Our very own Rowan Boase travelled all the way to China to to help the British Council deliver a series of workshops for teachers. Here she tells us how it all went.

Lost in translation

Last month, I found myself telling a Chinese teacher that he appeared to be the cause of climate change.

 

Well, not exactly him personally. We were playing an interactive game to look at the sources and sinks of carbon emissions, and he was representing recent human activities.

 

So it looked like he was the problem, as I tried to tell him as nicely as possible through the translator…

 

Our role in China

Jenni Wiggle, Head of Schools at Global Action Plan, and I travelled to China to help the British Council deliver a series of workshops for teachers, as part of their Climate Cool education programme.

The British Council facilitates cultural exchange throughout the world, and they have recognised that international dialogue on climate change is key to safeguarding our future. That’s why, in China, they have set up the Climate Cool programme to give young people opportunities to take action.

Our role was to give teachers ideas and techniques to kick start their own Green Your School project, an element of Climate Cool which has lots of similarities with our own Action at School programme.

Both give students the support to create innovative projects that improve their school’s environmental performance, through engaging the school community in behaviour change.

Taking inspiration

There have been some very inspiring and creative Green Your School projects in previous years – from generating wind power from the hot air blown out by air conditioning machines, to entirely covering the front of a school building in exam papers to highlight the issue of paper waste.

So although I went to China to give training, I actually learned a lot myself. Along with the Chinese for ‘5 minutes left’ and ’10 pork dumplings’, I learned that there is great enthusiasm to tackle climate change.

Taking the lead

Despite huge pressure on Chinese students to achieve academically, and the dizzying pace of development that has made a high-carbon lifestyle much more widely available in recent years, hundreds of schools in China are taking the lead in teaching the wider community to consider their environmental impact.

The problem?

At the end of the workshop I found the teacher I had earlier labelled as ‘the problem’, and apologised for embarrassing him during the game. He told me about his students’ research where they look into which plants absorb the most carbon, and about the solar-powered car he had built himself.

No, I thought, he definitely wasn’t the problem.

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