Video transcript: what I found out – Rupert
Taking action

Incorporating Lesson 4 – Rupert  (first paragraph)

One of the things they are astonished about is that you can fit the 6 billion people that live on this planet, if they were to the scale of the earth balloon, on a 2p piece.  So you get this idea that all those 6 billion people would actually take up very little space on the earth balloon, and yet their needs and their impact have a massive impact on the globe.  And that’s not where I leave them.  I have a strong belief that if we are going to be encouraging critical analysis, we are going to be doing enquiry learning;  we are going to be looking at trying to get an understanding of what’s going on.  We must also not just critique it, but create.  We must be thinking about what could we do.  What steps could we take.  So we have a lot of open-ended discussions around what kind of things the children can do to be part of the solution rather than just part of the problem.

One of the perspectives and the approaches we feel is of tremendous importance is that we aren’t preachy in our approaches; we do not come across to the children from the point of view that, “You should do this.  You must do this”.  Our approach is much more around trying to encourage good thinking skills, and getting the children to link their thinking and come up with questions and then to think of solutions and answers to those questions.  One of the things that has been very interesting recently is we have been working with some students from Worcester College of Technology and taking them to local factories – the two big cider factories just over the border into Hereford, and looking at what the two factories are doing in terms of sustainable development initiatives.  And the very fact that they’ve seen big companies taking major decisions based around sustainable development, and seeing what a huge impact that can make in terms of the CO2 production for instance, or in terms of how they deal with their waste, has made some of the students, who were quite cynical and skeptical – they’ve been sitting on the bus behind me going, “That’s amazing!” They’ve been talking about hope and optimism.  So I think that’s very important.  We share the idea – this is not just them on their own with their families at home, it’s part of a much wider picture. If we are all doing things, then we can make a difference.