How To Embed Climate Education in English - Part 1
Climate change, living sustainably, and connecting with our natural environment can and must become key features of our lessons, across all subjects: as the defining crisis of our time, climate change impacts everything.
Flexibility
of the National Curriculum
Teach the Future point out that
“The national curriculum has not been substantively or systematically reviewed
for at least eight years, and doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon”. If you
are an academy, you don’t even need to follow the national curriculum – you could
opt to construct a robust program of your own.
So don’t wait - use the flexibility within (and the potential freedom
away from) the national curriculum to utilise every situation possible to push the
green agenda, giving pupils (and staff) a deeper understanding of the
environment, to help celebrate our relationship with nature, and to learn how
we can best protect it.
English
is a Gift!
With the huge advantage of reaching all year groups, all of the time
(being compulsory up to KS4), the possibilities of infiltrating the English curriculum
are endless. Part of GCSE English Language focuses on non-fiction reading and writing,
primarily exploring perspectives and viewpoints, and being able to confidently
convey your own.
For KS3, the national curriculum says pupils should know “the purpose, audience for and context of the writing” plus should “read critically through knowing how language, including figurative language, vocabulary choice, grammar, text structure and organisational features, presents meaning”.
Use
the News
Every climate conscious teacher
can use the news to teach language. An excellent starter activity is a daily exploration
of the headlines: which climate stories feature? How are they presented – as impending
doom, or hopeful success stories? Do
they even feature – what is absent, and why?
In an age where we must teach pupils
to spot misinformation and fake news, understanding authorial intent – knowing who
says what, when and why – is more crucial than ever. Use the 3 main questions:
·
Who wrote it?
·
What’s their view?
·
Why – what’s their purpose?
For time-poor teacher, how brilliant is this, too? You have a relevant, important, necessary starter activity that explicitly teaches the real use of language in real situations, which directly fits with any topic, expands pupils’ knowledge of vocabulary, and which changes every day with minimum fuss. (Several websites helpfully gather them together – the paper boy is great for this: www.thepaperboy.com/uk).
Here’s an example of exploring
language within headlines (which always offer opportunities to teach those all-important
emotive words & phrases). These come
from the front pages of the Guardian, from Mon 27th November 23, and
Tue 28th Nov 23:
Where Are They?
What becomes incredibly obvious when you start looking through the headlines of our national newspapers is the lack of climate stories; and if they feature at all, they rarely feature on the front pages.
COP28 Scandal
COP 28 starts
Thursday - the 28th annual United Nations climate meeting where world leaders
will discuss how to limit and prepare for future climate change. Chatham House states the importance of this conference,
stating how it “comes at a decisive moment for international climate action.
Temperature records are being repeatedly broken and climate impacts felt in
unprecedented wildfires, floods, storms and droughts worldwide. The UN’s global
stocktake synthesis report shows much more must be done to meet the goals of
the landmark Paris Agreement. COP28 presents a critical opportunity to put the
world on a more sustainable path.”
Countries agreed at COP26 to
focus on the tougher 1.5C aspirational goal of the Paris agreement,
acknowledging that the 2C target would allow massive devastation to take place.
So we cannot continue burning coal, oil, and gas if we are going to avoid the worst
impacts of the climate crisis – take a look at the videos from @ClimateSciBreak
– it’s a no-brainer to invest heavily in renewables.
And then, the news broke that The
United Arab Emirates’ team organising the talks was planning to use its
position as host of the summit to strike new oil and gas deals with foreign
governments.
Just consider that a moment. New oil and gas deals at a conference
designed to phase out oil and gas.
This made the news radio headlines,
plus TV news. But when you look at the physical newspaper headlines for that
day, what do we get?
Even the Guardian, who
pledges to give the climate emergency the sustained attention and prominence it
demands, doesn’t feature this as a headline.
What about the following day? Still nope...
So what does feature? What
are we, as a nation, concerned with?
A great activity would be to create a display, pasting the daily headlines
onto your classroom wall, to enable an instant visual overview – which newspapers
feature which stories? How often? Who writes
the stories? And who decides – who are
the editors?
Article 12
Article 12 of the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty,
calls for appropriate measures to enhance public awareness. When our government,
media and newspapers fail to continually inform pupils of the climate crisis,
we as educators must explicitly teach this as much as we possibly can.
We
must use our influence and reach to
help inform, guide and empower our pupils at this increasingly desperate time.
More English lesson ideas to follow!
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2023/09/what-cop28-and-why-it-important
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67508331
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