Feeling very much like an imposter, I was delighted to join scientists in the fabulous settings of St. Alban’s School to attend 2024’s Cog Sci Sci conference. I was very grateful to the organisers – for putting on an amazing event, with a real teacher-led discussion sense and a great buzz about the room – but also for encouraging and supporting people to come along and share, even if their last science was some decades ago now.

Speaking: Improving the Science of Climate Education

I was honoured to be able to share some ideas with great colleagues on how to update and improve some of the science of climate education. With so much movement in the specifications and content over time, I outlined some ways and resources that we could hope for:

• Better narratives of impacts and relevant
• Better data, through a better understanding of climate history and sources to trust
• Better teaching and exploration of options and solutions

As well as talking about some of the big ideas and images, I was also delighted to be able to live-model some of the tools we can use and get people talking about climate solutions in an evidence informed way.  

I’ve uploaded my slides here (https://drpreece.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/cogscisci-david-preece-improving-the-science-of-climate-science.pptx ) with all of the links and references. Colleagues new to it might want to look back at this blog piece on how I teach using earth.nullschool, or this guide to the IPCC’s AR6 release that gives some further context. I strongly recommend playing with the resources, but also looking at the Royal Meterological Society’s fabulous https://www.metlink.org/ including their brilliant practicals, demos and experiments.

Hugely grateful for all who came along and contributed, and always happy to talk and follow up conversations if I can help!

Learning & Thinking: Some amazing talks

As well as presenting, I was excited to see some fabulous talks around the conference’s theme of “attention”.

Sarah Cottinghatt’s (@scottinghatt) keynote on the neuroscience and pathways of memory was a great starter, and connected brilliantly with Amarbeer Singh Gill (@SinghAmarbeerG) on some of the learning theories of retrieval and practice. In both, I was grateful for amazing discussions and really positive ideas of

I think my favourite talk of the day was Dr Bill Wilkinson’s (@DrWilkinsonSci) fierce advocacy for removing microbarriers – a call to action in learning science and SEN alike, with some really powerful project and analysis work that showed the differences that could really help. Some of the data and facts are a strong reminder that we need to be able to do more – and this is an area of my own teaching that was not as good as it should have been! I left feeling uplifted and hopeful that there were great and effective solutions.

The whole day was a wonderful experience – brilliantly hosted by St. Alban’s, Adam Robbins and the superb CogSciSci team. The atmosphere was incredible for a half-term event, and such a pleasure to meet so many great people and hear such enthusiasm for teaching and learning. Long may it continue – and we’d love to see some of the team come along to the Geographical Association conference in Oxford 2025. Perhaps this collaborative conference thing might catch on!