Conversations at a Time of Emergency

ESRC Festival of Social Sciences

Background

‘Conversations at a Time of Emergency’ is part of the 18 month South West practitioner facing project ‘Education at a Time of Emergency’. Both projects are funded by the ESRC, led by Professor Stewart Barr, and hosted by the University of Exeter’s Geography Department together with Lestari Environmental Education Consultancy.

At a time of climate and ecological emergency, environmental education practitioners are looking to innovate effective approaches and methodologies to encourage engaged citizenship and pro-environmental behaviours. Together these projects provide environmental education practitioners with a platform for engaging with social science through a series of events, peer support and mentoring.

This year’s ESRC FoSS event

An online webinar and a series of podcasts took place to engage experienced practitioners and researchers from the field of behavioural change science, with a view to generating a robust theoretical and practical foundation for the new project. The events represent a significant and timely complement to ETE, strengthening networks, diversifying knowledge bases, and ultimately adding impact to the new project at the University of Exeter. It combined a variety of perspectives to consider the role of environmental education and how to best support the sector.

The following thematic areas were explored: 1. Nature Connection – current challenges and opportunities; stories from the field. 2. Communication – learn from the social sciences to become better equipped for the current emergencies. 3. Foundations for change – bridging social science theory and applied best practice for effective responses.

The Conversations at a Time of Emergency webpage can be found by clicking here

Event one: Live webinar panel discussion

Webinar Speakers:

Professor Stewart Barr - University of Exeter (Chair)

Stewart graduated from the University of Exeter’s Geography Department in 1998 and continued his studies at Exeter undertaking a PhD exploring household waste practices. Building on this research, he worked for two years in the Department as a post-doctoral researcher on an ESRC-funded project entitled ‘Environmental Action in and Around the Home’. He became a Lecturer in Geography in 2003, Senior Lecturer in 2008, Associate Professor in 2012 and is now Professor of Geography. Within the Department Stewart undertakes research in the Environment and Sustainability and Spatial Responsibilities Research Groups and he teaches modules at all levels of undergraduate study.

Tom Crompton - Common Cause Foundation

I come from a natural science background but am compelled by the realisation that we cannot expect proportional or lasting responses to today’s profound social and environment challenges to emerge unless these responses are rooted in an understanding of people. By that I don’t just mean savvy communications approaches or an understanding of cognitive biases – important as those things might be. I mean something more fundamental: what matters to us, and what shapes what matters to us.

I have worked on values and social change for fifteen years, employed by or collaborating with diverse charities – including NSPCC, Oxfam, Scope and WWF. I have advised the UK, Scottish and Welsh governments on cultural values, and have collaborated and published with some of the world’s foremost academics working in this area. I’ve also written extensively in this field for both peer-reviewed and popular journals, and wrote the reports Weathercocks and Signposts: The Environment Movement at a Crossroads (WWF, 2007), Common Cause: The Case for Working with Values and Frames (WWF, 2010) and Perceptions Matter: The Common Cause UK Values Survey (CCF, 2016).

Caroline Hickman - University of Bath, Climate Psychology Alliance

Caroline is a psychotherapist & lecturer at the University of Bath & a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) for whom she has created several podcasts on eco-anxiety & psychotherapy, the climate and bio-diversity crisis and why some adults are reacting badly to youth climate strikers. She is currently researching children & young people’s feelings about the climate and biodiversity crisis to uncover and explore different stories, narratives and images around our defences against the ‘difficult truth’ of crises and hidden and ‘less conscious’ feelings about climate anxiety. She is passionate about getting ‘under the surface’ metaphorically and literally.

Robin Webster - Climate Outreach

Robin leads the Advocacy Communications programme for Climate Outreach, focusing on providing civil society campaigners with knowledge, tools and research to help them engage all sorts of people on climate change. She loves working with campaigners for their resilience and positivity even when facing up to the world’s biggest challenge. She has experience in the environmental world as a researcher, journalist and campaigner, first becoming interested in the disconnect between political debate about climate change and how we talk about it in real life whilst working as campaigner for Friends of the Earth. She helped to start up Carbon Brief when it began life as a climate science and energy blog and has spent more time than is healthy digging into the intricacies of climate policy, including as a researcher for the European Climate Foundation. Robin has a Masters in Conservation from UCL and an undergraduate degree in Biology. She is the author of Climate Outreach’s #TalkingClimate handbook amongst many others, and has lived in the UK, USA, Uganda and Austria.

The webinar was attended by over 100 participants and the presentations were followed by an interactive questions and answer session. The speakers were highly engaging and provided a diversity of viewpoints to approach the questions discussed. They covered a wide breadth of fascinating conceptual and practical themes relevant to the aim of understanding the role of environmental education in dealing with the current ecological and climate crises. The success of the event led the London Environmental Educators' forum (LEEF) to schedule a follow-on screening of the event via EventBrite.

Event two: Podcast series

A series of innovative podcasts were hosted to bring together experienced researchers and practitioners to ask: what is next for environmental education? The podcasts built upon the thematic areas discussed during the webinar event and incorporated key emergent discourse relevant to the fields of social science.

Podcast 1: Susan Warren ‘Noticing Nature’

Dr Susan Warren, an Environmental Education Practitioner, with 30 years’ experience working for local and national organisations in the fields of nature conservation, sustainability and community engagement. Connecting people with nature and encouraging empathy and care for the natural world has, and continues to be, a central thread throughout her work. Susan explored how our emotional connection to the natural world might be key to its protection.

Podcast 2: Caroline Hickman ‘Healing Eco-anxiety’ 

Caroline Hickman is an expert in understanding the emotional challenges of children. This podcast explored how to better quip teachers and other educators to allow authentic connection with the full spectrum of crisis emotions.

As a result of the success of these podcasts initiated by the FoSS event, a continuing series of podcast have been created, which will complement the Education at a Time of Emergency project.