How young people are using their power to transform definitions of climate education
by Morgan Phillips, Head of Education and Youth Engagement
3 min read
With power as the theme of next month's Transform Our World Youth Summit, we've been doing a lot of thinking and exploring on what power is and how young people are using it. Scarlett Westbrook has certainly been using hers over the last few years, and I loved reading this interview with her over the weekend.
The whole piece is excellent, but I wanted to flag one part of it particularly because it's a great insight on another issue we discuss a lot: climate education.
Since she was very young, Scarlett has been building and harnessing the collective power of young people to get climate education up the agenda. What stood out for me from this interview, was her answer to a question on what climate education is.
Her answer really illustrates how tuned in she and other young people are to the need to look at their schooling as a whole, and the need to think critically about what it is (and isn't) doing.
The calls being made on education policymakers to respond to the climate crisis are not a crude ask to cram more and more content into the curriculum. It's a lot more nuanced than this.... what's needed is different education, not necessarily more education.
It is critical we get this message across, not just to policymakers, but to teachers too - if we tell them we want to add to their load, they'll understandably feel some reticence, but if we ask them to help us re-imagine the look and feel of teaching and learning, we might just mobilise the revolution in education that is long overdue.
So, here's Scarlett answering the question: What should climate teaching look like? [With added emphasis by me]. She highlights the problem and the solution:
"Right now, we have a very prescriptive education system based on memorizing facts, regurgitating them, and then forgetting everything as soon as we leave. We need an education system that embeds climate education into every single subject, like a golden thread."
"I also think we need a more holistic style of teaching. Not everyone is going to learn from people standing in front of a whiteboard—I know I definitely didn’t. With climate education, I look at it not just as making climate more prominent, but also as a way to rethink how we see education as something that prepares us for the future, instead of being about passing exams, so we can do another set of exams, which we can then pass to do a job."
Join our youth-led sessions exploring the theme of power at the Transform Our World Youth Summit, from 7th-18th November.
