education research resources

Another couple of resources, but this time focused on research of environmental education.

Action research - improving learning through the environment is a "compilation of ideas for carrying out action research in order to improve learning through educational work in the environment".

Produced by the National Association of Field Studies Officers (NAFSO), it includes chapters on different methods of evaluation, such as letters and concept maps, evaluating fieldwork, residential courses and community-based environmental education.

It is available through the NAFSO website

ISBN: 1 901 642 10 00

Edited by: Adrian Clark, Helen Parry, Clare Shorter

Proceedings of the VIIIth Conference on Environmental Education in Europe 'Learning for a sustainable future: the role of communication, ethics and social learning in environmental education'

Editor: Mark Alderweireldt

CEEE Ghent, 2002

Although 5 years old now, this set of proceedings includes useful papers on EfS, focusing in Europe, with case studies and research. For more information about the CEEE conferences and the organising group, the European Foundation for Education and Sustainable Development, have a look at their website.

Happy new year - got any resolutions? If not, this video could help!

Happy New Year and welcome back!

So, have you made any resolutions? Apart from usual (more exercise, less chocolate), I am trying to reduce my consumption. I started with some of the xmas pressies I bought ('experiences' like a trip to the cinema or going for afternoon tea, rather than manufactured goods, or alternative gifts such as mosquito nets or fluffy ducks through various developing country NGOs), but want to continue my 'dematerialisation' into the new year.

This is mostly inspired by Annie Leonard's 'Story of Stuff', a great video which explains, from a US perspective, some of the economic basis for environmental issues and the importance of the drive we all need to create towards sustainability. The video is 20 minutes, but packs a lot in, explaining the linear 'extraction - production - consumption -disposal' lifespan of our material goods. Some of the language is complex, but all the key terms are explained, and there is a comprehensive list of references included. The use of animated graphics really helps to bring the statistics to life and illustrate the problems.

The accompanying blog and comments are also very interesting, do check it out and share it with people - she is making some good points about the key issues and barriers to global conservation.

RBG Canada Video

The Royal Botanical Gardens Canada have put up a video about their work.

Hard Rain - tough issues, clear choices

One of the many roles of the BGCI website is as a shop front - we advertise books, resources and journals which our members may find interesting or useful. One which has had the most response is the visual and poetic feast, Hard Rain. The book uses Bob Dylan's lyrics with photographs illustrating some of the worlds major issues - pollution, climate change, poverty and human rights. An outdoor exhibition has been put together by the book's authors which has been touring botanic gardens around the world - for the list and to see what the exhibition looks like, have a look on the Hard Rain website.

Now a new expanded version is being released with four new chapters; No Time for Denial by Jonathon Porritt; Hard Choices by Robert May; Beware the Climate Fixers by John Elkington and Geoff Lye and Changing Consciousness by David Bohm as well as a new photo essay by Mark Edwards with over 50 new photographs. Mark is also working on a new banner for the exhibition, provisionally titled, "Remaking a world gone wrong". This banner will emphasize the urgent need for a radically new, worldwide approach to our problems. It will be displayed alongside Hard Rain and will present solutions from around the world that need to be urgently scaled up.". A copy of Hard Rain is being sent to every prime minister and president in the world with a request that they outline their policies regarding the problems illustrated in Hard Rain, and asking that they suggest existing “living solutions” from their country that could be adopted more widely.

For more information about the exhibition, how to contact the team if your garden or site would like to host it and details of the itinerary, see the Hard Rain website. To order the book, use the BGCI bookstore

Big Draw

The weather last Saturday was glorious, which was terrific because I spent the day at Kew with family and friends participating in the Big Draw. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this event, it’s a national campaign that aims to get everybody drawing, whether you're three or 93! This year it’s taking place during the month of October with events all over the country. Like many venues, Kew held their Big Draw event on 13 October. If you’re in the UK and want to participate, check out the website for an event near you.

The Big Draw event at Kew tied in superbly with the Henry Moore exhibition they’re currently running. Twenty eight amazing sculptures are sited within Kew’s extraordinary landscape. The day was inspiring, and with so many workshops to choose from it was impossible to go to all of them. As it happened we only managed to get to three! The children really enjoyed the workshop entitled ‘From Nature to Sculpture’. They spent almost an hour looking down the lens of a microscope at tiny seeds and drawing the details on sheets of paper. They then took their recordings outside and made larger pictures using charcoal and these were displayed on a long fence in front of the Orangery, where people were taking lunch and drinking cups of teas and coffee. Incidentally, there was a notable abundance of ladybirds flying around and settling all over the Orangery. There must have been hundreds! It was a spectacular site. I’ve spent time googling about ladybirds but can’t find any answers to why there were so many – if any one’s got an idea, let me know!

Another workshop we participated in, and that was good fun, was ‘Midnight Garden’. The children got to handle some amazing specimens from the Arum family, draw round them on black paper and then cut them out to make a giant frieze. As expected, they chose the largest specimens and then lost heart cutting them out, leaving the parents with aching hands! Nevertheless, they were proud of their contribution and the visual result was terrific as you can see from the pictures. I don’t know how many people came to Kew that day, but certainly visitor numbers were up. The conclusion has to be - art is a fantastic way to engage people in the natural world!

Plans for the future

As I rushed for my connecting flight in Copenhagen, somehow I knew my luggage wouldn’t make it. Unfortunately, I was right and arrived in Riga at 10.30pm with just my handbag. Thankfully I’d packed my presentation for the next day. I was in Riga at the invitation of the University of Latvia to present about the role of botanic gardens in education and future trends. The University wants to revive its botanic garden and as a first step decided to hold an architectural competition. Five teams of architects from five countries traveled to Riga to participate in a four day workshop. It was a fascinating process.

The first day was the competition brief which involved presentations from a range of stakeholders and two visiting ‘experts’, Leif Schulman, Director of the Helsinki Botanic Garden and me. My job had been made much easier thanks to the input of several colleagues working in botanic gardens who sent me really useful information and images about their education spaces (thanks Michael, Jacky, Jeri, Shawn and Trevor!). During the afternoon we were taken on a tour of Riga city, the largest city in the Baltic States. The city is absolutely beautiful and certainly deserves to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Then on to the botanic garden which is situated on the left hand side of the river Daugava, a short bus ride away from the centre. The 15 hectare botanic garden has enormous potential. Its main collections consist of azaleas, rhododendrons, magnolias, dahlias, roses, apricots and peaches and hardy perennials. The displays of flowers were lovely and clearly the population of Riga enjoys visiting the garden.

That evening I found time to interview Anta (Director) and Signe (Deputy Director) of the garden. You can see the video on BGCI's website.

An open forum was held during the second day of the competition for the architectural teams to ask questions of the stakeholders and visiting ‘experts’. I was amazed at how few questions were asked, but as someone pointed out to me the architects probably didn’t want to give away their ideas! The final few days the teams were busy working on their concepts and designs. Unfortunately I had to leave on the Friday evening, so I’m still waiting to hear about the winning designs.

Reflecting on the process, I thought it was fascinating. However, I came away concerned that the vision of the garden was being left in the hands of the architects rather than being articulated by the staff of the garden. Perhaps this will come later, but I feel that if the garden has a strong conservation mission then this will drive the design. For example, I was very interested to find out that the Faculty of Biology at the University is involved in a European project to protect and manage the coastal habitats in Latvia. During the Soviet era (1940-1991) access to the coastline was restricted and, as a consequence, the natural habitats have been inadvertently protected. Reading through the brochure that’s been produced on the project, there's no mention of ex situ conservation. The Botanic Garden, for example, would be an excellent place to carry out ex situ research on some of the plant species. I think it would be marvellous to re-create a dune ecosystem to raise awareness about the importance of this Latvian ecosystem and run education programmes on how the public can help protect it - especially as increasing numbers of the public will be visiting the coast over the years to come.

Sorting Vegetables - all in a day's work

A year ago we gave up our family car, partly for economic reasons but mainly for environmental reasons. Day-to-day it works out fine, especially as we live in London which has such excellent transport links. Yesterday, however, I went to Bristol (West Britain) for a workshop. The journey, that in a car would normally take one and a half hours, took three and a half hours using public transport. I consoled myself with the fact that I was able to edit most of Roots on the way!

The workshop held at the University of Bristol Botanic Garden was excellent. Three botanic gardens - Innsbruck (Austria), Sofia (Bulgaria) and Kew (UK) - and a museum (Trento, Italy) have been working on an EU project called ‘Plant scientists investigate’. The workshop introduced us to a terrific range of activities that are included on their new website – www.plantscafe.org. Obviously we couldn’t try them all out but we had a good taste of the types of activities that teachers could do with their classes as well as activities that gardens could run with teachers and children. The resources on the plantscafe website are grouped under four themes - Conservation, Art and Plants, Food and Experimenting with Plant Growth. For the purposes of the workshop we focused on the theme of Food, mainly because Kew organised the workshop and this is the theme they developed. The activities we carried out were good fun and involved doing a diamond ranking exercise to debate the importance of plants, becoming detectives to deduce which vegetables matched with which evidence cards (an activity that involved good observation), sorting vegetables into families and carrying out a skit for our colleagues to guess which plant we were acting out. Everyone left the workshop fired up to find out more about the other activities. The website won’t be up and running until November, but I’ve no doubt it will be a fantastic resource for teachers and botanic gardens.

During the workshop we all had a chance to visit the newly relocated University of Bristol Botanic Garden. It’s a compact garden (1.77 hectares) but is well worth a visit. Its collections focus on four themes – Plant Evolution, Plants of the Mediterranean Climate Regions, Useful Plants and Local Flora and Rare Native Plants. They’re still planting up the garden so I’m looking forward to going back and finding out how it’s coming along.

Magnolias in danger

Last Monday, BGCI ran an event, in association with Fauna and Flora International to celebrate the publication of the Magnoliaceae red list, basically containing details of the conservation status of the entire Magnolia family. As happens so often with these reports, the outlook identified seems gloomy - the Red List identifies 131 wild magnolias as being in danger of extinction, from a global total of 245 species.

However, at least now we have this data, we know what Magnolias we have, where they are and can now actually do something about it. Knowledge is power after all, and these data are still lacking for many plant families, now we know the story for Magnolia, the situation is clearer. As Sara O said, "There is a strong chance that these species will become extinct unless we take action now," the problems that they face, destruction of habitat and over-exploitation are not impossible to do something about.

The guest list was impressive - great and good from BGCI's board, professors of botany abounded, Fauna and Flora staff and various journos from the scary media world. Plus we had delicious cocktails - yum.

Oh, and vitally , we got some news coverage - to find out more, check out the reports on
BBC
New Scientist
Inthenews

So, though the news might be bleak, the outcome is positive - hopefully through collaborations and working together like this, botanic gardens can and are getting a better idea of what the situation is for plant conservation status and work with the public and governments to address the threats.

Fore more information about the report, and the downloadable red list, have a look at the BGCI website.

Reasons to blog!

So, why exactly have the 'not so good at technology' education department decided to enter the weird and wonderful world of blogs? Well, from my own point of view, Sarah Dixon (BGCI's invaluable web editor) and I went to a training course by the brilliant Media Trust a couple of weeks ago that opened my eyes to the new communication tool that is 'New Media' - i.e. using blogs, Wikis (as in Wikipedia), Myspace, Podcasts and so on.

The Media Trust is a fab organisation - they are funded by the UK government and their remit is to provide training, expertise and resources to help charities use the media for their own benefit. They run training courses (very reasonably priced and sometimes free!), help locate media experts who will donate their time to work on a charity's particular media project, and will even take news, turn it into a press release and release it to the news feeds journalists use to locate stories. Have a look at their website to find out more.

Anyway, Paul Caplan, one of the tutors on this training day, was telling us about the possibilities of using new media - his point was that it opened the door to a totally different way of working. Rather than websites being places to get information from, a very didactic approach, we can use them to communicate, to create dialogue and conversation with individuals, sharing ideas and experiences in a much more open and democratic way. I'll write up some of the notes he gave us and put them on the website - of course I'll drop a blog in to say where they are. He also has articles available on the ICT Hub about new media and various other IT technologies.

In the meantime, the training session has directly led to this blog. Julia and I are always working on developing new projects and proposals and are always looking for input and ideas from our colleagues and friends - this blog, where anyone can leave a comment and contribute, ill hopefully provide us with a better way of communicating and learning from everyone.

We'll use it to share tidbits we pick up from various places, chat about ideas or suggestions, draw attention to new resources or outputs from BGCI and also to get to know the BGCI education website users a little better. So don't be shy - contribute, comment, get involved, we'd love to hear from you!

Welcome!

Hello. Great you're reading our first blog. We've set up this blog to talk about education, the environment, plants, the universe... oh yes, and botanic gardens.

We've just run a fantastic education congress in Oxford. Just look how many people turned up!