The maths classroom is often seen as a place of simple right and wrong answers and rote learning but it can and should be a place where children learn to think critically about complex real-life problems. What are we educating them for if it isn’t? The climate crisis provides an urgent, timely and ideal interdisciplinary context in which to set these problems. Yet, sustainability and the climate emergency have turned out to be almost totally absent from staff professional development events, in-service day training, department meetings and general curricular delivery. Staff working groups are often not established or meet less often than monthly. Even in science course plans, climate change was only given the most cursory of mentions. Yet we are talking about an existential threat to humanity that should be top of every agenda.
Continue reading “How can maths teachers engage with the climate emergency?”Tag: COP-26
Climate Change, Environment and Sustainability: Teaching Resources
The 26th UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow is a critically important intergovernmental meeting of world leaders and scientists if irreversible climate change is to be avoided. It is also part of a much greater and broader long-term challenge of mitigating wider environmental degradation world-wide that threatens the sustainability not just of humanity but of all life on Earth. These challenges and related opportunities are all deeply interdisciplinary in nature.
Learning and teaching resources on these and related topics spanning most curriculum areas and many facets of climate, environment and sustainability have been collated from various sources in our recently updated resources page.
Featured Image © UK Met Office, University of Reading #showyourstripes CC-BY-4.0