Experts, insects and informality: three key features within a school-linked conservation initiative

Abstract

This article highlights three key features that appeared to add value to young people’s experience of a school-linked environmental education initiative built around conservation activities. The three features – close-up encounters with other species, working with external experts, and a degree of informality – were identified through a combination of participant-observation, and focus groups seeking young people’s own perspectives. This article therefore responds to the need for further studies focusing not (only) on the outcomes of such programmes, but on participants’ lived experience of the processes contributing to them. Taken together, the three features highlight the value of a process of ‘curriculum making’ that included an openness to the communities in which schools are situated, to the material or ‘more-than-human’ world, and to unplanned events that enabled young people to experience a programme in their own ways. This finding brings together conclusions from related studies that separately emphasise the role of these elements in curriculum making processes.

Keywords:

• Conservation
• school grounds
• programme features
• curriculum making
• lived curricula

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those involved with the Polli:Nation project for helping to make this research possible – staff from Learning through Landscapes for facilitating access to schools, teachers for keeping us informed of relevant activities, and young people for providing the valuable insights that form the basis of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the author.

Ethics declaration

This study was granted approval by the Faculty of Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee at the University of Stirling. All participants provided appropriate written and informed consent.

Notes

1 “More-than-human” is a term used in geographical and anthropological research (Whatmore 2002; Tsing 2013), and later in post-human work in the field of environmental education (Taylor 2013; Rautio and Jokinen 2016), that offers an alternative to the notion of an externalised ‘nature’, instead emphasising the inseparability of humans and the material world (Jackson 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was jointly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the University of Stirling.

Notes on contributors

Andy Ruck

Andy Ruck’s PhD research, carried out at the University of Stirling, explored young people’s lived experience of the Polli:Nation project – a UK-wide environmental initiative centred around conservation activities in school grounds. Through this research, he provided ethnographic insight into the ‘curriculum making’ processes that took place through these activities, as well as young people’s own perspectives as to the project’s most significant features. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). Here, he explores farmers’ attitudes towards biodiversity-friendly farming as part of the EU Horizon 2020-funded SHOWCASE project. https://internt.slu.se/en/cv-originals/andy-ruck/.