Climate discussions with International Baccalaureate (IB) teachers

School climate strikes in Oxford 2019

The School Climate Strikes are undoubtedly a challenge for teachers and school leaders. Many are concerned about climate change and support their students’ initiative, but they are also under pressure to keep students at school, learning and passing exams. As Greta Thunberg becomes a teenage hero, teachers across all subjects are finding themselves seeking climate information, and school leaders are finding creative ways to harness climate awareness in support of school learning!

The IB education programmes have something special to bring to our climate futures: the focus on critical thinking, problem solving, and collaborative working develops exactly the set of skills that we need in the future workforce to solve the climate problem. Could the IB community be co-opted as climate champions? Today we had the opportunity to talk to a group of 16 teachers and leaders from IB schools, who were at Warwick University for some IB training, about their professional responses and needs in relation to climate change.

The discussion was wide ranging. It confirmed what we had learned from other teacher training organisations - that it is difficult for teachers to quickly find impartial and up-to-date sources of climate change information that are suitable in a school setting. All agreed that for an international community of teachers the biggest sustainability concern is flying, and there was a desire to understand the relative significance of school initiatives on plastic, meat and waste.

There was some concern that students are being hypocritical in blaming adults for climate change but doing nothing in their own lives to reduce consumption. In unpacking that view we all recognised our own reluctance to have our own behaviours challenged. Isn’t that the nub of the entire climate problem?

There was an acknowledgement that far from being “skivers” the students who are most eco-conscious tend to be the ones who are most diligent at school, and in the light of the statistic from the International Labour Organisation that climate management will create 24 million new jobs, we discussed whether in fact student engagement with their studies may increase as they become more aware of the climate crisis facing them. Could this be a win-win for schools and planet?

The IB was created as a force for good in the world in the 1950s and it may be needed now more than ever before. The take home message after a really thoughtful discussion was a comment from one of the attendees: “Every IB teacher should be a climate teacher”.

Our sincere thanks to IBSCA, the UK IB Schools and College Association, for making this discussion possible. We look forward to the opportunity to engage with more IB teachers, on climate, and on the circular economy on 29th November.

“I loved exchanging ideas and sharing experiences with teachers from other schools”

— Samah

Kim Polgreen

Oxford University Said Business School and Paul Polman

Paul Polman has been a hero of mine in business and sustainability. He has been the business leader who gave us all hope that business could lead us out of our environmental problems. He has just become the Chair of the School Board for the Oxford University Business School and last night I attended his talk at the Business School. He is a fount of knowledge about sustainability. He had some great facts: There are 3.3M jobs in green energy in the US - three times as many as in fossil fuels; 1.7Bn people in the world use 85% of the earth’s resources; 77% of Americans want to stay in the Paris agreement. Hope I noted them down correctly.

He talked about how scientists don’t use the language of certainty, and the big challenge in sustainability is communication. A shout out for all our students developing communication skills - use your school studies and your social life to develop your written and verbal skills!

My favourite take home? He said that we don’t need Business-As-Usual, we need Business-Unusual. I really hope that he will inspire the MBA students at the School, and all the other Business Schools around the world, and that business really can become the agent for change that I hoped it would be twenty years ago.

Kim Polgreen

Finding out where our waste goes

Residual waste is the term being used for waste that we haven’t managed to separate out for reuse or recycling. In Oxfordshire it used to go to landfill. But now we have an amazing facility just outside Oxford called an Energy Recovery Facility (Ardley ERF). I was lucky enough to have a visit there earlier this week. The trucks that collect waste from our bins go straight to the facility, the waste is tipped into a massive (really massive) hopper. It is mixed by some huge grabbers controlled remotely by a skilled operative and then moved into the incinerators. It’s hugely high tech and most of the plant is to do with cleaning the air. Apparently nothing comes out of their tall chimneys except water vapour - and of course CO2. The residue from the burning is used as aggregate in road building, and the finer ash is made into building blocks. The best thing is that they recover energy and make electricity. As the educator at the ERF was at pains to point out - WE STILL MAKE TOO MUCH WASTE! And we could be reducing, reusing and recycling an awful lot more. But at least in Oxfordshire we are doing something more sensible with it. See this Virador video for a quick peek of the landfill site. This shows how another Virador ERF works.

Kim Polgreen

Climate in Geography A Level

LIGC sponsored a recent seminar, organised by the ECI, on how climate change can be taught effectively withing the existing British A level Geography curriculum. Prof Martin Evans was involved in creating the latest syllabus that teachers are currently using. Although there isn’t much in the specification about climate, and curriculum changes happen far too slowly for this to be a sensible area for climate action, Martin explained to an audience of teachers that in fact they have a great deal of freedom to include climate in a large proportion of the modules.

There were lots of great ideas in Martin’s talk, and the teachers seems suitably enthused if slightly daunted. Geography is arguably the fastest changing subject, which means that teachers are always challenged to keep up with latest information, data, case studies etc. They have to cover a huge breadth of material. And they are probably the teachers most in the firing line for climate questions from students. There is a certainly an opportunity for them to become leaders in climate solutions by arming themselves with appropriate knowledge, resources and lesson plans, but they probably need some support.

LIGC is offering local teachers support in climate understanding through the one hour sessions we have trialled with IB teachers. We have also partnered with an Oxford teacher and climate activist to create the Teachers for Future Oxfordshire Facebook page for local teachers to swap ideas. We are highlighted the ECI’s intiative Maths for Planet Earth which although created for maths teachers, shows how an existing curriculum can be adapted to teach new material. And we are encouraging teachers and schools to look at EduCCate Global, the UN accredited online climate training for teachers. This is 20+ hours but those who have done it feel it has been very empowering.

A positive outcome for geography as a school subject might be that after years of being one of the less popular subjects, students might begin to see its value for their lives and their careers.

Student poetry inspired by Wytham Woods

On our weekend in Wytham Woods we and the students wrote a few words of poetry in response to finding and learning about fungi, and then standing still and looking closely as something in the woods for a few minutes. The woods were in full autumn colours, everything was wet, and there were amazing fungi everywhere. These are what the students wrote that day.

Battlefield

The flora’s fallen brethren

Consumed by the unseen scent

Ready to set the cycle again

Old and fallen trees, decaying in the woods

It was dying, but, it was helping new lives

To appear, small twenty mushrooms.

Nutty, wise

Lucky disguise.

Caring, strong

Daring song.

Three little mushrooms living off the dead,

With nowhere to grow but up ahead

Three little mushrooms living among the dead,

It’s a graveyard someone once said…

Branch like fungi, grey with a narrow roof surfacing gills

Existed in a colony exuding a nutty scent.

A broken tree trunk with red mushrooms growing out of it’s broken end. 

“lying broken detached by my roots although unknown red raw roots are growing beneath me.”

Cream and brown splothches like bubbles rising skywards

Shortly to fall earthwards as the tree trunk dissolves

Fungi oasis in a birch stump. Thriving where the tree is no longer. Silent in the cracking, dripping, plinking, wish-ing soundscape.

Fungi littered around you

Green splattered around the bark

Roots buried deep

Unmoving.

In the greatest of winds

Only few branches remain.

A weekend in Oxford's laboratory with leaves

The University of Oxford owns one of the most researched pieces of woodland in the world, and oddly, in the middle of it, is a Swiss Chalet.

The chalet has just had a major makeover, and been transformed from the witches’ hut of your nightmares into a rather chic abode. Having shown ourselves to be enthusiasts for bringing teenagers into the woods to learn about the research there, we were excited to be asked to test out the chalet as a venue for student sleepovers.

Our lovely friends at Westminster Academy school in Paddington mustered a group of eight very enterprising year 13 IB students who agreed to get on a train to Oxford for a weekend in the unknown. The weather was atrocious so armed with spare wellies and mountains of food we went to meet them at the station, with some trepidation about whether they were going to enjoy their weekend.

We need not have worried. They were the most fantastic group - enthusiastic about exploring Oxford, and open to new adventures. We did a whistlestop tour of some of our favourite bits of Oxford - diving into the famous Norrington Room in Blackwell's bookshop, gawping at the ceiling of Exeter College chapel, being warmly welcomed out of the rain by the Education Manager at the Museum of Natural History, and ending up with tea and biscuits and a fast and fascinating talk at the Environmental Change Institute.

Thence to the woods in the gathering gloom, a communal cook up and an early night. The following day was a gentle, drippy exploration of research projects in the woods, a fungal foray, writing some poetry, and close encounters with Dani, the Bat Lady's, “education” bats. We passed the evening carving pumpkins and baking apple crumbles. One of the students made custard from scratch!

The sun finally shone as we delivered our brave recruits back to the station on Sunday morning, leaving the pumpkins on guard back at the chalet.

We have proved that you can have a huge amount of fun and learn a lot in 36 hours. We are now keen to do it again …..

Kim Polgreen