Primary Education BA
Kevin Fossey teaches on a Primary Education BA and even though time is tight and often he only gets to spend three hours on each subject, he makes a concerted effort to bring the principles of sustainable development into his teaching.
He places significant emphasis on the importance of teachers as role models in the class room and feeds this directly into training for citizenship teaching:
'I think with my citizenship stuff...I'm really looking at us as teachers in the classroom being decent role models, so that we don't waste too much paper, that we have a system for recycling, you know like in the school I used to say no more than two black sacks should go out to the dust man every week from the whole school, and we managed to hit that target'
Kevin doesn't see things in terms of disciplinary boundaries, he encourages holistic perspectives - making links between the subjects and learning to teach in a way that helps pupils see the whole.
Subject content
As far as possible he orientates his teaching of specific subjects so that they tend towards encouraging good citizenship; Through Religious Education pupils can learn to care for people, History provides opportunity to learn from the past where societies didn't waste so much material; geography lends itself to sustainable development issues, for example fair trade and energy usage. In this subject he invites students to explore tough, complex issues such as Kenya flower industry: Supporting this trade in the UK is to support carbon intensive transportation, and yet thousands of jobs in Kenya depend on the flower industry, so neither options seem sustainable.
Kevin also emphasises the importance of choosing locally relevant sustainability issues for children to explore, reminding his students that 'our teaching doesn't have to be standardised...we can adapt our teaching to suit the needs of the children we are working on within our setting '- he gave the example of a trainee teacher who was instructed by her curriculum guide to do a project on litter, and yet her school was incredibly clean and had no litter. In order to stick to the rules she took her class room litter bin and tipped it all outside on the school grounds for the children to go out and collect. However, she couldn't foil them - they recognised their own litter immediately and knew exactly what she had done!