Abstract:
This 60-minute workshop explores our 13.8BY universe history within a primary education framework where students' learning provides fresh insights into our interconnected universe. Allowing students to examine our past, present, and to imagine our future, requires educators to access a scholarly, interdisciplinary and constantly updated pedagogical tool. Therefore a ‘Big History’ student-focused learning framework was chosen for this research as it empowers young learners to ask the big questions about our universe, our planet, life, and humanity and helps them make sense of the climate crisis as they engage in transformative sustainable thinking. The significance of this workshop incorporates findings from a longitudinal research study through current and past students' active participation. Current Year 5 students and Year 11 students from the original 2016/2018 research, alongside their teacher and teacher-researcher, will present evidence of child-centred, qualitative research that demonstrates a cohesive, wider worldview of an emerging universe story for young learners, empowering them to find their own voices to promote sustainability. The theory framework incorporates students’ environmental values, transdisciplinary learning and curriculum theory within child-framed socioecological learning. The workshop structure will allow students to interact with participants as they confidently articulate their learning into a wider-worldview understanding of an interconnected unfolding universe, and question what science and history can tell us about our place in the universe, alongside possible implications for future learning. The session format will interweave explanations from the research on the importance of child as co-researcher towards their learning of the universe story. Students will then engage participants in activities incorporating storybook readings, creating a visual timeline of our known universe’s history, and recreating relevant experiments to open up the discussion to link environmental education thinking and sustainability for the past, present and future. Participants will be encouraged to discuss any new perspectives they may have gained during the workshop, and possible insights for future primary education. A feature of this workshop includes students reflecting with participants on what an interrelated knotting of 13.8 billion year past/present/future means to their own understanding of sustainable futures and the climate crisis. Primary-aged students deserve to know the unfolding and unfragmented story of our universe as a reference for their future learning. As students navigate towards a more sustainable and just future thinking, may their fragmented learning catch cry fall silent - ‘Why hasn’t anyone told us this before?’