In this talk the presenters will share the insights from the ‘Our World Our Futures’ project – a small-scale, cross-cultural participatory project which explores what transformative environmental and global citizenship education might look like in primary schools across two contexts, the UK and the Maldives. The aim of the project was:

• to seek an understanding of how cross-cultural dialogue can develop children’s social, emotional and ethical understanding of the world, their empathy and their sense of self as global citizens.
• to explore how teachers navigate a flexible, cross-curricular approach to environmental education and how such a curriculum implementation can promote teacher autonomy in pedagogical development and professional learning.

The presenters will share their ongoing analysis of the findings, share some of the insights gained and challenges experienced and suggest ways in which similar projects could be implemented across different contexts, time zones, and cultures.

Website for Our World, Our Futures

Dr Claire Lee currently works at Oxford Brookes University (OBU) as a Research Fellow for the Children and Young People RIKE (Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange) Network. She will shortly be taking up a new 5-year Research Fellowship in the Centre for Psychological Research at OBU.

Claire was a primary school teacher for many years before completing her PhD at the School of Education, University of Bristol, in 2020. Supervised by Dr Frances Giampapa and Prof. Helen Manchester, her ESRC-funded PhD was an arts-based project investigating the learning lives of children from UK armed forces families.

Claire conducts educational research with and about children and young people. She is interested in the ways in which children actively use literacies, in their broadest sense, to make sense of the world and to develop a sense of self. In her research she creates spaces for dialogue with children, using arts-based and multimodal methods to explore the things that matter to them. She is delighted to be leading the Our World, Our Futures project with her Bristol PhD colleague Dr Aminath Shiyama.

Email: clairelee@brookes.ac.uk

Dr Aminath Shiyama currently works as the Quality Assurance Controller at The Maldives National University (MNU). Prior to that she worked as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education at MNU. Before the completion of her PhD in 2020 from the University of Bristol, she worked as a science education lecturer for pre-service primary teachers, developing and teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses on curriculum development and comparative education, and supervising postgraduate research projects. She has also worked with the National Institute of Education's science curriculum team as a curriculum panellist, providing teacher professional development workshops on science education pedagogies, environmental education, and active learning. She has also developed training modules on Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) and is currently working on a similar project focusing on SRHR from a life-skills perspective. She is also a coordinator and research associate of the research network Educationin Small States Research Group based at University of Bristol. Her current areas of research include teacher professional development, pedagogy development and quality assurance in higher education.

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