Catherine Honor’s students are eager to do what they can to tackle the climate crisis – so much so that they made a video to raise awareness. “Imagine a normal day. You get driven to school, have a ham sandwich, and have a bath,” they say in the animation, which they scripted, voiced and filmed in their free time. “These seemingly simple actions increase the rate of climate change,” they explain.
Geography teachers such as Honor, who are passionate about protecting our planet, are teaching the next generation to appreciate the natural world, as well as how to care for it.
Honor studied earth and environmental science at the University of Lancaster, followed by a master’s in volcanology at the University of Bristol and a PGCE at the University of the West of England, in Bristol, and is grateful for the opportunity to share her expertise with her students. “I love being in the classroom, no matter what I’m teaching,” she says. “It’s an added bonus that I get to share my passion for protecting the environment and influence the next generation.”
Catherine Honor: ‘I want to empower my pupils’
Honor teaches at Devizes school, a mixed comprehensive in Wiltshire, and relishes the opportunity to bring her whole self to class. “I talk about what I do to lessen my impact on the planet – like not using shampoo, or by driving an electric car, or wearing a dress that is made out of recycled plastic bottles or bamboo. This helps start conversations and gets pupils talking about solutions,” she says. “I want to empower my pupils so they know they have power to be part of the change.”
And it seems to be working. The group of students who created the animation are members of an extracurricular Climate Network club, which Honor facilitates. Another group of students formed a debate club, where teams discuss issues related to the climate crisis. Previous topics have included: global warming is not a crisis; humans are to blame for global warming; and schoolchildren have the power to influence our world leaders.
Honor believes that getting students out of the classroom and into nature is invaluable
But it’s not all theory. Honor has also worked with students to turn a corner of the school grounds into a haven for nature, complete with a vegetable patch and garden. “When I joined the school, I was excited to find out there was a much-neglected area,” she says. “I took groups of students into this space and we worked to clear brambles and prepare the ground for planting.”
For Honor, the experience of being out of the classroom and in nature with the children was priceless. “One boy found a frog and I’ve never seen him more excited,” she says. “For me that’s what it’s all about.”
Honor isn’t the only geography teacher inspiring a new generation of environmentalists. Beth Edmondson, who teaches at Ponteland high school in Northumberland, grew up in a rural town in Cumbria. As a child, she loved geography because it took her to “places, cultures, and landscapes” she’d never seen before. After studying the subject at the University of Newcastle she realised she wanted to pass her enthusiasm on to others, and trained to become a teacher. “Geography had opened so many doors for me – I experienced an opening up of the world – and I wanted to do that for other people,” she says.
Beth Edmondson: ‘Geography is a very current topic’
At university, Edmondson studied the palm oil industry in Borneo, and recently shared her photos and experiences with her year 8 class. The lesson inspired them so much that they created a petition to stop the use of palm oil within the school. “They were so passionate about it, they even had conversations with the canteen,” Edmondson says.
Climate denial is another hot topic that Edmondson is keen to get students thinking about. She recently told her year 11 class that her grandad believes it’s “a load of nonsense” and tasked them with writing letters to persuade him otherwise. In other classes, she’s used climate denying tweets from Donald Trump, news headlines and current affairs videos as a jumping-off point for sparking debates.
Edmondson’s teaching has been informed by her travels and study of the palm oil industry in Borneo
It’s a tactic that’s also been adopted by Emily O’Carroll, a geography teacher at Ditton Park academy in Slough. “Geography is a very current topic,” she says. “I use news and screenshot headlines to get pupils to unpick whether geography is relevant to them.
“Recently we have looked at wildfires in Australia, floods in Bangladesh, ice melt in Antarctica and desertification in China and Chad to name but a few. We are also planning on using videos of issues in the Amazon rainforest, which will hopefully give the children fieldwork without them leaving the house.”
O’Carroll, who studied geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a PGCE at the University of Oxford, thinks it’s vital that her students are as informed about the climate emergency as possible. “We very much base it on facts and let them draw their own conclusions,” she says.
She also teaches health geography, which covers pandemics. “We look at diseases, how they spread and how they can be dealt with,” she says. “It’s really interesting to see how the curriculum, which was designed pre-pandemic, ties in with what’s happening now.”
Emily O’Carroll: ‘I think everyone should study geography’
Unsurprisingly, O’Carroll’s students have come to share her love for the natural world and urgency about the state of the planet. One 11-year-old even wanted to write to Greta Thunberg and her local MP to call for more to be done to protect the environment in her local area. “I said: ‘I don’t know how we write to Greta Thunberg so we’ll go for the MP,’” O’Carroll says. “The student then did a drawing for the MP about how we can protect the climate.”
O’Carroll is in no doubt that her subject is more important than ever. “I think everyone should study geography,” she says. “Everyone needs to learn about different places and have general knowledge of what’s going on. It’s about having compassion for the world.”
Honor agrees: “I see it almost as a duty to inspire the next generation to be environmentally conscious citizens.”
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