Category: Sustainability in research

A new book for Earth Day: Taking A Close Look at Microfibres

Author Education and Childhood Research Group | Posted on

Earth Day (22 April 2026) saw the launch of a new children’s book, Taking a Close Look at Microfibres. Co-created by school pupils and researchers from UWE Bristol’s Science Communication Unit (SCU) and Education and Childhood Research Group (ECRG), the book supports children and teachers to explore an often invisible aspect of air quality: airborne microfibres.

The book is part of the Schools Under the Microscope project, a child-led citizen science project that invites pupils aged 9–14 to take part in real environmental research. Through hands-on investigation, creative inquiry, and collaboration with university researchers, children from England and Wales helped generate new knowledge while shaping an engaging educational resource for use in schools.

Exploring what’s in the air we breathe

While microfibres are increasingly well documented in water systems, far less is known about fibres in the air we breathe – particularly in school environments. The Schools Under the Microscope project set out to explore whether established citizen science methods, previously used in homes, could work meaningfully in classrooms.

Following an initial pilot with 90 pupils at May Park Primary School, Bristol the project expanded to include around 400 children across four schools. Together, pupils designed investigations, made predictions, prepared petri dishes, and positioned them around their schools for a two‑week sampling period. After collection, pupils used microscopes to count fibres, while researchers at UWE Bristol carried out further analysis and shared findings back with the schools.

This marked the first time data on airborne microfibres has been collected within school environments, offering valuable insights into both indoor air quality and the potential of citizen science in education settings.

Learning through participation and enquiry

The findings showed that microfibre levels in schools were similar to those found in homes, including a mix of natural and synthetic fibres – some even matching the colours of school uniforms. More importantly, pupils and teachers reported high levels of engagement and enjoyment throughout the research process.

The team found that although air pollution is often invisible, it becomes meaningful through hands-on activities.

From research to a children’s book

Children’s questions, observations, and reflections directly shaped the storyline and content of Taking a Close Look at Microfibres. The book is designed to open up discussion rather than provide simple answers, encouraging curiosity, critical thinking, and dialogue about environmental issues that affect everyday life.

Page from the book, Taking A Closer Look at Microfibres.

The illustrations were created by Luci Gorell Barnes, a socially engaged artist and arts-based researcher. Recycled plastics, fabrics, card, and paper were used to make the images – all materials known to shed microfibres. These materials were scanned and transformed into digital collages, visually reinforcing the book’s themes of materiality, pollution, and reuse.

The book is accompanied by free teacher notes and ten lesson plans, supporting cross-curricular learning in science, geography, citizenship, and sustainability education.

Launching on Earth Day – and beyond

The project also connects with wider work at UWE Bristol around sustainability and social justice. The research team is partnering with the Global Goals Centre to support the Better Uniform Campaign, which seeks to develop a more socially and environmentally just system for school uniforms across Bristol.

Access the free book and resources

Schools, teachers, and partners can access a free e‑copy of Taking a Close Look at Microfibres with resources for lessons and learning.

The team

Dr Margarida Sardo, Dr Ben Williams, Dr Verity Jones and Jacqui Warner.

What have you learned from rivers?

Author Education and Childhood Research Group | Posted on

By Emma Thomas, Terra Glowach, Kalpa Ghelani and Dr Verity Jones

Over the coming months, we will host public workshops, school sessions, family river walks, creative encounters, and online opportunities to contribute to our river work – join us!

What have you learned from rivers?

As Channel 4’s Dirty Business casts national attention on the shocking scale of water pollution in the UK, many are asking how we arrived at a point where our rivers are now frequently unsafe to enter, fish from, or even walk beside. The documentary drama makes visible what community activists, swimmers, anglers, and ecologists have long understood: our waterways are in crisis, and the crisis is human‑made.

However, while the national conversation focuses on what we have done to rivers, we – Emma Thomas, Terra Glowach, Kalpa Ghelani and Verity Jones at UWE Bristol – are asking a different kind of question:

“What if rivers are not passive victims of mismanagement but teachers, collaborators, and agents of a shared environmental future?”

This blog launches our forthcoming public engagement work to co‑create a plurifesto- a plural manifesto – for river‑aligned action across schools, families, and communities.

Rivers are speaking – but what are they telling us?

Rivers appear to be signalling distress. Across the UK, the health of rivers has been jeopardised by intersecting pressures: sewage pollution, agricultural runoff, climate‑change‑driven storms, and increasing flood risk. Recent data paints a consistently stark picture:

  • Raw sewage was discharged into England’s rivers and coastal waters for 3.62 million hours last year, according to Environment Agency data. [theguardian.com]
  • 4.7 million hours of sewage were dumped into UK waters in 2024. [sas.org.uk]
  • In some protected areas, pollution has been extreme. Wessex Water discharged raw sewage for 36 consecutive days at Chesil Beach, a site with multiple environmental designations. [theguardian.com]

Projects to improve the ecological health of rivers are underway. For example, in our city, the Bristol Frome Restored Project focuses on improving the ecological health of the river through farm interventions, in‑stream habitat works, and efforts to remove barriers to fish migration. The Frome Gateway Regeneration initiative treats the River Frome as a key environmental and spatial asset within a wider urban transformation aimed at providing new homes, workspaces, and improved public and green spaces shaped through community consultation.

These projects aim for compliance with frameworks, strategic coherence and alignment with planning and policy outcomes. Having watched Dirty Business, it is clear we need more than box ticking against success criteria. We need to value plural knowledge, coexisting truths and embrace ambiguity, sensory experiences and relational ethics. We need to harness opportunities for rivers to teach all of our communities about resilience and regeneration. 

A different kind of response: Learning with rivers, not just about them

While monitoring data, modelling, and policy reviewns give us vital information about rivers and contribute to neighbourhood renewal – whether related to contamination, flooding or drought –  they cannot answer some important questions on their own:

  • How do we live with rivers in ways that honour their agency?
  • How do we teach the next generation a river‑attuned ethics?
  • How do we understand what rivers themselves “say” through flow, shape, silt, flood, drought, smell, and sound?

Our project begins by placing agency with the river- not as metaphor, but as a methodological and ethical commitment.

Inspired by new materialist, ecological, and pluriversal frameworks, we recognise rivers as more than resources, landscapes, or leisure sites. They are alive with histories, stories, sediments, currents, and relationships – and these can help us re‑imagine more just environmental futures.

Introducing our plurifesto for river‑led action

Over the next year, out team will work with:

  • Families
  • Primary and secondary schools
  • Youth groups
  • Community networks
  • Anyone who has ever walked beside, paddled in, or worried about a river

Together, through creative, embodied, and relational methods, we’ll collect responses to a shared provocation:

What have you learned from rivers?

From these stories, drawings, encounters, sounds, and reflections, we will co‑create a plurifesto – a collective document that does not aim for consensus, but for multiplicity. A plurifesto that:

  • holds children’s river truths alongside adults’
  • honours scientific knowledge alongside sensory, cultural, and ancestral knowledges
  • includes what rivers tell us through flood, pollution, rest, and resurgence
  • supports actions at policy levels, school levels, and family practices

This plurifesto will be a guiding compass – not a static manifesto but a living, evolving expression of our shared commitments with rivers.

Why act now?

The release of Dirty Business has intensified national outrage about sewage and corporate misconduct. But outrage alone will not reshape relationships with rivers.

We want to help transform this moment of anger into a moment of attunement, collaboration, and community‑based river justice.

Rivers are not only victims of industrial malpractice. They are teachers in the climate crisis, showing us:

  • how environments respond to pressure
  • how ecosystems hold memory
  • how water connects communities, species, and generations
  • how resilience emerges from movement, not stasis

If we are willing to listen, rivers may guide us toward new forms of ecological responsibility.

Join us

Over the coming months, we will host public workshops, school sessions, family river walks, creative encounters, and online opportunities to contribute to our river work.

If you’d like to take part – or if your school, community group, or organisation would like to host a river‑listening session – please get in touch.

Let’s build a plurifesto that honours what rivers already know, and what they are asking of us now.

When rivers speak – through contamination, through flood, through flow – we must listen. Because the future we’re trying to secure is one in which rivers can thrive – and in thriving, teach us to thrive too.

Thinking about death for the future

Author Education and Childhood Research Group | Posted on

By Dr Verity Jones, Associate Professor in Education

Recently, much of my thinking, particularly in collaboration with Chris Bear (Cardiff University), has led me to think more deeply about death as an ecological, educational and ethical concept that demands a futures lens. In our work on food systems, we ask what it would mean to attend to the deaths of non-human animals and plants –  not as abstractions but as lived relations.

In February, I attended the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, Immersive Public Futures Symposium, where themes of loss, endings, disappearance and possibility threaded through discussions of how societies imagine, design and negotiate futures.

International perspectives on imagining futures

Contributions from international speakers underscored that futures – thinking is rarely a smooth trajectory of progress.

  • Fabio Rubio Scarano (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Museum of Tomorrow) foregrounded planetary change and regeneration through anticipating and paying attention both to memory and tomorrow.
  • Lisa Bailey (Museum of Discovery, University of South Australia) explored how museums can engage diverse publics with complex and uncertain futures.
  • Andrea Bandelli (Woven Foundation for Creative Climate Communication) challenged us to recognise immersion not as a technical medium but as a condition – a relational mode that shapes how we encounter the world and its potential futures and agencies.
  • Mandy Rose (UWE Bristol) discussed documentary and digital cultures as tools for imagining post‑carbon possibilities through planty immersion.
  • Justin McGuirk (Design Museum, London) examined design-led approaches to futures and the need to construct possible future buildings to imagine within.
  • Dan Lockton (Norwich University of the Arts) reflected on how lost futures can help people collaboratively reimagine alternative futures.
  • Johannes Stripple (Lund University) used speculative ecology and storying  to unsettle fixed narratives of crisis and change.

Across these contributions, there was an insistence that imagining futures requires attending to what is disappearing, threatened or already lost.

Connections

The symposium strongly resonated with work with my own research. Whether supporting young women in imagining near-future careers in construction and engineering, examining ecological timescales in food ethics, or analysing how children’s literature either narrows or expands temporal imagination, much of my work is centrally concerned with how learners inhabit and negotiate time.

This sits alongside collaborations with colleagues at the Global Goals Centre and SPARKS Bristol, where we co-create learning experiences that are research‑informed, inclusive, socially engaged and committed to widening imaginative possibility.

Looking ahead

The symposium has sharpened my thinking on how endings and futures coexist – and how education must hold both. Several publications drawing on this work, including research on identity making, children’s literature and sustainable education, are currently in preparation and will be shared later this year.

Building capacity, community, and climate literacy – reflections from the CCPERN January meeting

Author Education and Childhood Research Group | Posted on

By Dr Verity Jones, Associate Professor in Education

The Climate Change Primary Education and Research Network (CCPERN) began 2026 with an energising and thought‑provoking meeting that reaffirmed why this community matters so deeply. Bringing together teachers, researchers, practitioners, and organisations committed to sustainability education, CCPERN continues to offer a vital space for sharing practice, fostering collaboration, and exploring the urgent challenges facing climate and sustainability learning in primary education.

Our January meeting welcomed two speakers whose work, though distinct in focus, revealed powerful synergies: Kate Colechin, from UWE Bristol’s careers and widening access team, and Mark Whittaker, headteacher at a North Yorkshire primary school. Together, they helped us consider not only what children need to learn about climate change, but how education systems can better prepare young people for a rapidly changing world.

Green careers and early aspirations

Kate Colechin opened the session by offering insights from her work training careers practitioners and supporting young people in schools. Speaking from both a higher‑education and school‑engagement perspective, she highlighted how central sustainability has become to contemporary careers work.

Kate shared that, within UWE Bristol’s postgraduate careers guidance programme, sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are embedded across modules, shaping how future advisors support both young and old to think critically about the environmental impacts of work, and to recognise that “every job is a green job”. Her reflections on working with school pupils were particularly resonant: young people, she noted, are increasingly worried about AI, future employment, and the state of the planet – and they respond powerfully to opportunities that spark curiosity and broaden their sense of what is possible.

A key takeaway was the importance of early career‑related learning in primary school, especially as research shows that children’s assumptions about jobs often solidify between the ages of 7 and 17. Challenging stereotypes, expanding horizons, and linking learning to real‑world sustainability issues can shape dispositions that stay with children throughout their lives.

Whole‑school climate education and the power of place

From a practitioner’s standpoint, Mark Whittaker shared the work underway across Northern Star Academies Trust to embed sustainability in curriculum, culture, and community. His school’s context added important nuance to discussions about equity, engagement, and what climate education looks like in practice.

Mark described how participation in the CAPE (Climate Adaptation Pathways in Education) programme had been transformative for both him and his staff, helping them articulate the “why” of climate education and recognise the need to thread sustainability throughout the curriculum rather than bolt it on. His examples of outdoor learning, river‑themed curriculum design, and farm twinning illustrated how powerful experiential learning can be for building ecological awareness and student wellbeing.

He also emphasised the challenges: staff confidence, parental perceptions, and political sensitivities around climate issues. Yet his school’s work shows how partnerships – with RHS, the National Education Nature Park, and particularly Jamie’s Farm – can offer life‑changing experiences for children who may have limited access to green spaces.

Shared threads and looking ahead

Across both presentations, a clear message emerged: climate education is not a single subject, but a holistic endeavour. Whether helping young people imagine future green careers or enabling primary pupils to build connections with their local environments, the work must begin early, be embedded meaningfully, and involve whole communities.

CCPERN remains committed to cultivating these conversations, sharing practice, and supporting educators and researchers navigating this shifting landscape. We look forward to continuing this momentum at our next meeting on 25 March 2026, when we will explore international data on environmental education with Professor Jennie Golding from UCL and hear from Green Schools about their work across England.

Interested in joining CCPERN? Please get in touch with Verity Jones (verity6.jones@uwe.ac.uk).

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