David Selby presented sessions on the sustainable school, climate change education and futures-oriented education at the 2010 annual conference of the Swiss Group of International Schools (SGIS), Lausanne, Switzerland, 12/13 March 2010. http://www.sgischools.com/index.htm
Descriptions of his three sessions are as follows:
David Selby – Towards the Sustainability School: Curriculum, Campus, Community and Culture
Using ten key ideas, this session will explore a ‘4C’ model for progressing towards the ‘Sustainability School’. David Selby will argue that in achieving a critical mass towards a school sustainability ethic and ethos, an holistic approach is needed that integrates in a dynamic way curriculum development, campus change and community engagement initiatives against a backcloth of a transforming institutional culture.
David Selby – ‘Go, Go, Go, said the Bird’: Education and Runaway Climate Change
After a brief overview of the implications of climate change for life in the twenty-first century, David Selby will look at the phenomenon of climate change denial. That denial, he will argue, is also manifest in much of what is being offered as climate change education in schools and universities, including by those championing education for sustainability. He will offer ten propositions for an education that breaks through denial and addresses the reality of the human condition in a time of global heating.
David Selby – Doing More with Less: The Contribution of Futures Learning
In this workshop David Selby will present learning approaches that ask the student to explore probable, possible and preferred futures as a means of consciousness raising about ‘doing more with less’ in the present. Can we be proactive in influencing the short, mid and long-term future? Can we identify future histories and help make them happen? What degree of agency do we have in shaping the future? How might future visioning help us in present-day decision-making? When we say ‘doing more with less’, what are the characteristics of the ‘more’ we are talking about? How can that ‘more’ play out in the future?