Step 3.3: Select ideas and actions

Suggested Subject Area: Environmental Education, Geography and Literacy

Purpose
To provide students with opportunities to:

• Select ideas and actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a changing climate and improve the school’s ecological footprint 
  
• Reflect on their own ideas, values and priorities for their school and to consider practical ways in which they can influence change at school
  
• Identify, evaluate and discuss the environmental, social and economic repercussions of sustainability actions, ideas, campaigns and projects
  
• Draft an action plan
  
• Develop skills in comprehension, questioning, reporting and presenting.
  

Preparation
You will need:

• Access to the Internet
  
• A copy of Resource 1.5 for all students
  

Procedure
Talk with the students about how all ideas and actions, or lack of ideas and action, carry a range of implications. Some can affect places/environment, people/society, economies and policies.

As a class check out Wolfgang Kessling’s ideas as he is building the next World Cup Soccer stadium using sustainable principles. 
See http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/wolfgang_kessling_how_to_air_condition_outdoor_spaces.html (shown below) and discuss how the class might propose the school can create comfortable conditions with passive designs, using only available renewable energy sources like the sun and wind and recovering resources wherever you can at the school.

Ask students to review their earlier thinking...ask them if they have considered:

• Using the sun’s energy to heat and light the school buildings as much as possible
  
• Making sure people are in a healthy environment where they can get enough fresh air
  
• Suggesting a worm farm to reuse green waste and food scraps at the school and create soil and liquid fertilisers to use at the school
  
• Suggesting carbon forest plantings to sequester or absorb carbon dioxide
  
• Ventilation, like louvers to allow heat to escape
  
• Recycling bins for paper, food scraps, glass, batteries, mobile phones and aluminium cans
  
• Establishing food gardens and growing your own food
  
• Recycling paper and using mud to make mud bricks
  
• Recycling wood cut offs and making garden beds
  
• Using natural ventilation to cool classrooms
  
• Using tree plantings and landscaping to shade buildings
  
• Blinds for outside and inside windows
  
• Using skylights to light classrooms
  

Ask students to decide on the sustainability ideas that they propose be considered at the school to create more sustainable conditions and reduce the school’s greenhouse gas emissions; students can place ideas on a page of their learning journal.

Then, draw a compass in the centre of the class’s board or use Resource 1.5  or access compass images from https://www.google.com.au/search?q=compass+rose+worksheet&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=plBzUKa7LMitiAeH4YCYAQ&sqi=2&ved=0CC0QsAQ&biw=1270&bih=544 
or 
http://www.globaleducation.edu.au/verve/_resources/dev-compassrose.pdf

Instead of naming the four compass points north, south, east and west use:

• Natural environment/ ecological questions
  
• Social and cultural questions
  
• Economic questions
  
• Who decides? Who benefits? i.e. political questions 
  

Note: Diagonal points represent relationships between the four main points. For example, NE highlights ideas and questions about how economic considerations might impact on natural environments; SE highlights ideas and questions about economic considerations and people’s lives.

Using this ‘compass’ as a class identify the environmental, social, economic and political factors that influence the ways in which the class’s chosen  sustainability ideas or  designs, technologies or actions might impact or affect the school, its students, budgets and sustainable practices.

Complete this activity for all ideas to really understand all of the implications for proposing their use and implementation at the school.

Alternatively use a flow chart to list a series of events that might happen, sequentially as a result of your sustainability idea or design. Other boxes could be added to show related events. See: http://www.globaleducation.edu.au/verve/_resources/flow_chart.pdf for a template to use.

Follow up
After looking at the implications of the students’ ideas, ask students to prepare an action plan that defines actions that best meet the criteria for improving sustainable and /or adaptation practices while reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the school. 

The plan should convey information about:

• Problem areas identified from the surveys and research undertaken.
  
• Strategies and timeframes.
  
• Who is responsible? 
  
• Resources needed, and
  
• Indicators of success.
  

Ask students to consider a plan with the following headings.

Next - STage 4: Elaborate