Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Our school is located in a built up urban area which is definitely seeing some affects of climate change in recent years. The canal to the rear of the school is regularly full of litter and the water level is much higher than it used to be due to increased rainfall. The primary concern in the local area is air pollution.
This year our school engaged in a programme with RTE Jr to have the opportunity for the children to express their views on climate change and so that they could partake in a number of community workshops and events with other schools and local businesses. Our school installed air quality monitors in two points to track the quality of the air at different times of the day, week, month, term etc. Members of our schools ‘Eco Team’ or Green Flag Committee were in charge of monitoring and recording these results. Through these air monitors the students in the school were able to see how much the air quality around the school is affected by cars and other vehicles being left running outside of the school at drop off and collection times. After monitoring these results and sharing them with the wider school community the Eco Team then organised a ‘No Idling’ campaign to encourage adults to turn their engines off at drop off and collection times instead of leaving them running on the road outside the school. This campaign had great engagement from the school community and saw a reduction in the number of vehicles left idling on the road outside school and an improvement in the air quality as a result. The next step for this would be to encourage more families in the school to make use of the school’s bike library scheme to avoid using cars to get to school on a daily basis where possible.
I think it would be a great idea to establish a school garden where children can plant trees and provide a habitat for local wildlife. This can also help to uplift our school grounds and can give the children a project to continuously work on and maintain over the years.
Our school takes part in the School Meals Programme and has done for the last 2 years. This programme is wonderful as it provides children with hot food each day however there tends to be a huge amount of waste lunches left over. Our schools student council ran a survey in all classes in the school and found that in the course of 7 school days more than 500 school lunches were not eaten and were untouched (an average of 85 per day). This is completely unsustainable. I believe that it would be a useful activity for children to help brainstorm a solution to this problem. Then the children may have an opportunity to write to either the company that provides the school lunches or to the local TD to suggest a more ethical and sustainable approach to the waste left over from hot lunches.
Hi Cora, I completely agree with you about the importance for children, especially refugee children who may have limited access to language or may have recently had some upset in their lives.
There are a number of wonderful organisations in the area near my school that work to support refugees, including the Irish Red Cross, Doras and the Irish Refugee Council.
Schools of course also have a large role in helping these families and children. In my school we hold ‘sustainable clothing swaps’ termly where all parents are invited to bring clothes to donate or swap clothes or take clothes for free. We also hold a Halloween costume swap, a Christmas jumper swap and a football boot swap.
Additionally our school has partnered with TUD to partake in a local bike library where families can sign up to borrow bikes for adults and children for a school year for free. Families in the school can bring bikes in for repairs free of charge schools they need it or can swap bikes for bigger ones as needed.
We host an annual multicultural week where all families are invited to share their culture and traditions with the school community and the week culminates with a multi cultural food fair where families can bring traditional foods from their culture for others to sample. This is always a big hit and results in the swapping of recipes between parents!
Hi Catherine, I also found these lesson ideas really useful and very topical in the context of the education system in Ireland today. I think maybe it might be a great topic to integrate across SESE (History – houses and homes in the past; Geography – how homes are built) and art (Construction of homes using clay or recycled materials.)
While all of the UN SDGs explore pressing issues, I personally find that SDG 4 is one that students engage with very well. My class and school are very fortunate as we engage with SeeBeyondBorders Ireland in their Solidarity Schools programme. Through the lessons with SeeBeyondBorders children have the opportunity to reflect on their own experience in school so far, the things that have experienced or that they do experience on a daily basis. Then, through the Solidarity Schools programme the children have the opportunity to learn about and find out more about education in different parts of the world, in this case the Siem Reap area of Cambodia. As my class this year were very enthusiastic researchers we coupled our Solidarity Schools lessons with project work where we compared Cambodia and Ireland as countries and explored the action of Cambodia as a whole.
The children also had the very unique experience of meeting people from Cambodia when they came on a visit to our school and they got to hear first hand about the differences in educational standards and experiences with attending primary, secondary and third level education in the 2 countries
Hi Shannon, so interesting to hear about your experience and completely agree with this experience as a teacher during a PE lesson, in my own class this year there were sometimes remarks made bout certain teams having an advantage because they had more boys or a disadvantage because they had more girls. We explored equality and equality of opportunity in our class through our learn together lessons to give the class a new lens to look at these issues through.
It is hard to find a classroom where there is not already some notion of gender stereotypes among some students. In my own class this year I first noticed during an art lesson when children were choosing the colours of the pages that they were using for a paper weaving activity. I had plenty of coloured pages, but they were all pastel coloured rather than bold coloured, and some of students said they didn’t want any of them because they were ‘too girly’. I found it interesting how these children would even differentiate between certain shades of the same colour (in this case, blue) because they saw one as being ‘girlier’ than the other.
I know of colleagues in junior classes who have to remind students that anyone can be anything during aistear time, that boys can be nurses or that girls can be builders.
The Gender Equality Matters resource from the REC and UNESCO provides lesson ideas for how to explore issues of gender stereotypes and inequality.
Development education should be an important part of all student’s education in Ireland. When planning for why development education is important we have to consider the landscape of the modern Irish education system compared to the education system over the last 40 years. We live in a society which is becoming increasingly multicultural and we would be doing a disservice to students if we did not explore the topics that fall under the umbrella of development education, especially as these topics will become some of the central social issues in the future. Using the SDGs to explore Development education in the classroom can be a wonderful approach and open the door for further thinking and discussions. As the paper points out, we have come such a long way already, however this is only the beginning of the journey with development education.