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A photo from Dr Kirby and Dr Webb's research on sustainability education for young people

Dr Perpetua Kirby and Dr Rebecca Webb are lecturers in the School of Education and Social Work. Their research focuses on sustainability education for children and young people, with an emphasis on creative methods and notions of uncertainty. They tell us more about this research area and how SSRP has supported their work and careers.

How would you describe your research?

Rebecca: At its broadest, our research is focused on questions of the purposes of education, and how this relates to its practices and pedagogies. Under that umbrella, SSRP has enabled us to look at education through the specific lens of climate and ecological education. Our work is located at the interconnection of the human and the more-than-human.

Perpetua: Our work is necessarily interdisciplinary, as we are concerned with how education engages students to consider the complexities and uncertainties of environmental sustainability in such a way that they can come to their own position on how they want to live in the world. This requires more than just science, as it is about engaging with the existential dimensions of how we might live together on a compromised and damaged planet. We work with colleagues across the university to integrate their expertise into thinking about education with students of any age.

What was your initial involvement with SSRP?

Rebecca: We have a funny story about that. Perpetua and I came together because we were both educational ethnographers, coming from backgrounds of thinking about student participation and sustainability education. Our initial contact was serendipitous, as I was talking to a colleague about our work, and they said, ‘you should talk to my friend and colleague [SSRP Director] Professor Joseph Alcamo’.

So we excitedly went to meet Joe. Through his carefully crafted questions to us, it became apparent that we were a little confused about what exactly we were asking of him. His questioning was really helpful. We should have been much better prepared. And we needed to be much tighter and more convincing in translating our educational philosophical concerns into the practical every day.

Perpetua: We took our time to work on a funding proposal, that was then funded by SSRP as a project with colleagues in the Sundarbans in India, and in Ecuador. This was concerned with how young people might respond to current climatic and ecological challenges where the solutions were as-yet-unknown.

Tell us more about that project.

Perpetua: The project explored the role of arts-based deliberative pedagogies for supporting young people to express relationships with sustainability uncertainties. We worked with partners in both places, in a secondary school in India, and with SSRP researcher Professor Mika Peck’s network of ‘paraecologists’ [volunteers trained to collect biodiversity data] in Ecuador. This was during Covid so we were doing it all online, which was challenging, but it was still a fascinating experience. It was our first step on the ladder of funded research in this area. It gave us lots of thinking time to explore how our ideas of educational uncertainty might be enacted within different contexts. From that point, we met lots of other people from SSRP.

Rebecca: There were lots of obstacles to be navigated in that project. We wanted to explore what an uncertain pedagogy might look like. We had lots of tools and ideas that we had been working on with schools in the UK. But a paradox emerged: we were quite certain about our version of uncertainty, and colleagues were uncertain about it. This really made us think about what we meant by uncertainty. We really valued the opportunity to think this through with those with different teaching and practice experiences across the two contexts.

Is it challenging to communicate your ideas of uncertainty to young people, or even to engage them with the notion?

Perpetua: The greater challenge is translating philosophical ideas about what education might be for at a time of global poly crisis, within an orthodox globalised educational system – connected closely to UK’s colonial history – that is dominated by a concern with learning particular skills and knowledge. There’s a dominant modern movement to be highly efficient and disciplined in the classroom to ensure certain standards are reached as a justification of the efficacy of education. We’re trying to disrupt the dominance of this one way of doing education, to make space for engaging with alternatives in which multiple uncertainties can be surfaced in the ‘classroom’ as catalysts for thinking about how to live and act.

It’s important not to get our approach confused with more traditional progressive education movements. Historically, the latter has focused on elevating students’ interests in an attempt to rebalance power differentials between teacher and student. Often progressive education remains very much concerned with specific learning outcomes decided by the teacher, even while claiming to be participatory. Or progressive approaches can be chaotic where ‘anything goes’, without a requirement for rigour and clarity about the distinctive roles of the teacher and students.

Because we have used creative techniques, we can get confused with that progressivism, whereas we aim to create a demanding educational space, where teachers are asking students to engage with something that’s difficult – to engage with ideas, thoughts, and their own experiences. This approach we are adopting requires a process of deep attention and deliberation so that students are constantly invited to come to a position that is uniquely their own. It neither assumes that teachers know the answer nor that students can come to this position alone.

Is enough being done in schools to educate young people about sustainability?

Perpetua: One of the things about climate change and ecological degradation is that it affects everything and everyone. Educationally, this is as much an existential endeavour as it is about sharing knowledge and skills. It’s about how we live and what we do.

Rebecca: There are fabulous environmental sustainability resources in schools, and people who know a huge amount and deploy various approaches to teaching the curriculum and using novel approaches, such as teaching outside and making valuable links to wellbeing, for example, and socialising students into green and healthy practices. Our approach aims to complement that important work by moving beyond specific learning outcomes, where is it not the role of the teacher to tell students how to live. Rather, to hold them to account constantly, in order that they can pay attention to what the world in its current state demands of them, and to work out for themselves how to respond and to live.

In what ways are you able to affect this change? How does it work, practically?

Perpetua: We work in a variety of different ways with teachers across different ages and sectors. For example, we worked alongside a teacher in a local school over a period of time on a water project, developing  the uncertain pedagogy in collaboration with the teacher, reflecting with them and swapping roles as both teacher and researcher. We’ve also run workshops on campus and elsewhere with different schools, and for teachers. We also worked with a local authority in Newport, South Wales, over a year to provide training which enabled them to embed this approach and to make it their own.

Alyson Marchant, Teacher Advisor for Health and Wellbeing, Education Service, Newport City Council, said: "Participants have told us that the training has altered the way in which they teach and facilitate learning because it has created a deeper understanding of teacher engagement in the learning process, how to reflect and plan for independent deep thinking and exploration of topics and subject matter. This development in approach is not just affecting the work schools are doing around sustainability and environment, but all aspects of learning."

What methods do you use to engage young people with sustainability?

Perpetua: We are currently applying for research grants for a role-playing game, in collaboration with other colleagues, including [SSRP Fellow] Dr Jo Walton, Professor Kate Howland and Dr Sam Ladkin, which is in-person but also has a digital platform. The idea is  a group plays a game envisioning a sustainable future. They deliberate a different aspect of the future, such as food, energy, water or transport. Each session is a ‘turn’ in which they must make key decisions, that feed into the global platform. The decisions of all the different groups playing the game shape the global state.

Tell us about the Forest Food Garden.

Perpetua: It’s a module for second-year undergraduate students who create a forest food garden on campus. The educational philosophical work that Rebecca and I do informs the focus on uncertainty in the design and implementation of a garden that has value now and in the future. Colleagues from across the University lend their expertise to the teaching on the module – which requires students to think with diverse disciplinary knowledge, as well as their own cultural histories and experiences of growing and eating to design aspects of the garden. They pass these onto the next cohort  to implement the designs.

For instance, this year’s students are designing species habitats and next year’s will build them. Last year’s students designed a nuttery that is being planted by this year’s students. In the module, we talk about our indebtedness to those who came before, whether that’s the legacies of colonialism, local shepherding heritages, or the microscopic skeletons of plankton that form the chalk of the South Downs. We focus on the human and the more-than-human. This term, we’re looking at our indebtedness to those who come after, the as-yet-unborn, as the students begin their designs for the garden. As the writer Rebecca Solnit puts it: being on the side of plants means being on the side of the future. And our students will also be designing educational resources for school students that engage them in climate and ecological uncertainties.

Rebecca: There’s now Forest Garden Society, with their own radio programme. For the radio show, five students take a theme each week, for example fungi, and each pick music on that theme. The Society have also put on a festival in the garden to which 200 people attended in Welcome Week; they are now planning another larger live music festival for April.

How has SSRP helped or supported your research?

Rebecca: There are two big things. The first is interdisciplinarity; just the range of colleagues that we work with, from the medical school right across the sciences and social sciences, as well as media, arts and humanities. We collaborated with Professor Alice Eldridge, for example, on a project about birdsong in the woods for the 2024 Brighton Festival [Birdbath]. There’s also the local-global connection. It’s taken us away from the feeling that we’re only little local researchers. SSRP has given us the capacity to link to global colleagues.

Perpetua: We are indebted to SSRP that offers us a community of colleagues across the University, at a time when climate change and ecological disaster can leave us grieving and feeling desperately alone. Fostering such community endeavours is key to addressing the challenges.

Dr Kirby and Dr Webb’s research supports the fulfilment of the following SDGs:

SDG 4 – Quality Education
SDG 10 – Reduced Inequalities
SDG 13 – Climate Action

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