Encouraging active citizenship in the fight against socioecological catastrophe

As the climate crisis rapidly progresses, educators are compelled to consider their role in supplying the next generation with the skills to take on the challenges we collectively face.

To avoid instilling a sense of despair and helplessness in the today's youth, Dr Heather King shares in the opening remarks of this year's School of Education, Communication and Society annual lecture, that educators must be open to change, adaptation and innovation. Dr King is the current director of the Centre for Research in Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, who organised this year's lecture.

This year's annual lecture was delivered by Professor Emily Shuckburgh OBE, world-leading climate scientist and science communicator, Director of Cambridge Zero, the University of Cambridge’s ambitious climate change initiative. The event, which took place on 1 July, brought together academics, students, King's staff across various departments, but importantly, human beings with a shared passion for a better future. 

Professor Shuckburgh highlighted the current status of our environmental resources, noting the effects of climate change and where we collectively are in the fight in relation to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. 

Shuckburgh, who is also a mother of two, shared a moving anecdote at the lecture, which further strengthened her ambition to empower the next generation.

Moved by the profundity of her daughter's led Shuckburgh to question how we can help young people to respond to the current state of our relationship with the planet. 

The talk's title, 'Education visions: thriving sustainably on Planet Earth', shares its name with a soon to be published book edited by Professor Shuckburgh, James Biddulph and Harry Pearse. The book collects essays from academic experts across various fields, whose work is associated with sustainability. In putting together this collection, the team recognised a series of underlying themes and used these to inform a practical guide with real-life examples of how educators can respond to these urgent issues. These themes are associated with a series of tangible actions and solutions that educators can use in their work.

Professor Shuckburgh highlighted the following themes:

• Informing and empowering young people
• Active citizenship
• Creativity and resilience
• Transdisciplinary
• Community engagement
• Museums

At the University of Cambridge and as part of Cambridge Zero, Professor Shuckburgh has led on multiple initiatives to integrate climate education and encourage active citizenship in young people. Some of the actions taken by the University and led by Shuckburgh include integrating creative workshops in schools inspired by her Ladybird expert book on climate change, written with the HRH King Charles II, asking children to create artworks of their ideal world. Other initiatives include using climate change as an inspiration for plays and theatre shows and schools being the anchor for community engagement projects such as protecting local landscapes. 

More so, Professor Shuckburgh notes that it is not only climate issues that we must focus on, but a wider mission to bridge ever increasing social inequality and injustice. She warned of the erasure of existing scholarship about climate change that was written by non-Western scholars, such as 'Global Warming in an Unequal World' by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, a chapter published in 1991 and warning of environmental colonialism and the unjust responsibility placed on non-major players in aggravation of climate change.

Professor Shuckburgh spoke on a justified accountability and action, and provided a message of urgency and hope to educators to innovate their pedagogy in order to make a change to our environment and the lives of today's youth.

Watch the lecture back