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Ep 47: Teaching the Climate Emergency
Tamsin Hart: Hello and welcome to our latest episode of the Brighter Thinking Pod from the International Education Group of Cambridge University Press and Assessment. I’m Tamsin Hart, a Product Marketing Manager, and I’ll be your host today. We created our Brighter Thinking Pod to support teachers around the world. Each episode brings you helpful advice and interesting conversation from some of our authors, teachers and academics. Today we’re going to be taking a closer look at teaching the climate emergency. What the impact is for the planet and our classrooms?
For this episode, we’re joined by two special guests, Cindy Forde and Eddie Rippeth. Cindy is an author, activist, founder of Planetari, pioneering Earth-led education, earning a Climate Positive Award at UN COP 28. Her groundbreaking children’s book, Bright New World, Building a Better Planet, has garnered critical acclaim, selected among the best new children’s books by The Guardian and held as outstanding by new scientists in 2022. It has been adopted by the Australian National Curriculum.
Eddie Rippeth is Head of Primary Publishing, Products and Services at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, and commissions our guided reading scheme, Cambridge Reading Adventures.
Cindy and Eddie, welcome to the show.
Cindy Forde: Hi Tamsin. Hi, it’s lovely to be here.
Eddie Rippeth: Thank you, Tamsin.
Tamsin Hart: Great to have you both here. Now remember, all the links and info that we discussed are available in the show notes for your ease. And if you want to get your voice heard on the show, you can get in touch on X or Instagram at CambridgeINT.
Favourite experience in the natural world
Now let’s start with a question that celebrates the wonder of the natural world.
What is one of your favourite experiences you’ve had in the natural world that has just filled you with wonder? Eddie, let’s start with you.
Eddie Rippeth: All right, thank you, Tamsin. It’s a very, very difficult question because the natural world surprises me every day. Even just cycling down the river to come into the office today, I saw a kingfisher. And I think when I consider this question, it actually comes down to the beauty of birds.
If I could single one aspect out of it, it’s when something crops up during the day that you don’t usually see, let’s say like a kingfisher, perhaps it’s a goldfinch or a woodpecker, it’s always a wonderful reminder of the natural world and the beauty it brings us. Now, a lot of, you know, this can happen anytime, any, you know, really locally.
And it always underscores just how beautiful and valuable nature is and we really do need to take care of it properly.
Tamsin Hart: That sounds an absolutely gorgeous bird, Eddie. I frequently walk down my garden just to hang out with some very friendly robins we’ve got down there. And now Cindy, what about you?
Cindy Forde: Wow, that’s such a fantastic story, Eddie. Very much like Eddie, I’m really lucky. I live in the middle of a field and I do yoga every morning and I’m in a room that faces east. So every morning I see the sunrise and it’s just so stunning. Depending on the time of year, you get different colors. Sometimes the glorious orange and red and pink. Sometimes it’s almost diamond white.
But every single morning I can’t help but just be awed by this incredible force, this life force that powers a whole planet. So there’s numerous other examples, but that is my daily burst of awe and joy. Yeah.
Tamsin Hart: That sounds a beautiful start to the day.
Climate change: why is urgent action needed?
So let’s get onto the main theme of our discussion today. Cindy, can I ask you please, what is the challenge facing us with climate change and why do you think urgent action is needed?
Cindy Forde: Well, the challenge facing us with climate change is, you know, it’s actually a complex one, but to speak to it in its simplest form, basically all of the systems that we currently operate be it our economic system, our food system, our transport systems, how we treat our carbon sinks, our oceans, our rainforests, are systems that are not compatible with keeping Earth a safe space for human life. So we really need to rethink how we design our ways of living here.
And I think that’s where the education system comes in because the education system is one of the most powerful tools for change. If we raise a generation of humans, the next generation of humans that understand how to design whatever they want to be, whether it’s astrophysicists or hairdressers, adventurers or wallpaper designers, if they learn how to do that within the planetary boundaries, then we’re all set for a sustainable, for a thriving future.
So that’s a really important part of this challenge, recognising that the way that we currently live is not compatible with keeping Earth a safe space for human life. We can change how we think, so that’s very positive. And the difficulty is we have to do this fast. We’ve put such pressure on our life support system that we really are looking at six to eight years to rapidly reduce emissions and rapidly increase the amount of oceans, of land space, of biodiversity that’s put under protection so that nature can get back on with doing this incredible job that she does of keeping, I know, of keeping earth regulated and balanced and safe for us to live here.
So there’s systems change in how we think and then there’s this clock ticking so we don’t have, we know what we need to do but we need to act fast. I think that’s, those are the biggest challenges.
Successes responding to climate change
Tamsin Hart: Thank you, Cindy. And what do you think of the biggest successes so far in responding to climate change?
Cindy Forde: Well, I think human beings are an incredible species. It seems like we’ve done something incredibly stupid that we’ve brought our life support system to the brink of not functioning for us anymore. Earth is 4.6 billion years old. She may be damaged, but she will recover.
But what the difficulty is, people talk about saving the planet, it’s actually about keeping Earth in a state that will support human life so that we can thrive. So it’s about saving ours. And as an incredibly intelligent species, we know how to do it. We already know what we need to do. The solutions are very clear, and they’re out there. So I think that’s a huge success.
In the time that we’ve understood this problem, renewable energy has been innovated, developed to this point that it’s now cheaper than fossil fuels. You know, that’s a massive success. We know what we need to do with our food systems, our land systems. There’s incredible innovators. I’m really lucky because I work with many of them across the globe who are working out how to get the biodiversity under protection, how to get our oceans under protection, how to produce food in a way that means we can feed eight billion of us on the planet without stress on the land.
We’re doing an incredible job of working out what needs to be done, not just theoretically, but in practice. So what we need to get better at to make this happen is to have the leadership that gives us the mandate to get on and accelerate these innovations rather than the constant blocks that we live with at the moment because of politics.
Tamsin Hart: Thank you. Eddie, do you have anything further to add?
Eddie Rippeth: Yeah, I think in terms of the biggest successes, I think it’s really important with climate change to be very positive about what we are doing and celebrate the successes and point out that the stuff we’re doing does not mean the end of life as we know it, or the end of driving a car, or the end of visiting places.
I think for me, there’s a need to sort of to engage and make people optimistic and to offer sort of a really powerful vision of the future. Because, you know, we just talked about the successes, we can do this, I think, is the message that, you know, Cindy’s telling us. And actually, change is exciting and, you know, it’s often a very positive thing.
So I think it’s about encouraging people to embrace change and actually not sort of be sort of stuck in a sort of very siloed view of how the world should be.
How to introduce climate change and sustainability topics into lessons
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant. Thank you, Eddie. Now let’s take this back to the classroom. To come back to you, Eddie, how do you think we can introduce climate change and sustainability topics into our lessons?
Eddie Rippeth: Well, coming from the primary end, it’s actually very easy because children are fascinated in the topics which are related to climate change. They are fascinated in animals and rainforests and dolphins and whales. So it’s about sort of picking the topics which we know will really engage them and actually sort of showing how that topic is relevant, relevant to sort of the climate issue, but also they’re very important.
It’s about the importance of the nature around us. And if we’re protecting nature for the sake of its beauty, you’re actually always, that is gonna always benefit, I would imagine, climate change. I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial there, Cindy, but please step in there. But right from the start, for me, it’s about going to children with things they’re really fascinated by already. You will always get across the line with talking about animals, talking about different types of animals. And in many ways, I think this is where the younger generation are actually ahead of the elder generations, which their interests may have wandered away from such things.
Tamsin Hart: Thanks Eddie. Cindy, how would you introduce these topics?
Cindy Forde: Yeah, I think Eddie’s right. There’s just so much natural delight, curiosity, enthusiasm for these topics. And I think it goes, there’s the natural world, which is just an endless source of inspiration and joy. And there’s also the innovation. I mean, this, the danger we’re in, I love the Chinese symbol for crisis, is wéijī, danger and opportunity. So yes, we are in a danger, but this is a massive opportunity for the human family to transform and I think children love that.
You know, even our generation, we loved shows that were about the future, everything from Star Wars, Star Trek, all this. But you know, these innovations are happening really rapidly and in real time and children absolutely love that. How do we design the cities of the future? How do we design the energy of the future? How do we design the food systems of the future, you know, you let them loose on their stuff and they just, you know, with guidance, with teaching, they just, they, you know, they will take it away and come up, go visit a lot of schools.
They’ve come up with better ideas than what’s actually happening out there and there’s such a boundless imagination that, you know, you can see that these young people will be the innovators and the entrepreneurs of a brighter world if they’re equipped with the skills to make what they’re able to imagine into reality.
And I think it’s a topic that cuts right across all the subjects. You know, people think sustainability lives in geography or perhaps biology, but it’s in science, it’s in technology, it’s in maths, it’s in the stories that we tell. So it’s in literacy, it’s in the dreams that we manifest. So it’s in art. You can really make this a transdisciplinary topic that will engage all areas of the school life.
And of course it’s outside and it’s all around us, so you can build in that physical side of education as well. And really make, I’ve worked with incredible schools who are turning their schools into models of how education can look.
So they have farms, they have school farms, gardens growing their own food, all sorts of things that are happening outside the classroom, as well as what they’re learning inside the classroom. So it’s an incredibly powerful, motivating topic for children and for teachers, because in teaching this, you can actually take action. And instead of having the anxiety or the despair or the overwhelm, you know that you’re doing something and there’s nothing more powerful than actually shaping the future. So I think when teachers get that sense that they can do that, then I think there’s that real positiveness that Eddie talks about that does arise and it can influence the culture of the whole school.
How can we support discussions around climate change?
Tamsin Hart: That sounds brilliant. Plenty of opportunities for them to start dreaming big. And talking about the culture in the school, how do you think we can support discussions and activities around climate change and sustainability, Cindy?
Cindy Forde: Well again, I think Eddie’s made the most important point at the beginning. It needs to be framed with what we can do with positive. Yes, we get the news. Everybody knows that bad news sells. So we’re overwhelmed with everything that’s gone wrong and it can feel really hopeless and disempowering. But there is, you know, people even ask me that question, oh, how do you deal with that every day? You know, but I can’t think of a more joyful job. You deal with the, yes, you look at the difficult, the problems that we’ve created, but you also work with the human beings that are solving them. And those stories really need to be told.
And I think that that’s such an important any discussion I would frame on sustainability would say this is in the book that I’ve written, Bright New World. We start with what we can have. We can be here. This is all possible. And this is the it’s we can we can see what can be done.
So let’s look at where we are and let’s build ourselves a roadmap to get there. What would need to change? What would we need to do? And then people’s minds start working in that way rather than how do I avoid this? How do I block my ears? How do I hide from this terrible, overwhelming thing? So the frame of the discussion is action in a very real and pragmatic sense of what we can imagine and the small steps we can take to get there.
Tamsin Hart: Thank you, Cindy. Can you think of any more pragmatic solutions to support, Eddie?
Eddie Rippeth: Well, certainly as publishers, I’m going to be telling you a little bit later on in the podcast about what we do, which is using source text to provide really interesting climate-related materials. I think there are all of the subject disciplines which every single one will have an angle which is actually could be supportive of the sort of climate change agenda. I think a big part of it though is empowering younger people because in essence what we’re saying is you need to know this is your world and it’s in your power to actually save the world.
And it’s just, I suppose it’s bringing that element into the classroom that there’s a really powerful reason for learning and for learning about the climate change, but also for the fact that they are agents in this and they can do something really good for the planet. And I think this is where it’s sort of teaching them about how to influence and how oracy will play a part and how winning, it might be winning arguments, but advocating key changes which might lead to further climate initiatives.
How can encouraging oracy help spark climate conversations?
Tamsin Hart: It’s interesting you mention oracy there, Eddie. We hear a lot about that now in education. How important do you think oracy is, Cindy?
Cindy Forde: Well, I actually think it’s hugely important. I mean, I’ve, as an activist, has come from a long line of change makers. Being able to use your voice to clearly articulate, to understand and speak clearly for what you want has been one of the most powerful agents of change right across history. Just looking at the last century from the suffragettes to the civil rights movement, these were people who were able to stand up and articulate very clearly what they wanted and what change would look like for them.
And I’m looking at frontline activist movements, but even one of the exercises that we use sometimes in the things is writing a letter to your minister. You learn about a topic, for example, how the ocean works, and then you say, okay, now we know what we want or how to keep our river systems clean, which is a huge issue in the UK at the moment. So you can write, just writing that letter, well crafted letter, you can start writing it when you’re six, all the way through to secondary school, just putting out the ask for the world you want. It’s the one of the most powerful tools we have is our voice, so children who are well equipped to use that are the children who are gonna be the change makers and the people who get, who really help to shape that this world, taking it from the world in our imaginations, articulating that and making it the world that is real.
Eddie Rippeth:
And I think, yeah, the key aspect of oracy is any change requires people to persuade people who perhaps are reluctant and perhaps are sort of against that particular change. And you mentioned the likes of Martin Luther King. You know, there was obviously quite residual opposition. Now, the best way to overcome that is by persuasion and by, you know sometimes compromise, there are all kinds of ways of dealing with that, but oracy is very much the key.
And it’s actually being able to make the case and win over people who might otherwise sort of be thinking, oh, here’s another climate initiative, they’re going to stop me driving my car. Because there is fear here, and it tends to be fear in the older elements of the population and not in the young part of the population. And I think where there’s fear, it should be.
Having an articulate case can sort of persuade and remove some of those fears and answer the questions that people may have about sort of having to give up some aspect of their life or feeling they have to give up some aspect of their life because of the latest climate initiative.
So I think that’s the other key about oracy. It’s about we know what needs to be done. But it’s the case clearly has to be made and has to be made and has to be made with good reason because you want to bring everyone with you and you want everybody to sort of really understand why they’re doing things and agreeing with doing it rather than come sort of in a cumulative way or discovering that it’s a very, very difficult process for them.
Creating climate change activities in school
Brilliant, thank you, Eddie. We mentioned writing letters there. Are there any other kind of practical activities that can be brought into the classroom to teach climate education? Cindy.
Cindy Forde: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s, I think, you know, Tamsin, you as a communicator, you know, you do this wonderful job of telling a story. And as Eddie’s just said there, it’s the story that we tell. If the story lands wrong, something that can be a fantastic idea gets buried.
So I think in teaching, in encouraging our young people to be really strong communicators, great storytellers, whether it’s visual storytellers, this is where I think the art comes in, whether it’s storytelling in news, in fact, how you put your facts across, or whether it’s moving people’s hearts and minds through fiction, whether it’s music, there’s all these, because there’s so much of people believing climate change is about understanding the science, which of course is hugely important, but we often as humans, we respond in much more emotional ways to things, so if you’re trying to persuade and to change using that medium is really powerful. That’s why I say it’s a topic that can sit right across different subjects. Songs have been so powerful. I mentioned the civil rights movement. That was powered by some utterly incredible music that are now these anthems for change, you know, you hear change is going to come or we shall overcome or then they just trigger this emotional response.
So yeah, we did that. That was a victory. And I think that if we can use our power to imagine and to communicate that way from our earliest years, we’re much better equipped to make real this world that I think most of us want and know that we can have in our hearts.
Tamsin Hart: Thank you, some lovely ideas there Cindy. Eddie, do you have any more practical activities to add?
Eddie Rippeth: Well, I always think there’s something about the political process that children need to learn and how they can make a voice and not feel excluded by it. And that’s something which, you know, as publishers we should be looking at. But, you know, within the school itself, you know, maybe there’s sort of, you know, classroom processes where, you know, class elections and how they, you know, looking at how they can sort of create advocates and encourage the sort of oracy that will be important.
Climate change is a political issue and actually understanding how to put together a campaign and it might be a campaign based on creating wonderful posters or decorating the classrooms. So when parents are coming in, the message is passed on. There’s all these kinds of things that can be done. And as I say, it harks back to that idea that it’s about persuasion and bringing people along and equipping children to be able to do that because there’s definitely a sense that younger people get this much more than older people. I don’t think I’m too controversial in saying that as being relatively old myself. But yeah, that’s what I would say there.
Climate anxiety
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant, thank you. So lots of ways there of having a powerful voice, being creative, bringing it across all subjects. So we know that oracy is important. Well-being is also being considered more and more in a structured way in a classroom setting. At Cambridge, we’ve developed a wellbeing curriculum (primary and lower secondary) and resources, and in fact, you can listen to our recent podcast on wellbeing, which we’ll link to in the show notes. One of the aspects of wellbeing that came up in that discussion was climate anxiety. What is climate anxiety Cindy?
Cindy Forde: Well, I’m going to reframe that because I think it’s when people get a label stuck on them, it can be quite debilitating. And I think that climate anxiety is actually part of a natural process of us being aware that something isn’t right. I think, you know, if you get the sense of that in any other area of your life, that’s called empathy. It’s called responding appropriately. And I think there is so much that we’re aware of that isn’t working. We are in a code red.
You know, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, has said this is a code red. I’ve had a very great, good fortune to, you know, to be involved with some fantastic psychologists on this. And they say it’d be much more helpful if we referred to it as climate empathy, so that the children don’t feel that there’s something wrong with them in being over anxious, nervous, but they’re just tuning in to something that is happening very much around us in our time.
So if you reframe that, look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You’re feeling something that we’re all feeling. So now let’s hold that and come together and look at how we can take action, not only to make that feeling go away, but to make the situation better so that we don’t have this, so we’re not tuning into what’s going wrong. We’re channeling and being part of what’s going right. And I think so that taking the onus off the children feeling that there’s something wrong with them or the older people into it’s happening to all around us. Let’s move together as a group, as a human family and sort this thing out.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant. So you talked about reframing as a way of supporting the wellbeing of children who might have been seen as suffering from climate anxiety. Are there any other ways we could support them?
Cindy Forde: Well, I think it is really important for young people to see that things are happening. Eddie, I think the only thing that I’m going to, well maybe you might say some even more controversial things later on, is I think that, I think, I think we are, it’s a transgenerational thing. I think older people, there’s many older people who really understand this stuff, who have a lot of experience of working in it and making change, who’ve got long track records, histories, stories of being at the forefront of change, or in their field making change.
And I think that young people knowing that rather than this horrifying thing, it’s up to us, it’s our generation, we’ve got to save the world. I think that’s a message that’s really difficult for young people to feel that they’re isolated and alone in this, you know, this response, these terrible old people have made don’t care and they’ve made a dreadful mess.
And then these young, that’s not what you said Eddie at all, I’m just trying to expand the idea a little bit. But you know, so it’s the children are thinking these, and also that triggers anger, which isn’t helpful. So it’s young people, yes, they have landed on earth at this certain time, but there’s a lot of us that have walked a very long road to try to bring a different type of world into being. And we’re here and we’re still doing it.
And we’re here to support these young people and work with them and guide them through. And I think that’s probably, to know that, that they are part of a community where this is well understood and that people are working together across the generations to build this better world is much more assuring than we’ve been left in this terrible mess, it’s all somebody else’s fault and we’ve got to clean it up, which really isn’t the case.
Eddie Rippeth: Yes, and I absolutely agree, Cindy. I certainly don’t want to characterise every single old person as being, you know, anti-climate. I do wonder though with climate anxiety, and this perhaps goes across all generations, there’s actually, doing practical things is always a good way to improve one’s wellbeing.
It’s nice to know that you’ve done something which may be making some tiny difference to climate. So, you know, it might be, as I say, I cycled into work today, you know, I’ve done that for the last three or four years, and it’s a tiny bit of, it’s certainly, I feel the wellbeing of it, but it’s actually encouraging that kind of sort of feeling that well, actually, doing these things is making a contribution. I do wonder if within a school setting, it’s actually sort of, you know, it might be around, you know, showcasing how children are already making a big contribution or going out of their way to do that. I know it’s not climate specific in itself, but sorting out rubbish is interesting now in a way that it wasn’t a few years ago. Children do it. I think it’s those kind of things. Because they’re doing something, it’s interesting.
I think that would really, that does really help. And if they’re doing something like that and being applauded for it and encouraged, I think that’s got be good.
Cindy Forde: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I also think that it goes beyond the child themselves. It goes into the context that they’re in. And I think schools are really fantastic places. I know that schools can’t entirely generalise, but most people who have the calling to be an educator bring a set of values with them, which is about care, which is about nurturing, which is about compassion. And I think these are extremely important values to have in the ecosystem of a child’s development.
It’s quite frightening when you step outside of school environments that these values aren’t the ones that we see displayed in our world, in some of our business organisations. There’s fantastic businesses, there’s also very rapacious corporate empires, there’s the, you know, our lead, the governmental leadership. These values are really lacking and that can be a real shock for children when they leave, young people when they leave school, everything that they were taught is, you know, is flipped on its head.
But I do think within the school environment there’s so much that can be done for young people to see these ethics and values at work all around them. And I think that’s a natural propensity for teachers to do that. And obviously the teachers need to be well supported themselves because everything’s interconnected. It’s very hard to concentrate on the well-being of children if the culture isn’t one of well-being for the teachers environment of the school.
I think if you have a culture where those things are in place you’re much more likely to have children who feel that and who have the well-being themselves. I think that having those values which you do so often finding schools really supported will and it’s exactly the same, that’s the care of the child, the care of the person who’s caring for the child, the care of the self is the thing that enables us to care for our planet ultimately. So I think that having those values at the heart of everything that we do really is what will make the difference both to the child in the micro and to the planet in the macro.
How can teachers make a difference?
Tamsin Hart: Well, we talked about this. It’s interesting you raise that from a student perspective. But what if the teacher is the individual who is very passionate about climate change, who is having the climate anxiety? How can they influence their school to bring it into the classroom?
Cindy Forde: Yeah, I mean, that’s a hugely important question, Tamsin, because people talk about eco-champion teachers. I was part of a survey government, well, it was conducted for the British government a couple of years ago around attitudes, you know, how do we get this into school? And it was, you know, there’s the beyond the eco-champion teachers, because they’re doing it anyway.
But the other teachers, they need support. So this is a real, really important point for leaders of schools. You know, if you’re serious about doing something and leaders of publishing companies, leaders of education companies, if you’re serious about doing this, if you think that solving the climate crisis, the climate breakdown is important, then you have to create the culture where it’s possible to do so, which means supporting a culture of wellbeing as we’ve talked about, but also having the time, because so many of the teachers who weren’t the eco-champions said, well, we don’t have a mandate for this, we think it’s important, we don’t have the mandate, it’s not in the curriculum, we don’t have the bandwidth. That was changed, that the things that we now say are the most critical on earth if space was made for them in school.
So the eco teachers don’t just have the stress of knowing that this thing is happening and not enough is happening to equip the children to deal with it, but they’re supported. They’ve got the culture in the schools to do that. They’ve got the resources in the schools to do that. You know, that does become part of a much wider issue, societally, how we respond to this issue and not just to the market, which says we need qualifications, the exams are set this way, we need to teach our students to pass these exams, but really you’re training the children to go out into the world and replicate the system that has brought us to this really difficult point and so there has to be a systemic shift in that.
And I’m saying it’s me saying that, it’s mother nature saying that. We either shift systemically what we think is important or our chances of thriving are much more limited. So the value system that supports a healthy earth eventually needs to align with the one that we see supporting a healthy economy, which is really why, how we set the curriculums and how we set the things that we think are important to learn about at school. So those two things have got to come into much greater alignment.
Tamsin Hart: Eddie, what do you think about these individual passionate teachers? What can they do?
Eddie Rippeth: The individual passion of teachers can be facilitated by what we’re doing at Cambridge University in Press and Assessment. We do have an unusual amount of influence over curriculums in the sense that we are creators of curriculums and major assessments. Quite clearly, if we are embracing the change and we are seeing climate education within the curricula that we’re producing and within the publishing that I’m personally involved in, that really will help support these individual teachers and also that helps engender that sort of much more greater climate focus within the schools because ultimately the schools, you know, they live and many will live and die by the education that they’re giving the children and it will become very important for them to be including climate within that education. So there’s a role in all of the tiers of organisation involved in education. And Cambridge obviously is very much one of those, being a publisher and an assessment body.
Planetari
Tamsin Hart: Now you talked about personal experience there, I think we should take this moment to dig into both of your experiences. So Cindy let’s start with you and your work at Planetari. Can you tell us how this began and what you do?
Cindy Forde: Yeah, sure, I’ll try to be succinct because it’s quite a long journey. I’ve spent most of my career looking at systemic change. This is going back to the early 90s when I was repeatedly told, I’m ahead of my time. I hear that phrase so many times in the context of what I do. And I think now we’re at the point that we’re out of time. So what I recognise working with lots of businesses and government was that people just aren’t aware. You get to people who are 30 or 40 and they’re still now, they’re waking up to the situation that we’re really in. You’ve been educated all the way through to take up a role in society and then you suddenly realise that it’s paradoxical to whether we’re actually going to, actually to the regeneration of Earth. Often what looks like a very good job can be a job that’s actually part of the problem rather than part of the solution and it is possible to transform everything. There’s nothing, most industries are neutral, food, transport, energy, it’s possible to transform them into something that is part of the solution.
And so it seemed to me that it was critically important that we educate ourselves very differently so that in whatever field of endeavour we choose, we know how to do this stuff.
And so through various iterations, I finally decided to found Planetari, which is around pioneering Earth-led education. So it doesn’t mean that everybody learns how to hug a tree. You know, from the beginning, our frame is the planetary boundaries. As we teach children in school to do everything in the frame of what’s healthy for their minds and their bodies, it’s just extending that so that you understand how the planetary boundaries work and everything from exactly from our literature, economics, history is taught to be within those planets.
So we need to do that mind flip and move from this egocentric worldview which is saying that the earth exists to serve humans rather than humans exist to be stewards of the planet that keeps them alive and that transforms every the way that we learn almost every subject.
How does Cambridge Reading Adventures link to sustainability?
Tamsin Hart: Thank you, Cindy, some very inspiring work there. And now back to Eddie, who, as you will recall from our podcast intro, was responsible for commissioning our Cambridge Reading Adventures series. Eddie, can you tell us a little bit about the series and how the themes tie in with sustainability and climate change?
Eddie Rippeth: So, the Cambridge Reading Adventures is a series that we produced several years ago and it’s unique in the sense that we started out wanting to cater for students all around the world or pupils all around the world starting to read.
And what became very clear in terms of choosing themes and topics which of international relevance, relevance to children in India or in United Arab Emirates or in Colombia, all around the world, actual topics around the environment and climate and conservation are really a good way of binding an international series together because they are universally relevant.
So having created this series a few years ago, we had a load of books in here which were really quite, I would say, very, very sort of topical for climate change. I mean, we had books on the climate change process. We had books around pollution. And we had books about recycling. All manner of things which were, if not closely related, were tangentially related.
And I think we actually found about 60 or 70 of the books have some really strong link to potential climate change work. So what we did was we chose several of these books working with Cindy and decided to create a teaching environment around each of them. So if you regard a reading book as a stimulus, so there’ll be a lovely story.
For example, one of the stories for five, six year old children is called, Seagull. And it’s about two young children who find a seagull on a beach, but the seagull is an absolute mess. It’s covered in oil, it’s covered in litter, it’s covered in all manner of stuff. It’s a real sticky mess. And they end up trying to clean it so it can go away and be happy. And obviously, it’s very clear opportunities there to study why is the seagull getting so messed up, etc.
It was about drawing the themes out and then developing these themes with various activities. Some teaching as well around the concepts, in this case it was plastic pollution and what’s going into the ocean and how we can avoid this kind of behaviour that came out of that particular title. As I say, at the moment we’ve done six.
But there are potentially lots of other opportunities and we are certainly looking at whether we can do a few more of these and ultimately actually produce a few more of these, well a few more Cambridge Reading Adventures which actually sort of would tie in with these powerful themes. So from a publisher’s point of view this is a start, it’s absolutely just a start and obviously with reading it’s more discretionary than a statutory curriculum, but nonetheless it can really sort of help bring climate and the issues around it, the issues around sustainability and other things right into the classroom in an easy, enjoyable way. And what we’ve done then is taken it that step further with the teaching and the projects and activities which can follow from that reading book.
Tamsin Hart: Brilliant. Thank you for bringing those up, Eddie. We’ll be linking to all of these resources in the show notes, so you’ll be able to access them. Cindy, what was your aim with these teaching sheets?
Cindy Forde: Well, it was absolutely delightful to be invited to collaborate with Cambridge on these fantastic reading adventures because while it’s a small step, everything does start with a story. So the aim, and I work with children, my memories as a child, I think stories are some of the most powerful things, whether it’s animated stories or reading stories, these are the things that really shape your formative view on the world, so being awakened to these, it sounds small, but that is a kind of awakening, a sensitising, which I think is really important to happen in those early years.
So our intention, the stories are beautiful already, the illustrations are beautiful, they’re inspiring, they create this whole universe that you can step into, and our intention was to really respect that and make these adventures as delightful as possible because you know, you want people, the children, to feel so excited about learning about these topics and what they can do and being an active part of it. That’s the real mission that you give a sense of this. And you and your lovely opening question this morning, Tamsin, what gives you that sense of wonder and awe?
You want these, we want these adventures to enhance these already beautiful reading adventures with the teaching and learning activities that really enhance that sense of learning of wonder and awe, not we’re learning about really difficult topics, we’re learning about this stuff, but hey look, look at the actions we can take, look at the adventures that we can have making these, you know, learning how to transform and make our world an even more beautiful place. We’re dealing with very small children so we really want to give them that sense of delight and possibility with these adventures that we’ve collaborated with you all on.
Tamsin Hart: That sounds absolutely amazing. So you were working with your team at Planetari on these sheets and you all brought different specialisms to them, didn’t you?
Cindy Forde: Yeah, we did. So I’m a creative, you know, my bread and butter really is storytelling, whether it’s storytelling in the children’s realm, children’s story, or this storytelling in the business and the governmental world. If we, the stories that we tell, you know, that shapes our imagination. If you can create something powerful enough for something to people to believe in it, they will, you know, then it exists. So that’s how I try to use my power as a storyteller.
On the team we also had Eliza who’s an incredibly skilled teacher and she’s also an artist. So she looks after making sure that these things not only match the needs of the learning environment of the curriculum but also that they’re done in an incredibly creative way. She often gets told to work with children who are unteachable and through art and creativity she’s able to bring them totally in line with the curriculum. So we infused that into these adventures so that they are these engaging, creative, expert, you know, invitations to explore and discover.
And we also had Kelly, who’s a trained teacher and she’s also a trained mindfulness expert and so that whole thread of bringing a greater awareness of well-being, starting from self all the way through to planet, is brought into these. It sounds an awful lot to bring into these small adventures, but I think once you start doing it, it becomes almost automatic. And with the lovely stories that we already had to start with, I hope that we’ve really been able to support and enrich them by weaving these three storytelling, creativity, mindfulness through this learning of how to make our world a more beautiful place.
Tamsin Hart: Thank you. I think, Eddie, you have something to say about that.
Eddie Rippeth: Yeah, I just wanted to add the, one of the things I would say we’ve discovered about Cambridge Reading Adventures and the great, the really powerful themes around climate is how international they are. And there’s, you know, we purposefully were designing something that had to sell into markets all around the world. And I think ultimately Cambridge Reading Adventures can be found in about 100 countries around the world. And I think that sort of connection that we can help engender between children all over the world in terms of making it this really powerful sort of force across the world is something which can be done with climate because it does go everywhere.
We don’t find it’s blocking us into certain countries, by the way, which is interesting as well. And I think that for me is a sort of really sort of hopeful thing that the more interconnected, the more international looking we are, the more children are able to embrace climate change.
Tamsin Hart: Thank you, Eddie. And we have been doing some extra content around sustainability and climate change as well. Eddie, can you describe a blog post we’ve been working on in the aeronautical industry?
Eddie Rippeth: Well, we’ve got another podcast coming up, which is very much around whales and dolphins and the preservation of the oceans.
Tamsin Hart: That’s wonderful. Thank you, Eddie. So we’ve got a lot of exciting content coming up we’ve been mentioning. So you’ll be able to find links to our ORCA podcast as well that Eddie mentioned there, where we’re talking about the wonders of the underwater world. So we’re working with an Orca charity on that one. So please check those out in the show notes. And Cindy, so we’re talking about some big ideas in this content. How would you take those ideas into the classroom?
Cindy Forde: Well, I think that the Cambridge Reading Adventures series is a really great way of doing it. I really enjoyed working on that series because some of the books we chose were actually fiction. So you’re inviting children in to have, through these stories, which are really exciting, and then through a small story, you can introduce a big idea.
Eddie talked about Seagull. It’s a little story about the little seagull on the beach that gets dirty, but from there you can get all out into plastic pollution. I mean, depending on the age of your children, you can just keep expanding, because where does plastic end up? In the ocean. Why is it a problem for the ocean? Then you can get into the things that happen, you know, that we need to do to help to regenerate our oceans. Then you can look at actual materials manufacturer. Okay, so if we can stop it getting in, how do we get it out? There’s the things that you can do to transform. You can get plastic out of the ocean and turn it into all sorts of other things that’s already happening, boats, swimming suits, but you could also look at materials design, how do we design something that degrades, which is also happening. So it just spirals out.
I mean, I would love to see a much more integrated approach to teaching, you know, earth-led education so that it’s connected across the curriculum and this is structured. But as a teacher, there’s so many ways that you can start from these small stories and link them right across, you know, the different subjects in the curriculum. And again, as I said, depending on the age of the children into, you know, much more, much more wide and if it’s age appropriate complex subjects. So I think that little drop is really good.
Tamsin Hart: Wonderful, thank you.
Thank you for sharing those brilliant inspirational ideas with us that we can take into the classroom. That’s all we have time for today on our climate change episode. Thank you to Cindy and Eddie for being such fantastic guests and sharing some really useful and as I say, inspirational insights.
Don’t forget to tell your friends and colleagues about us and rate our show on whatever platform you’re listening on. Our show notes have lots of useful links that we’ve discussed throughout this episode, so be sure to take a look at them. You can also follow and contact us on X or Instagram at CambridgeINT. Thank you for listening. We hope you join us again soon.
