Nature
The climate emergency is causing distress for young people and affecting their mental health.
Biojoyversity acknowledges the interplay between the wellbeing of humans and our planet. The agency to create more biodiverse learning environments, as well as spending time in those improved spaces, will benefit the wellbeing of students as well as their local environment.
Imagine if this improvement in biodiversity and joyful wellbeing was multiplied across the 30,000 schools in England and beyond.
We can start to make real change across a distributed ecosystem of schools, as testbeds for solutions that could be implemented in wider society.
Primary Inspiration days
These are productive relationship where we work together after inspiration days on projects such as building willow structures and enhancing biodiversity across schools.
We recently welcomed year 5 students from Pilgrim’s Way who spent the morning in our fantastic orchard, pond dipping, bug hunting and filling up amazing bug boxes made in DT and more.
Later, they worked in drama expressing different environments across our Wild Isles through movement and tableau as well as learning songs in the orchard with the music department, coming back together as a whole group at the end of the day to give an inspirational performance in three-part harmony.
Focus days
Similar to our Year 7 Nature Day, we will be running nature activities, musical activities and drama/movement workshops culminating in a biodiversity concert.
This will see more than half the players associated with insects drop down, a third of the bird singers and a quarter of the mammal instrumentalists – the huge loss of rich harmonies will hopefully impact the audience as an experience of the meaning of biodiversity loss.
They come back together in a rousing song and reinforce their potential for increasing biodiversity and making a difference.
Voice
Our urgent global challenge requires a multidisciplinary call to action which needs a new type of collaborative space for people to come together, putting the next generation and their voice at the heart of what we do.
Innovation
We are embedding innovative critical thinking for youth around modelling future systems. Our year 12 students take part in genuine research projects working with academic support from the Universities.
Community
We collaborate across Kent with environment, biodiversity and climate groups as well as with the Canterbury Festival, local companies, language and culture partnerships creating opportunities for young people and communities.