Learning for sustainability as a whole-school mission

Padraig Cawley

My name is Padraig Cawley. I'm principal at Ardscoil na Mara, Tramore in county Waterford. It's a co-ed school with over 1200students. We are on a sustainability journey working towards changing attitudes, training our students to understand the environment and the place that they live in. We are making great strides in that direction but it's a long journey and one that takes lots of commitment and drive from both our staff and our students. We are trying to change attitudes through training, working with our students and also through our staff because we believe that they will make the difference in the years to come.

Patrick Kirwan

My name is Patrick Kirwan. I'm a science and sustainability teacher; I'm also the founding director of the Irish School Sustainability Network or ISSN for short. We are a grassroots movement of teachers and students all across Ireland and we are here to support schools. Teachers in the network trial courses and action projects in their school and they share the resources and what they have learned. In ArdScoil na Mara we are trialling ISSN initiatives to foster a culture of agency and empowerment.

Aoife Denton

One of the first initiatives we took on with the ISSN was the climate and nature summit which really helped us foster conversations across the whole school around difficult topics, like the biodiversity across Ireland, the drivers towards climate breakdown, and climate psychology. Following the summit, staff and students wanted to know what we can do for more meaningful action and we began to play the “five minutes of sustainability” videos. Our students even got to create some of them which was a really great experience.

Patrick Kirwan

All of our third yearers get to participate in the ISSN’s environmental influencer course. This is an 8-week module and it gives students an overview of what's happening with climate and nature and it gives them an understanding of the link between what's happening in the media, how that affects public opinion and how that impacts policies and politics. It also gives them an understanding of how social change happens. Students can then opt to participate and apply for the ISSN’s environmental leadership development programme. And that happens in fourth year – the programme is run by myself and Damien Nicholls, our school's permaculturist.

Evie, student

We run a lot of different practicals in our outdoor classroom, like sewing seeds, making bird boxes, weaving willow, and even herbal tea tasting. And in between these practicals we talk a lot about food security, the housing crisis, and what biodiversity is and why it is important.

Aoife, student

Some of the actions we have taken this year have been contacting our local politicians and reducing our energy consumption. We also ran a ‘plant a planet’ campaign which encourages students to take trees home and plant them in their own garden. This year we planted 658 trees and over the last three years we have planted just over 1'800.

David Leahy

We found that we had an overreliance on plastics to create projects in the school. Now we have moved towards more sustainable materials such as plywood. We encourage our students to think of the three Rs: reduce, reuse and recycle. Reduce the size of the project, recycle some materials in making the project, and reuse parts such as the motor and mechanisms, etc. We hope that students will take this in their own designs going forward and be inspired by this to produce more sustainable designs in the future.

Patrick Kirwan

Education for sustainable development is actually happening in lots of different areas of the school. Our religion teachers Ashlee Hally and Kealan McLoughlin have a very strong peace and justice group. And they are working with WorldWise Global Schools to foster global citizenship values in our school and raise awareness. One of our science teachers, Claire Adamson, has a class once a week with our fourth year students and they work on ECO-UNESCO's Young Environmentalist Award. Ashley Hally has recently been appointed with the responsibility for education for sustainable development. She is mapping out what we are doing in our school all across the different subject areas and creating a sustainability policy for the school which will help us to strategically plan for the future so that we make progress from year to year.

Padraig Cawley

While we are not a sustainable school just yet, we are really working hard towards those goals. We have huge initiatives taking place bringing in teachers from other schools where we train them onsite here in our school at Ardscoil na Mara. This is something that we are really proud of and we know that it is making a real difference as these teachers bring all that knowledge and learning back to their own school and thereby setting the seeds for change within their own school community.