Pedagogy

On this page (links open in new window, but these are all sections on this page)

1. Concept Map

2. Wider links

3. Burns Model

4. Nature Connectedness

5. DPSIR

6. Tricky Concepts

This project is about seeking the sustainable in our normal classes. Of course though there are a number of links that can be made to other areas of the IB and our school priorities, including:

• Service/CAS (see the Processes and Responses areas in the sections below.

• The Globalisation and Sustainability global context (but try not to limit sustainability engagement to only those units).

• Eco-Committee (ensuring that all students have the opportunity to engage and not just the already-engaged).

• Diversity (see 'Perspectives' below, for example)

Embedded below is a relevant page from Miles Richardson's blog - he leads the Nature Connectedness Research group at the University of Derby. Note that this is aimed at everyone - not specifically teachers or teenagers.

The DPSIR model can help frame the causes and consequences of environmental change. Using a consistent model like this gives a consistent message, reinforces teaching in other subjects and encourages us to teach a message of hope that includes possible responses to environmental change.

The video below gives a clear description of each part, with this summarised in the diagram underneath the video.

Associate Professor Tina Grotzer, a cognitive scientist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education encourages us to consider three concepts students may struggle with when learning about the environment.

"Teaching and learning about the environment means grappling with three key concepts, which shape the way we understand our impact on the world:

1. Action at an attentional distance: the idea that the connection between causes and outcomes in environmental systems can be difficult to recognize because they exist on large spatial scales and in different “attentional frames.” Middle schoolers may say, for example, that they want to “save the polar bears,” but they don’t see polar bears in their daily lives. As a result, many have a difficult time remembering consistently that their actions, such as recycling and turning off the lights, can actually affect polar bears.

2. Distributed causality: the idea that many disparate causes can collectively lead to powerful, unexpected, and possibly unnoticed outcomes. One quick drive to the grocery store may use barely any gas, but billions of people make that trip thousands of times a year, and the amount of gas those trips use adds up.

3. Probabilistic causality: the idea that a cause doesn’t have to lead to an effect every single time for them to be related. (For instance, not every person who smokes will get lung cancer, but statistically, it increases the likelihood he will.) Students have to learn to look beyond their personal observations, valuing and interpreting scientific data to comprehend the relationships between actions."

There are many varied ways to overcome these issues, including but very much not limited to:

• Focusing teaching on more local and familiar effects, such as the halving of the UK hedgehog population since the year 2000.

• Making explicit links between distant and local factors, for example draw a chain of consequences from melting sea ice to flooded homes in London.

• Providing reminders to bring the distant into the attentional frame - in the example above this could be something like putting a sticker of a polar bear on the light switch.

• Making use of Project Zero Causal Learning In the Classroom resources to make it 'CLIC'!

  • Asking yourself and students the Causality Questions (example answers)

  • Teaching the CLIC modules (tell me if you're up for this, please!)

  • Using the Causal Patterns website, if you can get Flash working!