Tag: Climate action

“Leaky spaces for Climate Change Education are not enough for Bristol’s young people”

Posted on by Lucy Backwell

city hall, BristolBlog by Mrs Michelle Graffagnino, Senior Lecturer in Education, and Dr Nicola Warren-Lee, Senior Lecturer in Education.

After attending a Bristol Education Partnership Climate Change event at City Hall in Bristol, Nicola and Michelle recall the brilliance of the student contributions, the passion of the senior leaders and the ambiguity of the attending DfE representative.

City Hall in Bristol is impressive.  Even more so on a crisp autumnal morning full of enthusiastic school students armed with posters, and a cohort of beginning geography teachers ready to take their first steps into a microteaching event on climate change curriculum improvement in October 2022. The Bristol Education Partnership (BEP) had organised a climate conference to showcase individual schools’ climate change initiatives and to bring students to take part in workshops on different areas of climate action.  The School of Education, PGCE Secondary Geography group were there to support discussions on how the curriculum that students follow could be changed, improved and linked together. (more…)

What can prehistoric preschool teach us about climate change education in the present?

Posted on by Lucy Backwell

Blog by Professor Paul Howard-Jones, School of Education, University of Bristol

Several years ago in Turkey, an archaeologist invited me to descend into a pit where one of the first urban settlements was being unearthed. There was a hearth, holes for holding pots and the remains of plaster on the walls, still bearing traces of decoration.

The layers of development exposed by this excavation revealed a continuous period of innovation since around 6000BC. Over its lifetime – around 1,200 years – the site hosted the first “urbanites”, who had left their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind and begun a journey of creativity and invention. Among their ideas were novel building techniques, cooking methods, and ways to create and use pottery. (more…)

School of Education Climate Action Group: reflections on 2021-2022

Posted on by Lucy Backwell

Blog by Professor Alf Coles, School of Education, University of Bristol

The School of Education Climate Action Group started in 2021 and, among many things it did in 2021-22, the most high profile was the ‘Climate Justice Challenge’, which ran for 30 days in March 2022.

This blog will reflect on that Challenge, as it is something we aim to re-run in March 2023, and also detail some of the wider and continuing aims of the Climate Action Group. (more…)

Latest Climate Action at the School of Education, University of Bristol

Posted on by Lucy Backwell

Blog post by Lauren Hennessy, Research Associate on the Climate Change Education Research Network

Since the launch of the Climate Change Education Research Network (CCERN) in November 2020, numerous new research projects and initiatives have been developed at the University of Bristol’s School of Education. Some have come out of CCERN’s work, others exist quite separately. This blog post highlights just a small selection of those initiatives. (more…)