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Video transcript: Tools to enhance understanding of climate change and sustainability

Climate change is a major concern to young people and our education strategy supports these aspirations. At the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research, or BIFoR, we are continually developing a range of tools to widen participation and highlight climate change research in our teaching and learning in schools and  University. There are a number of opportunities for learning outside the classroom by visiting the FACE (free air carbon enrichment)  experiment and our state-of-the-art glass houses and laboratories on campus.

To overcome the logistical and distance limitations of visiting the FACE site we have partnered with Digital Education to develop a range of virtual tours and field trips. These range from the FACE site itself, mangroves in Dubai and a tour of the Wyre forest in the context of the writer Ruskin. We also use virtual tours of glaciers in Norway to enable students to experience data collection in the Alpine environment. Our students have created virtual resources addressing pollination and climate change, which have been used in first year UG teaching. Students can also participate directly in the research through volunteering,  collecting data ranging from animal traps,  leaf damage and soil analysis.

A rapidly developing climate change agenda and the inherent plant blindness of students and teachers stimulated us to develop BIFoR in a Box to enable schools and community groups to create their own forest laboratories and we have profiles and mini lectures by our PhD students to highlight careers.

This diverse set of open resources aims to facilitate greater numbers of students at all levels to find solutions to the existential threat of climate change.

 In this week’s MicroCPD, Professor Jeremy Pritchard discusses the approaches used by the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), to widen participation and highlight climate change research in teaching and learning. 

At BIFoR we are passionate about translating research outputs into enriching resources for school pupils (KS2-KS5), university students and special interest groups. To do this, teams of  academics, technical staff,  undergraduate and post graduate students have developed innovative tools that are rooted in outreach. These allow us to widen participation with our research institute, the aim of which is to provide fundamental science, social science and cultural research of direct relevance to forested landscapes anywhere in the world. These  tools can be applied more generally to support translation and outreach efforts:

  1. Providing enriching opportunities to learn outside the classroom:  we run regular visits to the BIFoR Free Air Carbon Enrichment (FACE) facility for school pupils, university students and special interest groups. These trips typically comprise of a tour of the site and field work. We also run trips to the UoB campus, with support from the Universities Outreach and Recruitment School Activity Network. In addition, we support visits to secondary and primary schools themselves, that are co-delivered with teachers.
  2.  Overcoming access barriers, widening participation and providing immersive learning experiences that reflect the breadth and depth of research at the institute: with support from Digital Education, we have developed immersive tours of a number of our research sites, including BIFoR FACE, the Wyre forest and Mangroves in the UAE. These use the tool Thinglink and are made available via a public canvas page. The  pages are a free resource hub for educators, with additional lesson resources that anyone can download and use directly in their classrooms or community settings. We are keen to ensure everybody has access to one of the worlds largest climate change experiments and so we partner with organisations such as ‘STEM Learning’ who also list BIFoR education and outreach resources on their learning pages.
  3.  Encouraging meaningful collaboration between researchers and school pupils using citizen science: we have developed a free STEM kit for school pupils and community groups called ‘BIFoR in a Box’. Using materials from the kit, pupils can install a tree growth band (or dendrometer band). This links directly to the research occurring a BIFoR FACE and enables teachers to carry out field work on their school site. Monthly readings are submitted, before being made available on an interactive data dashboard. This is freely available, meaning schools can join a growing community of citizen scientists, monitoring tree growth, biomass accumulation and carbon storage, over time.
  4.  Enhancing science capital and raising career aspirations: we encourage everyone working at the institute to create a career profile. This supports teachers in meeting the Gatsby Benchmarks of Good Career Guidance, as they can explore careers linked to a specific topic area or download the full set of career profiles to display in their classrooms. To widen participation in our annual meetings, we also encourage PhD students to create ‘mini lectures’. These are made available alongside career profiles and provide valuable transition resources as pupils move from KS4 to KS5 or KS5 to University. A placement student developed these further as part of a third-year environmental science module, by creating worksheets and handouts to encourage more active engagement with the videos.
  5.  Supporting subject knowledge enhancement (SKE) of teachers and embedding research outputs into the curriculum: we partner with the School of Education, local secondary schools and external organisations to co-design and co-deliver CPD for teachers. These have been delivered both in person and online in the UK and abroad, extending our impact further.

 Underpinning all of our outreach efforts is a dynamic network of BIFoR volunteers. This network is made up of undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the University. We empower our volunteers to become Forest STEM ambassadors and support with the delivery of the five outreach initiatives outlined above. We also take part in University led internship schemes and placement opportunities. This helps us to develop a cohort of students that are skilled in science communication and outreach and enables us to continue our widening participation efforts into the future. 

Supporting Information:
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