Green Live Learning Lab
The Green Live Learning Lab project, which began in spring 2023, brings together family learning with real-life sustainability learning. It is led by Westminster Adult Education Service’s Community and Cultural Learning team, in partnership with Westminster City Council. The first year of the project was also in partnership with MCS Foundation and Campaign for Learning.
About the Green Live Learning Lab
The neighbourhoods of Westminster are changing, as low-carbon and retrofit regeneration and investment projects move ahead. We are taking the opportunity of this ‘live’ classroom to demonstrate what these changes will mean for local families. The heating and cooking systems we use in our homes will change and we will all need to become familiar with renewable energy. There will also be wider considerations of how we live in a low-carbon city. The designers, environmental specialists and building development professionals who are carrying out the regeneration work are all involved in the project.
In addition, with much of the development in the environmental industry outpacing the school curriculum, this project is a valuable “see it, understand it, be it” opportunity to bridge this gap and to highlight and signpost ‘green’ careers.
Co-creating a full pack of teaching resources with the local family learners, which is also accessible for participants who do not have English as a first language, was another outcome of this project. This is being disseminated through national Family Learning partners.
What has happened so far?
Between March and July 2023 we held participative sessions with WAES students and low-carbon and renewable energy technical experts.
We then moved on to co-creating teaching materials with session participants. The teaching resources (for example quizzes, displays, discussion activities or anything else to help people learn), which are on the topics that we have looked at in the participative sessions, mean that the project we are doing could be repeated with other learners in other cities, or in other parts of London that are undergoing similar retrofit and regeneration work, using the resources we make.
The co-creation sessions took place in the autumn term of 2023, and then the results of these were worked on by graphic designers, leading to the launch of the materials and the celebration event on 19 June 2024.
The materials are now freely available to access and are being disseminated through our website, and through our project partners, Campaign for Learning.
The Green Live Learning Lab project then continued into a second year. In autumn 2024 we ran further sessions and site visits using the materials developed from the project. The topics were:
- Using Your Neighbourhood to Learn About Sustainability
- Energy efficiency
- Resilience and adaptability
- Clean energy
- Reflection and next steps
We also had a site visit to the Royal Opera House in December to learn about the retrofit work that is happening at this heritage building.
What is next?
We are currently running the second set of sessions for 2024-5 at Pimlico on Monday afternoons.
We have two other site visit sessions coming up. We will learn about Rain Gardens and Flood Management, with a site visit, on the morning of Tuesday 11 March, starting at WAES’ Amberley Centre. On the afternoon of Monday 17th March we will have a visit to the recycling centre in south London that takes Westminster’s recycling.
Sessions are free to attend, but please book so that we know numbers
Book on to the Rain Gardens session here and the recycling centre visit here (please note there are some health and safety restrictions on the tour of the facility, detailed on the booking form, but the presentation at the facility is open to everyone). We hope you can join us!
You might also be interested in the launch of the Green Skills Innovation Centre at WAES in 2025, which will house the latest green technology equipment for communities, businesses and individuals to experience and share the knowledge and skills which will place Westminster at the forefront of emerging technologies.
Co-created resources from the Green Live Learning Lab
Download ZIP files for each unit of the Green Live Learning Lab resources along with supporting material below, for use by other organisations around the country.
