Opening Workshop 2014

Day 1

Learning Pathways through Changing Places: 

Exploring the Global

Linking communities from the wetlands of the Norfolk Broads and the Cambridgeshire Fens with Alaska, Mexico and Mongolia

This four part event brought together researchers and practitioners from around the globe to talk about alternative approaches to learning in times of environmental change. Each presentation was locally situated and embedded in place (in Mongolia, Alaska, Mexico and Cambridgeshire), and illustrated how environmental issues that have local significance can be relevant to and reflected in distant places.

Day 2

Workshop

The purpose of the second part of the ‘Learning Pathways through Changing Places’ conference was to ensure that the schools we are working with in the Pathways Project were given the opportunity to hear about the different elements of the project and get an understanding of the part their school might play in it. The conference was also designed to provide an opportunity for open and candid discussions between academics and practitioners about the research questions we intend to investigate and the scholarly contribution that the project might make. 

The day includes: presentations by children from the schools where the pilot work took place (referred to as the HEIF schools); presentations from our partners in Mongolia and a curriculum expert from Alaska, and presentations from civil society groups (the Broads Authority, the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership and the Prickwillow Museum) who are willing to facilitate the delivery of the teaching programme in schools. The workshop ended with a performance of an extract of a thought-provoking and highly reflexive play about environmental change in Norfolk by the playwright, Steve Waters.