Connecting Classrooms - Chinese Bridge for UK Schools

Learning today with tomorrow in mind

Corfe Hills School and partner schools - the road to becoming a sustainable school.

Education is about change. Through learning, people gain new knowledge and understanding which enables them to build new skills and adopt new behaviours. All schools have a vision of what they hope to achieve in educating their students.

When schools start out on their sustainability journey they need to develop a clear vision of where they are hoping to go, at least in terms of the direction of the changes that they hope to make. We have done this at Corfe Hills and included these ideas into our School Improvement Plan.

Setting a final goal is difficult when working in sustainability and not necessarily desirable, as the context within which the school operates is continually changing and the vision needs to accommodate this.

The use of learning as a tool to promote informed behaviours and ways of thinking which facilitate desirable changes i.e. towards sustainability. On the ground – this aspect concerns practical responses to the “doorways approach” of the sustainable schools framework and the reasoning behind them. These areas have clear, measurable short and medium term benefits to the school and beyond. This area includes the energy, water, buildings, grounds, travel, waste and purchasing dimensions – it involves inclusion, local well being and the global dimension.

This aspect is the “teaching and learning” dimension – the curriculum area. This is where students develop lifelong learning and critical thinking skills. This is the essential part of our work in creating citizens who can and will actively participate in the reflective social learning needed to live in our complex and uncertain world and to consider how they might live in the future.

These two aspects are equally important and compliment each other. They both need to feature in the vision of the sustainable school. The plan for a collaboration between Poole schools and Guiyang City schools would involve a group of schools from the UK and their Chinese partners in a “sustainability” project.

The project would be led by students through a programme of study and activities which incorporate – “green days, green ways and green teams” with an emphasis on curriculum work as well as energy saving, gardening and recycling activities.

This is a possible collaboration idea for our partnership of schools to think about.

• “Sustainable development, if it is going to happen, is going to be a learning process. It certainly won’t be about 'rolling out' a set of pre-determined behaviours.”

Professor Bill Scott, University of Bath

• "There needs to be a balance between telling young people how to ‘be sustainable’ in order to begin to make changes in our communities, and engaging them in the thinking that will enable them to make sound decisions for themselves .We suggest that ‘our long-term future will depend less on our compliance in being trained to do the ‘right’ thing now, and more on our capability to analyse, to question alternatives and to make our own decisions when we need to."

Professor Bill Scott, University of Bath