Let's tickle the elephant
ThoughtBox Education’s response to the DfE’s draft Climate & Sustainability proposals for schools.
Ever since ThoughtBox started, our core aim has been connecting people with the knowledge, skills and practices needed to create and sustain a thriving world. Understanding how rigid the National Curriculum is – yet seeing the huge gaps forming and widening around the sort of learning we need in our changing world – our programmes have always been designed to help schools fill these gaps in order to support these needs, whilst Government policies ‘catch up’ as it were.
It is therefore a hugely positive step that the DfE (Department for Education) recently released their draft Climate and Sustainability Strategy and are working on plans to bring this vital – and vitalising education – into mainstream settings.
A large part of their proposal focuses on developing and implementing a climate curriculum. However, whilst it may feel simpler to just ‘slot in’ some climate lessons between English and Maths and quickly upskill our teachers to deliver these lessons, that isn’t what this sort of learning requires.
Climate education is not simply knowledge to impart – it also includes behaviours to develop, practices to inhabit, skills to strengthen and mindsets to advance. It is a way of learning that will in time evolve into ways of living and thriving together in our changing world.
Launched at the end of Cop26, Nadhim Zahawi set out the DfE’s ‘whole-system approach’, with proposals focusing attention not just within the curriculum but on the wider educational landscape, covering:
Climate Education
Green Skills and Careers
The Education Estate
Operations and Supply Chains
Data
For those of us who’ve been pushing this for years, there is a lot here to celebrate: the recognition that teacher training is an essential part of this sort of learning; the understanding that we need to support young people with the skills and practices needed for jobs in the future which don’t yet exist; the appreciation that the DfE must not ‘start from scratch’ but instead work with existing educators, organisations and partners who’ve been working in this space for decades, to build on their wisdom and experience and move forward together.
Most significant, perhaps, is their declaration that we need a ‘whole-system approach’. This is a big step in the right direction, and builds on work that many of us in this field have been championing and promoting for a long time.
And yet, a large elephant sits in the room.
The inconvenient realisation that the education system, as it currently stands, is actually perpetuating many of the personal, social and ecological crises that we face.
This is a hugely problematic elephant, admittedly. And we’re choosing – deliberately in some cases – to not look at it. Yet there it stands.
Our mainstream education system is inadvertently burdening young people – and teachers – with ever increasing pressures, disconnecting people from their sense of emotional wellness and leading to a rising mental health crisis. It is disconnecting people from each other, forcing students and teachers to compete with each other for grades and salaries, for attention, for resources, for success, as well as exasperating issues of social injustice. And it is literally disconnecting people from the outside world and our innate relationship with nature by making everyone stay indoors and sit down for 6+ hours a day.
In essence, mainstream education is actually contradicting the three pillars we all need for holistic health and wellbeing: personal, social and ecological wellbeing (what we call Triple Wellbeing). When we start to recognise how the climate crisis is also a crisis of social justice and human emotion, we begin to understand how our schools are not nurturing the mindsets needed to respond to the challenges ahead, but are instead inadvertently stifling them. It’s a terrifically inconvenient, big fat elephant for sure, but there it stands. And we ignore it at our peril.
But here’s a thought…
Rather than seeing this elephant as an inconvenience, what if we looked at it a little differently and saw it as an invitation to do things differently?
Speaking of elephants, I’m reminded at this point of the fable of The Blind Men and the Elephant. For those unfamiliar with the story, six blind men are sitting together, arguing over what an elephant is. Each of them touches a part of the elephant and is convinced that they see and understand what it is:
“It’s like a giant snake!”, says the blind man touching the trunk.
“It’s smooth and solid like a wall,” says the man touching the elephant’s side.
“It’s sharp and deadly like a spear,” says the man touching the tusk. And on it goes, with each fixated on their understanding gained from ‘seeing’ just one part of the whole elephant. It is only when the Rajah comes to them as they argue and invites them to stand back a little that things start to change: “Perhaps if you put all of the parts together, you will finally see the truth.”
And so it is for us. One of the other inconvenient truths of our education system is how we’ve decompartmentalised and fractured learning to be separated and removed from context – and as such created an education system which is at odds with the deeply interconnected world in which we all live.
Within the new DfE strategic approach, if we – for example- slot in a new Climate Curriculum or Climate Leaders Award, yet continue to keep plugging away with schooling in these same discombobulated ways (and don’t step back to see the bigger picture at large) we’re missing the truth and the opportunity to see the ‘elephant’ in its entirety.
Our lives are not compartmentalised and separated, as is mirrored through mainstream school. Life is a lot ‘mushier’ than that – especially when it comes to responding to the current social, emotional and ecological crises that we face.
At present, the education system is not functioning as a system and – as such – is not able to adapt and respond to problems that arise, but is instead forced to stick plasters onto gaping wounds. This is not the fault of the teachers and leaders within, it is a flaw of the education system at large. Yet what this means is that the way we are educating is actually contradictory to the way we need to be living in order to survive and thrive in our rapidly changing world.
The recognition by the DfE that now is the time to do something is the invitation we need to not only see that elephant but to give it a good poke. Or rather a tickle, for this is a positive invitation into a space of innovation, creativity, inspired thinking, positive futures. And can be hugely revitalising for everyone.
Environmental education is exploring and learning together the knowledge, skills and practices we need to thrive. As such, the whole notion of why and how we’re teaching and learning needs to evolve. Collaboration, critical thinking, empathy, resilience, systems thinking, practices for wellbeing: these are the essential ‘green skills’ we need to be focusing on. So let’s take this opportunity to start embedding them fully across our learning spaces.
There are so many examples in the world to help embed this sort of practice-based learning into our schools – from the Welsh curriculum, to project-based learning in Danish schools to the OECD’s Learning Compass framework to wider learning about localised systems of collaboration and reciprocity seen in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi. Even our own familiar practices of project-based learning in mainstream Primary education offers a framework to begin. Let’s be humble enough to learn from others and implement systems that help us to thrive, not just survive.
This is not the time to for adding more things into a broken system. This is the time for rethinking the point of school and recognising the need for things to evolve. Because, if the point of school is to prepare young people for the world they’re growing into, then we need to be honest with ourselves – take a good long look at that elephant and admit that the system as it stands isn’t doing this anymore.
This moment needs us to recognise that, instead of academic success being the purpose of school, we need to put sustainable, or regenerative, livelihoods at the heart of our education systems. It needs us to recognise that this is the moment to evolve – as the world invites us to step up to the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Therefore, instead of offering critique or commentary on individual elements of the DfE’s draft strategy alongside the strong responses from Teach the Future and the NEU which we support, we instead welcome this moment as a collective invitation to take a step back and look at bigger issue at hand. To look at and fully see that elephant. And then give it a tickle to shake the system up and move it around, ready to face the world we’re actually living in.
Rachel Musson | Director of ThoughtBox Education
ThoughtBox is community of teachers and educators helping connect schools with the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to create and sustain a thriving world. Let’s talk.