CONTRIBUTORS
Waves of change: building resilience for the future
Comment by FELICIA JACKSON, Chair of the Learn2Think Foundation
One of the important ways that we can address climate change is through building resilience into our systems and processes. We need to build capacity into society to anticipate shocks, absorb stresses and crises and reshape the way that we develop in order to live more harmoniously within natural and social boundaries. While we’ve recognised this at a social and economic level, we’ll still a very long way behind that in how we teach our children. At some point we’ll all have been told
that children are more resilient than we’d give them credit for. Consider the old trope that by mere virtue of their youth, children are inherently capable of bouncing back from trauma like bullying, divorce and bereavement. Why is the focus now on a perceived lack of resilience amongst young
people against a background of the climate emergency, Covid and the all- pervasive atmosphere of social media? Is this down to a shift in our collective psyche or is it the landscape around us that has changed? What has probably changed is how we view resilience itself. After
decades of study on the effects of stress, the scientific community is now hyper-focused on resilience and there are many working definitions - is resilience a trait, a process or an outcome? Dr Selda Koydemir offers this interpretation: resilience is ‘the ability to navigate successfully through, and recover from, stressful circumstances or crisis situations and to do so in a way that leads to healthy functioning over time.’ An individual who might adapt to stressors in their school life/workplace,
however, may fail to adapt well in their personal life or relationships. The question is, how to equip children with the knowledge and skills they need to brace themselves and thrive across all domains? And how can we go about this seamlessly within our existing curricula? One of the first things children need to know, is that being resilient is
not about ‘bending, not breaking’. They must be comfortable with the idea that feeling overwhelmed by any adversity- whether it’s bullying, illness, exam pressure, or eco-anxiety- is OK. It’s OK to not be OK. And being resilient mustn’t be confused with ‘positive thinking’. Being able to regulate your emotions is not the same as being resilient. By acknowledging, naming and accepting their emotional states- anger,
anxiety, helplessness, overwhelm, depression - children are empowered to reach out for help, to focus on what they can control and crucially, to separate themselves from their thoughts. It’s been exciting exploring the work of Penny Spikins at the University of York, who is working on the theory that the reason that homo sapiens came to dominate humanity was their emotional nature and need to connect with others. But her work does bring up the idea that while such connections strengthen the community’s ability to adapt, it can make individuals more vulnerable to anxiety and depression. What schools need to ensure is that children are encouraged to have
agency, a sense of hope and control over some of the choices in their lives. This will help them reframe difficulties as challenges and obstacles as opportunities for purposeful growth, so they are better able to recognize and tap into their personal strengths in the long term. At Learn2Think we’d like to see all children equipped with the
knowledge and ability to successfully adapt to ever-changing dynamics, across all areas of life. This is not a skill that needs a lesson, but a practice that should lie at the heart of educational development.
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www.education-today.co.uk Cultural education in STEM
In her regular column this month, STEMtastic! founder KIRSTY BERTENSHAW discusses how cultural education can be woven into STEM lessons to help deepen learning.
Cultural education can enrich students learning, develop passions and introduce them to knowledge and experiences they might not have has before. A few ways we can include cultural education and entwine it with the STEM subjects or use it as a bridge to further understanding are given below. Art: art can have a huge link to science. Ancient
humans used cave art to represent the world around them using pigments made from natural materials. This can link to the idea of solvents and solutes in paints with the solvents evaporating leaving behind solutes on the cave wall/canvas. Natural dyes can be extracted from plants and the chemistry behind them explored, including changing the pH to change the colour of the dye e.g., red cabbage juice. Even the history of making pigments can be interesting, including transition metals salts forming blues and even ‘mummy brown’, a pigment originally made from ground up Egyptian mummies! There is an astronomical focus to some famous paintings such as Van
Gough’s The Starry Night, or Verschuier’s The Great Comet of 1680 Over Rotterdam, or Church’s The Meteor of 1860. Astronomy has always been an obsession with humans, although we haven’t always understood what we observe. This could be a cultural introduction to a space topic, exploring the past, present and future understanding of our universe from the beginning, believing the solar system was heliocentric, up to the possibility of the end of the universe. Visiting museums: museums such as the Science Museum, Natural
History Museum, The National Space Centre, or Think Tank give the ‘wow’ factor from seeing artifacts in real life, such as actual space suits or real fossils of creatures long extinct. This might foster an excitement or enthusiasm for a subject that students didn’t have before. More than just a visit and a day out, activities can focus on points on interest. For example, the Dodo models in the Natural history Museum in London are probably incorrect anatomically. Newer research on the shape of the skeleton suggests they weren’t as short as pictured in sketches and displayed at the museum. This can be a starting point for considering the value of scientific evidence. When is evidence considered valid? Can a sketch be trusted over the actual skeletal remains of a creature? This can also include the misrepresentation colours of skin of dinosaurs. The show “Walking with Dinosaurs” represented dinosaurs with certain colours of skin, without much evidence. Now we believe many dinosaurs to have been feathered. Students can explore questions such as “Where does this evidence come from?” “How did it change our opinions?” Engineering: engineering is often underrepresented in schools. The
Anderton boat lift uses the relationship between density mass and volume to fill tanks with water and ultimately lift boats, connecting rivers and canals forming motorways of the past. Seeing this in action in full scale can foster an interest in engineering and understanding of how STEM subjects relate to each other in the real world. The Romans: when teaching about materials, properties, composite
materials and concrete, a thought should be spared for the Romans. Roman concrete changed architecture in Britain during the Roman empire, although much of the knowledge and ability to access materials was lost once the Roman empire fell. Underfloor heating, aqueducts and drains used technology to present water leakage while delivering large amounts of fresh water to populations. Even Roman armour was a new technology, using segmented pieces of metal joined together with leather straps, allowing it to be strong but also compact when carrying around - unlike later suits of armour!
Further reading:
https://www.darksky.org/7-pieces-of-art-inspired-by-the-night-sky/ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/ingenious/roman-ingenuity/ https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/260726/Cultural_Education_report.pdf Kirsty is the founder of STEMtastic, an education consultancy with a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths
www.stemtastic.co.uk
December 2021
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