On Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd June eight students from the Lower and Upper Sixth spent two days with Bill Finnegan, graduate researcher at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, creating digital stories predicting what life will be like in 2050.
Passionate about the social practices of energy in schools and with a particular interest in the routes to achieving net-zero carbon emissions in schools and their surrounding communities, Bill’s workshop offered a combination of education, entertainment and creativity. The students first took part in a preparatory exercise, taking it in turns to read stanzas from ‘The worship of Nature’ by 19th century American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, who was also a Quaker. The verses provided the audio for a combined video collaboratively created by the group, giving each individual a chance to experience the online editing software and practice their technical skills before getting stuck in their Letters from the Future.
The aim was to write a letter from the year 2050 back to yourself in 2021 explaining how climate change had impacted your life over the last 29 years. Students were able to imagine both positive and negative consequences, balancing the quality of simulated stars and December sunshine against loss of human life due to flooding and population explosion or needing to wear a mask all the time.
Oliver Staines, Head of Geography, and workshop organiser, commented: “Students who participated had expressed a strong interest in tackling the climate crisis or in taking the subject of Geography further. The human impact on our planet in the form of global warming is a core element of both the IB and A Level courses and students brought their own knowledge of these factors to the workshop.”
The students participating were pleased to complete their video Letters from the Future and it is interesting to see how imaginative and creative many of their digital stories are. The full playlist can be viewed on YouTube or for a quick preview of the content you may wish to watch Ruth’s video (Upper Sixth).
In discussion with Oliver after the event the students agreed that the benefits had included: technically improving their video editing skills; having the time and space to reflect on and realise the profound importance of the climate crisis, beyond merely having knowledge of it; improving their public speaking and speech writing skill sets; and understanding the importance of positivity in communicating with people about action that is need on the climate crisis if you are to engage them with the topic.
Bill’s research is supervised by members of the Low Carbon Futures team at the Environmental Change Institute and he is developing the digital storytelling workshops in partnership with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. In addition to delivering his digital storytelling workshop to our students he met with Head, Matthew Judd, to understand more about the school’s approach to climate change and education and toured the site, covering the 65 acres of the Park, with an environmentalist’s eye.
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