This week saw the first official One School One Planet classroom sessions at Llanfyllin High School. We have started working with a class of 29 Year 10 Welsh Baccalaureate students, who are helping us to trial and develop our 12 unit course and learing resources.
On Wednesday, Steve took the first class with the group. He introduced the aims of the One School One Planet project and trialled our Vox Pop project with the students, which we first initiated back in December 2016. The Vox Pop project asks three simple questions:
- What does Climate Change mean to you?
- What do you know about the Paris Climate Agreement?
- If you were in charge, what would you do about Climate Change?
Some of the responses from students are collected below. They are quite revealing!
The responses we gathered on Wednesday serve as very useful baseline survey of students’ views and opinions about climate change and their awareness of strategies for dealing with it.
On Friday, Steve and Jack returned to the class to introduce some project work to begin next week. The project will see each student writing their own 3 minute speech inspired by Severn Suzuki’s 1992 address at the Rio Earth Summit. We plan to record their speeches and edit them together into a short video:
In preparation for starting their speeches we asked the class to put together some ideas for things they might include. We suggested that they write three short paragraphs addressing the following points:
1. Tell us about yourself, your background…
2. What are your concerns?
3. What solutions would you propose?
We were keen to point out that what we were really interested in was their own personal concerns. What they themselves are worried about. Here are some of the ideas they came up with. Again, they are revealing of some very important issues surrounding public opinion about the need for social, cultural and economic change in addressing the eco-crisis.
These are all legitimate concerns and opinions that require positive solutions. We hope that over the course of our 12 units – each covering one of the 12 principles of Permaculture – we will be able to address such concerns with practical and sustainable suggestions.
Finally, one last output from these first two days of classroom work: while they were watching Severn Suzuki’s speech we asked the students to make a note of any particularly poignant imagery or ideas in the address. Some of the clusters of imagery they collected read like little poems. Here are a couple of examples:
Stay tuned for more updates on our project!
#osop
#OneSchoolOnePlanet