mashed potato.
Recipes are a great opportunity to practise maths concepts in real life: mass, volume, proportions, temperature.
Understanding interconnected society
Throughout the upper years of primary the HASS syllabus includes understanding how societies and communities function (extending to a global level in year 6). Use your local community as the teaching example. Where does the water come from in your community, the electricity, the food, the services, the telecommunications? Where does the sewerage go? the waste? How far have the things we use travelled to get to us? Take children to see the infrastructure that supports this. Emphasise there is "no away". Teach the water cycle and decomposition with real life examples from your area. Students don't need to be explicitly taught about climate change until later primary but they need to know about our interconnectedness and need of the natural world.
Waste
Don't limit teaching about waste to a once a year picking up litter for Clean Up Australia Day. Picking up the litter is an ineffective solution to the problem and doesn't engage the children to relating it to themselves. Do a school wide waste audit like they did on War on Waste. Challenge the students to design solutions. Put the solutions in place and do the audit again each term to see if there is improvement. Don't limit this to a one off event. Remember that it is not just a matter of recycling properly but reducing the waste from the start. Take a look at the maths you can do from a waste audit.
Challenge your older students to do a waste audit at home and come up with a plan to combat it. Then do another audit to see if it has worked.
Cool Australia has plenty of ready made lessons on waste and waste audits on there website.
Try to be a Nude Food school with only unprocessed, unpackaged food.
Energy
Again energy can not only be taught in Science but also provides a real life maths opportunity. Again do an energy audit, design changes, implement changes then re-audit. There are plenty of resources on Cool Australia website to prevent redesigning the wheel for time short teachers.
If your school can get a grant for solar a pre and post installation audit would be great. Don't forget to look at the school electricity bills and teach how to read electricity bills and the cost of electricity.
Water
You can do lots of science and maths activities and units on water. Do a water audit, calculate the annual rainfall collection potential of the roofs at school (lots of area and volume there), calculate the waste from a dripping tap or a hose left running.
Nature
Connect to nature. Do lessons outside. Do a regular walk around the streets around the school. For an idea of the variety of things you can learn look at my posts on topic walks.
Democracy
Teach democracy in year 6 as if it is important. teach them not only how the government works but how they need to participate in democracy not just by voting but through communication with elected representatives, understanding issues, reading party policies, signing petitions, contacting elected representatives. Show them how easy it is to contact your representatives through phone calls, emails, and in person.
In English teach the students how to write persuasive letters, speeches, articles using environmental concerns as your stimulus. Support students who participate in Climate Strikes and other actions. They are learning Civics from real life.
Fix it skills sewing, woodwork
Teach real life skills like sewing hems, and buttons and using woodwork tools. Lack of these skills means that people are throwing out things rather than repairing them. Show them how the internet can teach them how to do things.
Imagination and experimentation recycled material
Teach students to use their imaginations and experiment by using recycled materials when you do craft and science.
Science
Teach students about science and to value it. Don't just treat it as an add on. Show them the scientific process of curiosity, hypothesis, testing the idea and refining the idea. Teach them that science is all around us and done by people like us. Show them how interconnected everything is and our dependence on nature. Show them that we depend on nature for our food, water, air, materials and health. Teach students about the importance of pollination and bees for our food supply. Do real science with citizen science providing data to real scientists eg Insect Pollination week, Backyard Bird Week, recording frogs for FrogIDAus, recording litter for Litterati and recording microplastics for AUSMAP. In the upper years teach about climate change and show local examples of how it happening instead of icebergs and starving polar bears that have no connection to our students lives.
Information literacy
Do your students know how to tell real facts from fake news. There is lots of misinformation about climate change on the internet. Teach your students how to identify credible news from fake news. If you use climate change examples when teaching this you can reinforce the science of climate change.
Financial literacy
Students can learn about managing money, the power of advertising to make you over consume and needs and wants with financial literacy. This can be taught not just in maths but also English (persuasive texts), HSIE and PDHPE. The ASIC Money Smart website has units for all ages and subjects all ready to go on their website.
Maps
Teach your students to read maps: weather maps, contour maps, road maps, building designs, flood maps, fire risk maps.
Climate Change and Adaptation workshops for parents
Run workshops for parents about climate change science, about retrofitting houses, about energy/water savings. about gardening and about active democracy.
Role models
Give students positive environmental role models. Learn about environmental activists and be a good role model yourself.
Most of these things don't require you to mention climate change or do large amounts of extra work. Just think of how you could teach the content using the environment and healthy living as your stimulus.
If your school is not doing this, speak to the principal and use these as ideas for conversations and skill learning at home.
In the Guardian Edward Stubbs considers secondary education but I as a primary school teacher and grandmother of a primary schooler would like to look at the lower end of education. After all my granddaughter will only be 17 years old when our ten years are up.
One thing I am certain is the the current system is not giving our kids the skills they need to survive the climate emergency. Yet if you look at the Australian Curriculum it has a cross curricular priority of Sustainability which is supposed to be taught across all strands of education. So really the curriculum has everything we need to teach the skills and knowledge we need.
The Climate Reality Project has a resource for talking about climate change age appropriately to children.
Now I don't want to scare primary age children about something they can't do anything about but I do want them to have skills and attitudes that will help them survive a world that is going to be a lot less safe and secure that the world we grew up in.
I also understand that teachers are already cracking under the current workload and don't want more stuff they have to teach. The aim is to swap current content for content that teaches climate adaptation, using the current Australian curriculum.
I also understand that climate change has become a political football so teachers are reluctant to mention it. You are not doing your students any favours by this silence. However it is possible to teach climate adaptation skills, knowledge and behaviours without mentioning climate change because they are also essential for health, safety, general knowledge and waste reduction.
Physical
The physical skills of swimming, biking and walking can be taught in school as part of Physical Education. Swap other sports for these. Take students for walks around their community. This aids their spatial memory as well as their fitness. Some children have been driven everywhere and don't have a mental map of their area in their mind. How many children are being driven less than a kilometre to school? This causes traffic jams near the school everyday. Yet if more children walked or rode then it would be safer for everyone. Can you get funding to pay some parents to guide a walking or bike train to school each day? You can use the current obesity crisis as the reason to advocate for this and not even mention climate change.
Natural disaster training
Do your students (and parents) know what to do in the event of a natural disaster? Do your students and parents know what your school plan for natural disasters is? I'm assuming that your school actually has a plan. Many schools have incursions from fire brigades already. Why not collaborate with fire/ emergency services and have some lessons that look at bushfires, floods, storms and emergency preparations, what to do during the natural disaster and safe behaviour afterwards. Include parents and what your school would do under different circumstances so that in the event of a natural disaster everyone knows what to do and eliminates panic. Again since this is only an improved and localised version of what currently happens (the generic fire brigade visit) you don't even need to mention climate change.
Years 5-6 do a unit on natural disasters. Rather than choose a disaster a long way away find a local flood, bushfire or storm to study in depth. Look at the effects it had and plan responses to it. Connect natural disasters to their own lives. Would the roads get cut to your town? How much food is in shops? What would happen if the power was cut for days? Telecommunications? Where is the emergency safe place in your town?
Food
Children are disconnected from the sources of food. In all grades we can work to connect them. Have a school vegetable garden and kitchen and teach children to grow and cook food. Teach children where food comes from and make it local and relevant. Expose children to different tastes of fruit and vegetables by bringing in some to try (obviously avoiding tree nuts and peanuts and any known allergies). Can your students recognise food growing on trees or on plants? There are numerous opportunities to bring fruit and vegetables into the school day eg books about fruit and vegetables in English, fractions and length/mass in Maths, Science, PDHPE.
Look at the labels of processed food in Maths to look at percentages, investigate the cost of processed food compared to the main ingredients eg cost brushed potatoes, washed potatoes, pre-cut frozen chips, packet chips, packaged dried mashed potato.
Recipes are a great opportunity to practise maths concepts in real life: mass, volume, proportions, temperature.
Understanding interconnected society
Throughout the upper years of primary the HASS syllabus includes understanding how societies and communities function (extending to a global level in year 6). Use your local community as the teaching example. Where does the water come from in your community, the electricity, the food, the services, the telecommunications? Where does the sewerage go? the waste? How far have the things we use travelled to get to us? Take children to see the infrastructure that supports this. Emphasise there is "no away". Teach the water cycle and decomposition with real life examples from your area. Students don't need to be explicitly taught about climate change until later primary but they need to know about our interconnectedness and need of the natural world.
Waste
Don't limit teaching about waste to a once a year picking up litter for Clean Up Australia Day. Picking up the litter is an ineffective solution to the problem and doesn't engage the children to relating it to themselves. Do a school wide waste audit like they did on War on Waste. Challenge the students to design solutions. Put the solutions in place and do the audit again each term to see if there is improvement. Don't limit this to a one off event. Remember that it is not just a matter of recycling properly but reducing the waste from the start. Take a look at the maths you can do from a waste audit.
Challenge your older students to do a waste audit at home and come up with a plan to combat it. Then do another audit to see if it has worked.
Cool Australia has plenty of ready made lessons on waste and waste audits on there website.
Try to be a Nude Food school with only unprocessed, unpackaged food.
Energy
Again energy can not only be taught in Science but also provides a real life maths opportunity. Again do an energy audit, design changes, implement changes then re-audit. There are plenty of resources on Cool Australia website to prevent redesigning the wheel for time short teachers.
If your school can get a grant for solar a pre and post installation audit would be great. Don't forget to look at the school electricity bills and teach how to read electricity bills and the cost of electricity.
Water
You can do lots of science and maths activities and units on water. Do a water audit, calculate the annual rainfall collection potential of the roofs at school (lots of area and volume there), calculate the waste from a dripping tap or a hose left running.
Nature
Connect to nature. Do lessons outside. Do a regular walk around the streets around the school. For an idea of the variety of things you can learn look at my posts on topic walks.
Democracy
Teach democracy in year 6 as if it is important. teach them not only how the government works but how they need to participate in democracy not just by voting but through communication with elected representatives, understanding issues, reading party policies, signing petitions, contacting elected representatives. Show them how easy it is to contact your representatives through phone calls, emails, and in person.
In English teach the students how to write persuasive letters, speeches, articles using environmental concerns as your stimulus. Support students who participate in Climate Strikes and other actions. They are learning Civics from real life.
Fix it skills sewing, woodwork
Teach real life skills like sewing hems, and buttons and using woodwork tools. Lack of these skills means that people are throwing out things rather than repairing them. Show them how the internet can teach them how to do things.
Imagination and experimentation recycled material
Teach students to use their imaginations and experiment by using recycled materials when you do craft and science.
Science
Teach students about science and to value it. Don't just treat it as an add on. Show them the scientific process of curiosity, hypothesis, testing the idea and refining the idea. Teach them that science is all around us and done by people like us. Show them how interconnected everything is and our dependence on nature. Show them that we depend on nature for our food, water, air, materials and health. Teach students about the importance of pollination and bees for our food supply. Do real science with citizen science providing data to real scientists eg Insect Pollination week, Backyard Bird Week, recording frogs for FrogIDAus, recording litter for Litterati and recording microplastics for AUSMAP. In the upper years teach about climate change and show local examples of how it happening instead of icebergs and starving polar bears that have no connection to our students lives.
Information literacy
Do your students know how to tell real facts from fake news. There is lots of misinformation about climate change on the internet. Teach your students how to identify credible news from fake news. If you use climate change examples when teaching this you can reinforce the science of climate change.
Financial literacy
Students can learn about managing money, the power of advertising to make you over consume and needs and wants with financial literacy. This can be taught not just in maths but also English (persuasive texts), HSIE and PDHPE. The ASIC Money Smart website has units for all ages and subjects all ready to go on their website.
Maps
Teach your students to read maps: weather maps, contour maps, road maps, building designs, flood maps, fire risk maps.
Climate Change and Adaptation workshops for parents
Run workshops for parents about climate change science, about retrofitting houses, about energy/water savings. about gardening and about active democracy.
Role models
Give students positive environmental role models. Learn about environmental activists and be a good role model yourself.
Most of these things don't require you to mention climate change or do large amounts of extra work. Just think of how you could teach the content using the environment and healthy living as your stimulus.
If your school is not doing this, speak to the principal and use these as ideas for conversations and skill learning at home.
This is great - What about also teaching ecology and inter-connectedness of all species etc., if the bees go then the polination stops, if the polination stops we have no food....etc.
ReplyDeleteThanks Nigel, I have added your ideas.
Delete