Teacher's guide for Sustainability Through Your Own Lens competition
The Sustainability Through Your Own Lens Photography Competition is a great opportunity to explore climate change and adaptation with your class or student action teams of any year level, and the perfect end-of-term 3 activity!
This activity is optional, but some schools have even made it a whole-school event to prepare students to enter the competition.
Lesson plan overview: Building a Climate-Ready Future
Objective: Understand climate change risks and vulnerabilities and the ways we can we adapt and build a climate-ready future.
Workflow of classroom activity and time commitment:
- Analyse images from the slide deck (45 minutes).
- Explore students’ final reflections (20 minutes).
- Prepare to enter the competition (20 minutes).
Optional: Reading ‘Building a Climate-Ready future’ text for context on the topic (10 minutes).
Download the classroom resources pack on HIVO, which includes:
- lesson plan and table
- curriculum links
- ‘Building a Climate-Ready Future’ text
- slide deck with images.
Step 1: Analyse images from the slide deck
Use the slide deck template included in the classroom resources pack to help students record their reflections and responses to the images.
Step 2. Explore students’ reflections about the concept of building a climate-ready future
Explore students’ reflections on the images using the information recorded in the table. Discuss their responses and encourage further reflection using the following prompts:
- How might the slide deck images relate to building a climate-ready future?
- Who benefits from building a climate-ready future?
- Why is building a climate-ready future important?
- What does building a climate-ready future mean to you?
- Investigate how your local area/school/home backyard is becoming climate-ready and use this inspiration to enter the photography competition.
Step 3. Prepare students for the competition
Ask your students to consider the following when planning to enter into the competition.
Planning the photo:
- What things are happening around us that tell a story about building a climate-ready future?
- What would we want to capture in a photo to tell this story?
- Would we want to capture a positive or a negative story? Explain.
- At what time and where should we take the photo? And why?
After the photo’s been taken reflect on the image:
- What is your photo about?
- How is the photo related to building a climate-ready future?
- Why did you choose this photo?
- Who or what is featured in this photo?
- What things are happening outside the photo frame?
- What does the image miss?
After the reflection
Ask your students to answer the competition prompt in a maximum of 100 words: What does building a climate-ready future mean to you?