Come Together!

On Thursday, 7th of June a number of us involved in Science for Sustainability (s4s) came together to see how things have been going.

Actually, the 12 of us who are students at Leicester were there to see who had won the recent competition!

As previously mentioned, the competition was to:

1. Think about Sustainable Development (in Africa).
2. Model African Sustainable 'Complex Systems'.
3. Design a fun, educational game to illustrate these.

We've had Progress, Interdisciplinary Science team, Student and other smaller meetings; formal, informal, face-to-face and online. However, this was the first time that some of these different people came together!

The whole point of s4s is (to use the lingo) to form a 'community of practice' through 'participatory action research'. In other words, the aim is to invite lots of different people to become involved as a 'community'. This is never going to be easy since we're all (thankfully!) so very different! So, helping to make this work has become a big part of the project.

Given this you can see why it is so satisfying to see all of these different people sitting in the same room, discussing Sustainability and having fun!

We believe that the kinds of problems we may be trying to solve in Sustainable Development will only start to be worked towards when lots of different kinds of people are given a chance to contribute.

By-the-way, "Team Rabs" won the competition but it was very close! Everyone did really well for various reasons, which was the whole point.

All of the games will soon be played at local schools to see what the people who will really count think. The plan then is to 'bundle' everything together - learning materials, methods and competition results - for use by the African Virtual University, Open Educational Resources team in the TESSA project around Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thus, our hope is that more people can begin to come together and add their own voices to what Sustainable Development may really mean?