Tag: Education

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How can educators make the world more sustainable?

Nina Jussila

What can we as educators do to support sustainable development and circular economy?

I work as a business and entrepreneurship coach which means I work with young people around the world. The amount of people I work with is not huge, but then again if educators around the world would come together we could reach quite an audience. Remember, these young people are future change-makers, which means our actions might have a bigger impact than we realise. 

So what can we do? 

In the last few days, I have been searching through many articles and web pages and I want to share two things that I believe all the educators should do; raising awareness and empowering people.

Awareness 

It all starts with understanding the current situation and the challenges that we are facing. For example, are you aware that in 2020 all of our yearly resources where used up by the 22nd of August? 

We also need to make sure people are aware of our current approach which is very linear “take-make-waste” and get people to see all the opportunities and benefits that the circular economy could provide. If you are new to the subject, I recommend watching this brilliant short video (it is only 3 min 48 seconds long).

So how can we adapt this to our teaching? The internet is full of materials, which is great as it means we don´t have to start from scratch. There are two web pages which are my favourites in relation to providing free quality lesson plans and ideas. 

Now that we understand the concept it is time to find out about our own ecological footprint. Quiz time! (As we all love them) My favourite quiz was from WWF, as it was easy to use, very visual and it educates you at the same time. 

Below you can see my results. It is better than the UK average but more than the world one, so I will need to evaluate my behaviour and to see what I could change to lower my carbon footprint. This question is especially in my mind as we are in the process of buying a house. How much furniture and electronics I could buy second hand? And could we potentially install some solar panels? 

Empower

I would like to start with some wise words from my educational hero, Sir Ken Robinson: 

”We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it´s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish” Sir Ken Robinson

As I mentioned at the beginning, we as educators have great power in empowering the new generation. We have an opportunity to create awareness and support people to take action. This can happen in all the fields, but especially in entrepreneurship. One of my roles is to support people in brainstorming new business ideas and I think this is a perfect place to integrate the circular economy to my teaching. 

To create a WOW business idea, I normally encourage people to think about these three questions:

  1. What are you passionate about?
  2. How do you add an element of innovation? (For example by using TRIZ model “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”) 
  3. What do the customers want? (Find out by talking to people or by researching future trends, e.g. Mintel)

But now I have added a fourth element, as I truly believe that all the future companies need to think about our planet. 

4. Is it good for the world?

I would love to hear from my educator colleagues, how do you think you could add a circular economy and sustainability to your teaching? 

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How do we really learn?

Nina Jussila

For ages people have been going to schools where teachers teach and “people learn”. World has changed a lot but the schools have not, how is that possible? Teachers use to have all the knowledge which they kindly shared to students who didn’t know that much, but nowadays we can just google and learn the same things from internet, so they are not really needed anymore or at least not for the same purpose. And even more interesting is that there is a lot of recearch about how do we actually learn and really little comes from listening the lectures.

learningpyramid

Learning Pyramid

I really love this video from Charles Jennings & Fuse about model called 70:20:10. It tells how 70% of the learning comes from experience and practise, 20% of the learning comes from networks and conversations we have with other people and only 10% of learning comes from learning formally. And from that 10% we forget 50% in one hour unless we put it into practice. Quite fascinating model I think.

But in real life there is the pressure from the education system “we have to make sure people learn”, so how can we manage that? And the answer is you can’t. It is important to realize that we can’t manage this process, we can facilitate it, support and help to make it happen, but everyone individually has to manage their own learning.

If we want to create learning organisations we have to stop pushing content at people and let the people have right recources to be able to pull the information when they really need it. That way the learning will be more effective, faster and efficient.

What if we would have schools where people could take responsibility of their own learning, coaches supporting them on their path and guiding them to set goals and make plans how to achieve them. Networks around them to help realize they don’t have to know everything, but they will learn how to find the right people and teams to work with. I really believe we can give everyone opportunity to learn this way, it might take some time, but that’s my goal and I will work hard to make that happen.