Round Square 'Zoom Postcard' session

By Dean O’Brien, JS Classroom Teacher

On Wednesday night I had the pleasure to represent Radford with six Year 6 students who nominated their interest in participating in the Round Square Zoom postcard session from The British School New Delhi in India on ‘Sustainable living’.

The event brought together around 90 participants from 17 schools in 5 countries (India, Australia, South Africa, Canada and Oman). Our Year 6 students displayed a strong passion towards sustainability practice at Radford and more broadly in Australia and on Earth itself.

The international students were interested in how we approach sustainability at Radford and in Australia. The Zoom meeting also gave the students new ideas for how sustainability is approached in the other countries. Participants were able to participate in small break-out rooms to discuss practices in their respective schools and they shared sustainability ideas and challenges they participate in within their schools. It is hoped that our Year 6 students will be able to take action within their exhibition groups and, when we return to on-campus learning, they will be able to put these ideas into action within the Radford and wider communities. Hopefully we can participate in another meeting like this soon!

Some feedback from a few of our students.

‘For life on Earth to work, it cannot be a one-way cycle of “Take, make, use and throw away” because we will just end up with nothing to use and a whole lot of waste. The world must run in a cycle. We must take things, make something out of it, use it and give back to the earth.’ — Thenuki

'I enjoyed the sustainability conference very much. It was interesting to learn about what activities schools in other countries were organising. Some of the ideas were the same sort of things we do to reduce, reuse, recycle and create a circular economy in Australia, and some of the ideas were very different. There were not many ideas about recovery of energy or waste-to-energy in the conference. I think all countries could do a bit more about waste-to-energy. That is what I am investigating for Exhibition.
One imaginative example and new idea was that school students in South Africa put lots of plastic into plastic bottles and used the bottles as bricks to build a school for schoolchildren in a remote area. I think it would be amazing to be inside a school made of plastic bricks.' — Peter

'I felt proud to share our story of sustainability at Radford College – our Waste-Free Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I found the workshop to be interesting and informative. It was heartening to see that like us, there are so many students and young people across the globe being change-makers, thinking about and acting on sustainable living strategies. I learnt about the cycle of ‘take, make, use and throw away’.
What I understood from The Bare Necessities organisation is that we have to work on making this cycle sustainable so that whatever we throw away eventually breaks down and mixes with the environment.
The DIY ideas on making natural paint brushes and paints and bird feeders are definitely something we could incorporate in the ELC.' — Anya