Category: Climate Justice

Eco-literacy Toolkit

Library Services response to climate change and justice

Exploring climate justice resources available to the UAL members of staff (see my other blog post) inspired me to talk about it with my fellow librarians across the UAL Library Services. I discovered that one of the Chelsea librarians is authorised to facilitate screenings of an interactive film created by the UAL Climate Emergency network. I found this film very informative and motivating and I recommend requesting the viewing of this resource to every member of staff.  

I also learnt that two of my CSM colleagues are working on the Eco-literacy Toolkit for our Library Services. I got in touch with them, and I am part of a small group now that works on finding best ways of presenting the Toolkit to the other librarians. We work on the Intranet page that should allow for an attractive and easy to use layout that will encourage our librarians to teach with sustainability and climate justice in mind. 

Sneak-peek of the Library Services page for Eco-literacy Toolkit

The Eco-literacy Toolkit consists of the library sessions templates for online and in-person teaching on researching sustainability. It presents several activities we can choose from when planning such sessions. There are examples of the keywords building icebreaker, recognising greenwashing and visualising topic collaging exercises. The Toolkit is designed the way that it can be expanded with time. The librarians will be encouraged to develop this resource further by adding the examples of their sessions and activities. Personally, I cannot wait for the project to be ready, shared and used.  

Climate Justice at UAL

Exploring the Staff Development UAL resource

Photo by Vlad Sokhin (2011)

I have been educating myself about the subject of Climate Justice for a while now. I include resources on sustainability and climate justice in all my teaching sessions and I make sure that I purchase relevant materials for the Library. However, I must admit that I feel that I did not engage with Climate Justice staff development programmes at UAL enough. 

The Canvas website on climate justice is a great resource, but I had a problem with where to start there. The sheer volume of information had initially overwhelmed me. I started by clicking the links and ended up feeling lost with 10 tabs being open at the same time.

Then, I came across a Climate Glossary that is a beautifully designed document explaining vocabulary that we need to understand if we want to start an informed conversation on climate justice. Just going through the definitions makes it clear how the climate justice is interconnected with social and racial justice and how we cannot talk about one without the other. I will share this document with my students together with links to the UAL websites on sustainability (that I do share now). 

UAL-Climate-Glossary

Learning about the UAL leading CATALYST; a series of workshops was especially useful. In April there is a workshop on carbon literacy that I am interested in. This 8-hour course situates learning about fundamentals of climate change in the context of our daily lives and UAL.  

I have also read the document on embedding climate justice in the curriculum. I am working now with it to see how I can use it to enrich my practice as a librarian. I will update this in the blog posts after attending the aforementioned training. 

climate-and-social-justice