Welcome back! I hope you have all
enjoyed your summer break and are looking forward to a new term! As our blog
wasn’t running during the holidays I thought it would be good to spend this
entry catching up and looking in to a couple of summer highlights before we
launch in to a new term! Over the summer we have been busy bees with a number
of different things going on from running workshops and conference talks to
working on making progress with our research.
In July we were lucky enough to
be invited to help coordinate a couple of workshops with Crispin School as a
part of their enrichment week, giving us our first opportunity to engage
directly in the classroom with around 40 year 10 students over two days. Our
workshops focused on examining the issue of deforestation whilst placing
emphasis on the human dimension of deforestation by including activities
directed at exploring the possible social, business and economic aspects of forest
destruction.
Through a clever role play game called ‘Timber!’ developed by
Graham Pike of the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada, the kids were
encouraged to adopt the role of a variety of different stakeholders commonly
represented in complex environmental discussions. The game enabled the students to work on better
understanding the difficulties of comprehending the complicated interactions at
play when attempting to manage the eclectic interests of different groups
wanting to use the forest, by promoting that deforestation is not only an
ecological issue but is also strongly influenced by factors spanning the
political, cultural and socio-economic realms. Furthermore, the activity ignited great debate
around wider topics of globalisation and sustainability. The success of the
workshops was then finished off with a great evening community event hosted at
the Red Brick Building in Glastonbury where we were able to share our message
with an engaging international audience.
The response to the workshops was
phenomenal and we would like to thank the students of Crispin School for their great
efforts in participating in the activities. It was a lot of fun! We would
particularly like to thank David Wrathall for his leadership and role in the
development of the workshop, and Fran Thomson for her tireless support in
putting together the community event in the evening.
We are really looking forward to the next couple of
months where we will be continuing to develop the research aspects of the
project as well as beginning to work on planning our film!
If you’re interested in using the
Timber! game in one of your classes, just follow the link below:
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