Creative Approaches to Environmental and Sustainability Education

Children today face significant challenges in response to living in a globalised world and the predicted environmental threats to the planet. As such, it has been suggested that there is increasing need for primary schools to have a global rather than merely local perspective and to cultivate in students a critical sense of environmental responsibility. However, the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals highlight that there is much still to do to achieve this (UN, 2015). Implementing environmental and sustainability education (ESE) within primary school contexts can be a complex and time-consuming process; perhaps as a result, and alongside increasing competing demands on curriculum time from core subjects, it is often neglected.

Despite these concerns, we suggest that through exploring sustainability in primary schools we can not only engage children with these complex issues, but also develop their broader skills and understanding.

This short course draws on recent research to explore how we might do this, with a particular focus on arts-based pedagogical approaches.