Storymoja Nairobi

Sitting here in a cool Nairobi morning, preparing for this weekend's Storymoja Hay Fesitval, one of the Hay Festival's eight international literary festivals. In the gaps, I'm heading out to Lake Nakuru National Park and Lake Naivasha with journalist Anita Sethi before visiting the slums in Kibera tomorrow.

Of the organisations that I've met so far, one of the most inspiring is 826National, a US not for profit working on literacy in schools that helps children publish their own books.

More on this later...animals to see first.

Why 10:10:10

Bill McKibben explains is clear to David Letterman

Welsh Assembly's view on delivering ESDGC

The ESDGC action plan was completed in December and the new draft was put together by the 25 or so people on the ESDGC panel; the plan's not prescriptive and wants to give individual institutions opportunity to develop their own.

Strategic context includes WAG's One Wales Agenda and the driver behind One Wales One Planet. Strengths - demand for learners, recognised as good practice, evidence of delivery, stakeholder commitment. Tina Hawkins is working with the team in the Dept fo Environment Sust and Health to develop the idea of a young person's charter - could this link to the idea of the '1 Club' - people who give one percent of their time to community and environmental projects? In ESDGC, there is funding available, but not massive amounts - £150k or so.

Five aims: mainstreaming and embedding it, simplify delivery, integration with other programmes, accessibility to learning, and learner participation. Priorities include evaluation, research to define quality and indicators, web based communication tools and engagement with local authorities.

In further education, there's value in creating a Practitioner Network, and looking at potential training for practitioners, projects, materials and events etc.

There's needs to be training for trainers on how to embed this across different areas - we have literacy experts and therefore need an agreed level of expertise on how to create common standards  and a common understanding of what good looks like.

Learning from the future

Spending a day working with the champions of sustainability education from 20 colleges across Wales; these are the folks who are embedding real change into the workplace, and this post captures the ideas - heads of environmental education, business and many other work areas.

Short presentations from Pembrokeshire College and Yale College underpinned the impoetance of good monitoring and reporting of what happens so that the people taking action know what's happening. Yale created a 'green handprint' to stamp on projects where good practice is happening - they've developed a Moodle site with resources and embedded ESDGC into environmental management - using real information from building management systems etc as part of day to day work. The harder stuff, they're finding are topics such as resolving the loss of money from selling Coke to the reduction in plastic waste and dietary opportunities that would develop as a result. "We're also crossing the learning-teaching issue and are going to be working on paper next - realising it's a systems approach that's needed". Learning projects are what gets the students involved.

Gobal exchange programmes have developed using the College's international offices, so that students are now starting to run projects for themselves - one of the best indications that things are starting to work.

climate change is difficult because it's not in our nature to do favours for people who are not born yet.

Understanding relevance and complexity are two of the most important areas - one exercise asked students to cut out articles on climate, wealth SD and other issues and stick onto a flip chart and make the links between the articles on the flip charts with string to see where the connections lie. To understand Fair Trade, give away chocolate according the rules of the 'chocolate game' - the supermarkets get 10 squares, the farmers get one etc.

Eco footprinting exercises are working well - CAT's 'Where's the Impact?" is one good way of communicating this - understanding where the ingredients of my Kinder Egg comes from - plastic - cocoa - milk - sugar - aluminium - and then work out the connections between those products and personal action and choices.

The times they are a changin'

Sell2Wales is the Welsh Government's procurement portal. The features on it are usually what you'd expect, written in pretty standard language; this one caught my eye, and shows that someone in Newport is thinking of the bigger picture, and should be recognised for it:

"Newport City Council (hereinafter referred to as "the Council") invites tenders for the removal and relocation of equipment from the existing Bettws High School to the newly built Newport High School, on the same site and to provide Ethical clearance of all surplus equipment"