The Beehive Workshops were a suggested intervention to a problem space pitched to the BCII cohort by the Climate Justice Research Centre at UTS. With the rise of climate anxiety and eco-depression affecting individuals’ mental health, the research team developed a Climate Toolkit to counter these mental health issues in an educational way. However, the toolkit itself, which included a student and educator version, existed only as a PDF. Our role was to make the toolkit more effective and impactful for target audiences by providing recommendations of different methods for the researchers to use, focused on the three transdisciplinary (TD) pillars – integration of diverse knowledges, bringing the real world in, and reflexivity.
My team consisted of three other members and we began by looking at what already existed and was effective within the toolkit. We thus identified a gap to intervene in – the accessibility of the toolkit for primary and secondary students. With this problem space in mind, we mapped the various BCII methods that had been most useful to us in the last four years, considering how to transform them in a way that would be easy to understand for younger children.
Our final recommended intervention culminated in this: The Beehive Workshops.
The Beehive Workshops are three adaptable, formative workshops based on the TD pillars, flexible in its implementation for different age groups between Years 4 to 12. Our inspiration came from programs such as Healthy Harold, but with a focus on the emerging perspectives on climate change. While we have interwoven BCII methods into these recommended workshops, we have also incorporated play, experiential learning and a safe space for mental health as the core structural elements for students.
The beehive theme also acts as a visual motif to help engage our younger audience and act as a representation of what the workshops aim to achieve.
Workshop 1: Integrating Diverse Knowledge
The first workshop aims to introduce children to the idea that everyone has a unique understanding and perspective when it comes to climate change, all of which is valid. The workshop includes three activities: a rich picture, word map, and ‘day in the life’ scenarios. The first two visual exercises aim to gauge the students’ current understanding of and emotions towards climate change. The final exercise introduces them to a perspective on climate change they may be unaware of. Finally, homework will involve asking approximately four people in their lives about their feelings on climate change.
Workshop 2: Bringing in the Real World
The second workshop continues to dive deep into the multiple perspectives and experiences surrounding climate change. After discussing homework, they do three activities: the perspective relay, stakeholder mapping, and gap analysis. The perspective relay will ask students to apply different figurative lenses, such as the lenses of a farmer or politician, to see climate change. Stakeholder mapping is an essential method in BCII and enables the students to approach a problem space in a transdisciplinary way. Finally, the gap analysis exercise will require teachers to pick a topic and students to show how well they understand the topic using a traffic light system (green being very confident, etc.). Students will be told to research an eco-warrior for homework.
Workshop 3: Reflexivity
The final workshop will aim to summarise the information from the previous session and present possibilities to deal with the problem of climate change. Students will present their research on various eco-warriors before jumping into activities: Crazy 8’s, rich pictures, and pathways. Crazy 8’s requires students to come up with 8 ideas in 8 minutes to deal with a proposed problem. The key is speed, rather than quality. Next, students will create another rich picture as a class on their understanding of climate change, placed next to the initial rich picture from the first workshop to document the shifts in knowledge. Finally, students will be shown different career pathways that tackle climate change. This workshop can be concluded with a guided meditation.
Mental health check-ins
Following each workshop, teachers will facilitate a mental health check-in with students. This is an essential part of our intervention – while the majority of the workshops introduce students to new knowledge, this final exercise will allow students to debrief and speak about their reactions and emotions.
Other TD methods
- UDP chain: Create a causality chain by asking why and moving up the chain, then considering the consequences and moving down the chain.
- ‘What if’: Consider different possibilities and using convergent thinking.
- Fishbone diagram: Considers all the different causes and effects within your problem space. The first step is to identify the problem, then work out the major factors involved. Next, you identify possible causes and analyse your diagram.
- Closed world principle: Intervention for the problem found using factors that already exist within the problem space rather than the addition of something new.
One step further
We felt that it was also important for this interactive format of the climate toolkit to include Indigenous Australian perspectives. This is not only to demonstrate respect for the land that we live on, but to also look at the sustainability practices and approaches of Indigenous Australians.
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