Building a Sustainable Future

Students engaged in a ground-breaking programme designed to bring education and industry together could be the architects of a sustainable future for all. Mark Smith, Director at Stephen George + Partners explains how high school students are being immersed in architectural practice.

Earlier this year, I was honoured to see Year 9 students from St Mary’s and St John’s Church of England school in Barnet (SMSJ) receive certificates and prizes for a raft of innovative ideas for planet-friendly homes that included solar and hydroelectric power, heat pumps, and waste management. The students had just completed ‘Architecture and Sustainability – looking to the future’, an innovative schools programme designed to engage with future generations in planning the environmentally friendly homes and towns of their own future.

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      string(5651) "Stages 1-4Mapping Worlds(show.mappingworlds.com/world) Key Stage 3-4http://www.amnesty.org.ukhttp://show.mappingworlds.com/worlde-learning76Volume5.4nCreativeTeaching&LearningDeveloped by the Department for Education, the RenewableWorld project revolves around a series of connected butself-contained web activities, which explore the diversity ofrenewable materials and their role in building a sustainablefuture. The activities are simple and informative, and youcan find a list of curricular links and also prompts for furtherdiscussion and activities in the teachers’ section of the site.There are five activities in total, covering a range of topicsrelated to renewability, including careers in the renewablematerials industry, and the importance of us as consumers inchoosing renewable alternatives. They all have far-reachingpotential for the classroom – for example, activity 1, a sortinggame in which players identify renewable and non-renewabletextiles, fuels and building materials, could provide anengaging springboard into the topic. Activities 4 and 5, onthe other hand, may be a useful way to end an explorationof renewability, as their aim is to stimulate discussion andself-reflection. Activity 5, for example, asks pupils to considerimportant questions, such as whether we should forcepeople to switch to renewables, or whether the advantagesof renewable materials outweigh the drawbacks. Pupils thencome up to the board and vote yes or no by clicking on thedecision line. Individual votes are anonymous, but the systemprovides a bar chart overview at the end.If you’re searching for a more structured activity, however,then activity 2 is definitely worth a look. Here, pupils explorethe materials used to furnish a kitchen in 1915, comparedto kitchens today. They then design a kitchen for the future,balancing the pros and cons of futuristic materials suchas biopolymers, sustainable wood composites and eventable salt, which could be used as detergent in ultrasounddishwashers. The aim is to create a stylish but sustainable andinexpensive kitchen – a tall order! For extension tasks relatedto this activity, see ‘Quick Ideas’ in the teachers’ section.Vibrant, colourful and wonderfully illustrated, this interactivecityscape is a fantastic way to investigate how people canreduce waste, use less energy and save money by doingsimple things at home, at work and in the community.The city map is divided into four neighbourhoods, all ofwhich contain a range of different characters to meet, andbuildings and businesses to explore. Pupils can bouncebetween Shaq’s Garage, Maria’s Market, City Hall, the HazardousWaste Centre, even the old noxious landfill site from when thecity was not so green and known as ‘Dumptown’, in order tolearn how the 3Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle – can be appliedto different aspects of life.The site is intuitive and easy to use, and the informationit provides is humorous and expressed in very child-friendlyterms. There’s quite a lot of text in places, so younger childrenmay need some support, although they will enjoy clickingaround to find all the hidden pop ups in each image.The focus is on communities banding together, and thereare plenty of ideas that pupils can carry out in their ownhomes, in schools and around the neighbourhood. Why notvisit Recycle City school and see what initiatives you andyour students can put into practice in your own classroom?The site also suggests organising a virtual scavenger hunt– for example, asking your pupils to work in groups to findsomething made from recycled tires, or perhaps a use for oldbricks. Of course, the list of items you’d like your pupils to findcan be tailored to emphasise reuse, recycling, or any othertopic you are exploring in class.Another suggested activity for a classroom setting is theClean Up Dumptown game, which gives you the chancewitness Recycle City at its worst. Here, pupils take on the roleof city manager and put into place a number of initiatives toreduce waste. The game is very open-ended, with no goalsor winning conditions at all. This allows teachers to assigngoals as they wish, perhaps setting an overall spending limitin order to emphasise the balance between cost and impact.Recycle City(www3.epa.gov/recyclecity) Key Stages 2-3The Renewable World(www.renewableworld.org.uk) Key Stages 2-4http://www3.epa.gov/recyclecityhttp://www.renewableworld.org.uk/Volume5.4nCreativeTeaching&Learning77e-learningBased on a pop-up book of the same name, How We MakeStuff explains how the earth’s natural resources are used tomake everyday objects such as mobile phones, chocolateand rubber ducks. Each item’s journey is condensed into nomore than six steps – complete with lovely illustrations andfascinating facts – which outline its story from raw material tofinished product, plus how we dispose with it once we’re done.The final step is a question: can we do things differently? Thisallows children to explore the different, more environmentallyfriendly approaches we could take to designing and creatingproducts, as well as inventive ways to recycle and reuse suchitems – for example, making trainers that can be turned intosoil, or printing books on plastic that can be washed andreused.The site also features a fantastic section on biomimicry.Nature manages to turn production and disposal into anendless loop: why can’t we? Highlights here include: a brilliantvideo on what we can learn about economy from ants andtermites, another on what a tree can teach us about plumbing,and a short slideshow featuring"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Websites for ethical living

25 Jul 2015

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      string(5622) "SpacesSustainabilitywww.teachingtimes.commake a big difference, so that we change our habitsand behaviour and tread more gently on the planet.What is Pop-Up?Pop-Up-Farm brings sustainability education intoschools and the wider community, both in the UK andoverseas.  It combines the basic elements of water,waste, energy, food and growing to demonstratedifferent ways people can change their lives to themutual benefit of communities and the planet.The heart of the Pop-Up farm is the Plotting Shed.This can be an existing physical structure, a real shedor any other building deemed suitable.  The otherelements of the Pop-Up farm will lead out from theshed.  In the shed will be cushions and bean-bags(or chairs), boards and chalk, paper and pens –Thepurpose of the plotting shed is to encourage peopleto share ideas, suggestions and thoughts. The seriesof images accompanying this article illustrate boththe concept of the Pop Up initiative.How does Pop-Up work?Pop-Up will focus on three key areas:Schools – primary and secondaryCommunities – churches,  town squares,supermarket car-parksInternational – Commonwealth countries, bothdeveloped and developing.SchoolsStarting with Burnley, Pop-Up is working inconjunction with Start (an initiative of The Princeof Wales to show people how simple steps can leadto a more sustainable future), The Prince’s Charities(especially BITC), the council and, of course, the 38primary schools of Burnley.  The focus of this primaryschool project is to educate children on the basicsof sustainability in a fun and engaging manner.  Asa key partner of Start, Asda will be at the heart of theproject supporting Pop-Up with sheds, water butts,tools and other inputs as required.CommunitiesStarting with Manchester, Pop-Up is planning to workin conjunction with the city council, to introduce aPop-Up presence in the heart of the city, focusingon the employment elements of sustainability byestablishing a commercially operating seasonalfarm, whilst demonstrating and educating peopleon how they can not only save money, but alsoenhance their lives by adopting a more sustainableapproach to life.InternationalStarting with Uganda, Pop-Up is working inconjunction with Seeds for Development (a charity■■■for providing people with the types of solutionsthat they require. In particular, they challenge themyth of sustainability and that industrialised viewof nature and people not mixing. In growing in theurban space, and establishing a new paradigm forthat growing and including learning as a centralfeature of the work in progress, we begin to see theprospect of a new form of urban life, based aroundday-to-day capabilities, not some utopian design buta curriculum for life, and of life.Schools in the vanguard of changeBy taking the environmentalism out of the urbanmix, the experimental projects are starting to getbeyond the implausibility of ‘nature as happy, greenand friendly’, to a simple practical relationship ofconvenience. This takes us out of the predictableframeworks through the integration of urban andrural by bringing a new form of learning to thetownscape. It has to be noted that this also has little todo with generating ‘local’ produce, which perpetuatesa particular form of market-trading promoting elitefoods, distinct from all other foods. Instead, bygrowing food inside city space experiments with theurban idea, it represents a way of responding to thefood security crisis, first symbolically, and perhaps ata later stage, as an embedded feature of the urbanlandscape and mindscape.That is why the potential gains of using schoolyardsas the new urban farm are so attractive, as theyconnect a number of important elements together.School is a point of contact for a community ofpeople. There is a shared interest in making thelearning context real and provocative and purposefulfor the participants involved. There is great interestin how we might ensure that school has relevanceto young people, and the existing fragmentation ofenterprise and education can be overcome as theproduce arising from the schemes can be developedcommercially, thereby enabling further projects to befunded without needing to be externally funded.A school of sustainabilitySo I think that the school of sustainability is nota school at all in the traditional sense. Instead itrepresents the attitude of sustainability in practice, away of providing a design through which communityfood security can being to become a feature of a newcurriculum for urban life. This would be a curriculumthat sees growing, and experimentation of growingin the urban setting, as part of a vast, urban open-source programme.To achieve this I have designed a project called‘Pop-Up- Farm’ to illustrate this school of sustainabilityin action. The basic idea is that Pop-Up challengesus in unexpected ways and in unexpected places,showing us how easy it is to make little changes that 14 Learning Spaces  Volume 1:2Sustainabilitywww.teachingtimes.comsupporting Ugandan farmers) in 4 schools, whichalso play an important role within their communities.Pop-Up will demonstrate basic farming techniquesto children and local farmers/residents and highlightthe importance of water harvesting, soil managementand creating viable community held businesses.SummaryIn his Reith Lectures of 1995, Cities for a small planet,Richard Rodgers presented some startling data thatillustrated the effect that the car had made to theurban designed space. ‘An efficient parking standardrequires twenty square meters for a single car. Evensupposing that only one in five"
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Learning Spaces

LS1.2_p08-p14_Sustainable minds sustainable schools

3 Feb 2012

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      string(355) "... changing existing mental models of who weare, the relationship we have with each other and aboveall with our places and the biosphere that sustains us.Building sustainable communities is a questionprimarily of renewing and re ordering our relationships.This change is essentially a question of learning,unlearning and re-learning ..."
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      string(5166) "Steve suggested to me, wedo have a choice. We can continue business as usual orwe can seek new solutions and approaches to extendand challenge what we have been doing so far to try toprevent ecological collapse.So what exactly has this all got to do with theprofessional learning of educators?■■■ School Leaders pioneering newapproachesIn a recent project with The National College for SchoolLeadership (now renamed The National College) thatI have been involved in, we are seeing how schools arepart of this turning; for a change too is going to beneeded in the ways we educate, not just our childrenbut ourselves and our communities. If ‘The GreatTurning’ is to happen as fast and as effectively as weneed it to, then we need to move from being a societythat is still predominantly running on an industrialmindset to one that can serve the transition to a moreecological and sustainable world. The shift to a futurethat is ecologically sustainable is more profound andultimately more exciting than just technical fixes. Themost critical solutions are going to be educational onesand lie in changing existing mental models of who weare, the relationship we have with each other and aboveall with our places and the biosphere that sustains us.Building sustainable communities is a questionprimarily of renewing and re ordering our relationships.This change is essentially a question of learning,unlearning and re-learning. It is a question therefore ofwhat happens in classrooms and schools. Generationsof children have gone through a school system designedto take them away from the land and in making themliterate in one way but depriving them of a fundamentalliteracy in another way.The recently published Thinkpiece from NCSL(Birney et al 2009) makes it clear that the decisionsabout how we want the future to be and our part increating that with children and young people is a moralone. It is an issue for everyone but particularly foreducational professionals. If we continue to subscribeto unsustainable practices such as pollution and over useof resources in the way we live and the ways in whichwe educate then we are potentially destroying the life-chances of our young people. The Thinkpiece goes soSchools in Ecological Transition: Education as if the future really mattered ■20………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….far as to say that we are as educational professionals, thedirect representatives of tomorrow’s generation. The wayforward, it suggests, is for us to aspire to a time whenschools become microcosms of the world as it needs tobe in the next decades. This includes:■ Providing living examples of sustainability practice■ Achieving self-sufficiency in energy and zero waste■ Growing as much food as possible■ Bringing the natural world back into the schoolsand its groundsThe National College’s ‘Sustainable Schools’ project(NCSL, 2009) has been working with leaders who arealready on the path of leading this change of focus fortheir schools. We have been asking ourselves as a projectteam; so just what is this change? How does it happenin a school? How do we sustain it and get everyoneinvolved? In the social change literature leaders whoare starting out on the journey of creating a sustainablecommunity in their school and local community areoften termed ‘early adopters’. What they are doing iscreating a broader view of outcomes for their schoolsand a particular approach to the nurture, cultivationand re- prioritising of relationships as an educationalgoal; however these relationships are not confined tohuman ones, critical as those are. Leading a school froman ecological perspective sets the stage for a larger set ofrelationships to become a central concern of educationand the curriculum.What becomes important is the relationship studentshave to energy, to water, to waste, to growing food,to the outdoors and the local eco–systems of whichthey are a part; also to the community they belong to;learning about the inter-relatedness between people,their community and the ecological processes thatlife relies on. This is not by any means a theoreticalexploration. It has the purpose of clarifying how to livefrom the understanding of these inter-connections; anunderstanding that leads to new insight about peopletheir place and their purpose. (NCSL, 2009.)Until now ecology, place-based learning and thestudy of human habitats have taken place in geography,science and environmental studies programmes.However a focus on sustainability is rapidly becomingsuch a priority that there is a need for all the adultsin a school and all the subjects of the curriculum tohave a role and contribution for this is truly a wholecommunity initiative.There are new and exciting pedagogies beginningto emerge"
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Professional Development

Education as if the future really mattered

5 Jul 2010

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      string(5647) "CreativeApproaches34Volume5.3nCreativeTeaching&LearningInspiring thenext generationof engineers35Volume5.3nCreativeTeaching&LearningCreativeApproachesThe future of the UK, and indeed, the world, depends on engineers. Butare our schools providing them? EngineeringUK explores a few ways toopen pupils’ eyes to the exciting possibilities that exist for young people inscience, technology, engineering and maths-based careers.Research launched to coincide with Tomorrow’s Engineers Week inNovember 2014 highlighted some interesting findings about people’sperceptions of both engineers and engineering as an industry andpotential career choice.Hearteningly, three quarters of parents would recommend a career inengineering to their children, and nearly half (47 per cent) of secondary schoolchildren would consider a career in engineering, with 29 per cent of them girls.However, only 34 per cent say they know what to do next in order to becomean engineer.Not surprising when only a third (36 per cent) of secondary science, technology,engineering and maths (STEM) teachers said they felt confident giving pupilsadvice on careers in engineering. Clearly, schools don’t have the support theyneed to support the engineering ambitions of their students – something thatneeds to change very soon if we’re to meet the demands for engineers in theyears to come.The essential role of engineersPart of supporting schools in fostering pupils’ engineering ambitions is ensuringthat schools have a clear picture about what engineers do, both on a day-to-daybasis and more generally. Engineering is everywhere. Look around you and tryto find something that hasn’t been engineered in some way. The chances areyou’ll find it difficult. Little wonder then that so many of us find it hard to defineengineering – but what description can you give your students?http://www.thehrdirector.com/business-news/graduates-and-employment/schools-not-getting-behind-engineering/CreativeApproaches36Volume5.3nCreativeTeaching&LearningVery simply put, engineers design, create and innovate to improve our lives.They are currently tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems – fromdealing with cyber security and maintaining clean water and energy supplies, tofinding sustainable ways to grow food, build houses and travel. Engineers alsopresent solutions to immediate and long-term problems. For example, as westruggle to deal with an ageing population, engineers are involved with designingdiagnostic equipment used in hospitals, building sustainable accommodationand inventing gadgets to make our lives easier, including robotic lawnmowersand emotional computers.From developing life-saving medical equipment and minimising the damagefrom earthquakes, to helping chart-topping musicians record songs, developingcomputer games and making better, greener transport, engineering is and alwayswill be a part of everyday life.The good news is that Britain is great at engineering. But – and it’s a big but– the sector has a severe shortage of skilled professionals as older engineersretire and the industry grows. You may be surprised to learn that engineeringemploys over 5.4 million people, and the projected number of job openings forthe decade to 2022 is over 2.5 million. However, the numbers coming throughthe ranks are not sufficient to reach this projected demand and the number ofwomen in the industry is currently so low (the lowest proportion in Europe, infact) that Labour leader Ed Miliband recently called it a ‘national embarrassment’.That’s why Tomorrow’s Engineers wants to give every young person aged11 to 14 the opportunity to participate in an engineering-related activity with anemployer. If they can see the number and diverse range of careers available inengineering, the hope is they will continue with STEM subjects, thus keepingtheir options open for the future.What is Tomorrow’s Engineers?Tomorrow’s Engineers is a wide-ranging schools programme led byEngineeringUK and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and your one-stopshop for information and resources about the amazing careers available inengineering.Working with businesses, not-for-profit organisations and charities, theprogramme includes industry visits, workshops, STEM Ambassadorpartnerships and careers resources to help schools incorporate engineering intohttp://www.tomorrowsengineers.org.uk/http://www.engineeringuk.com/http://www.raeng.org.uk/http://www.stemnet.org.uk/ambassadors/37Volume5.3nCreativeTeaching&LearningCreativeApproachesthe current curriculum and plant the seeds needed to grow local engineeringtalent required by businesses.The engineering community is all too aware of the challenges it faces in termsof educating and training the future engineers who will shape the world we livein. Recent research has shown that, when centrally coordinated, the impact ofschools outreach is tripled, so employers and professional institutions acrossengineering are working together to improve the reach of the programme,which means even more schools across the UK will have the chance to benefit.The programme also runs an annualcampaign, Tomorrow’s Engineers Week,that shines a spotlight on engineeringcareers, and is supported by the government,educators and employers across the UK. Itgives young people across the UK thechance to take part in activities, talk directlyto employers and young engineers andto learn about the varied opportunitiesavailable. Last year’s Tomorrow’s EngineersWeek 2014 celebrated everyday engineeringheroes and tried to change"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Inspiring the next generation of engineers

10 Apr 2015