Embedding environment, sustainability and place into education through teacher-researcher collaborations: The Morecambe Bay Curriculum’s innovative co-design project

Embedding sustainability, environment and place into education has been recognised as a key strategy for addressing the climate crisis and providing constructive hope for the future. This paper reports on a project to co-design curriculum resources which brought together the expertise of teachers and academics to achieve this aim. By combining creative pedagogical skills with cutting edge research knowledge, sixteen place-based resource packs were developed. These go beyond the teaching of factual knowledge and embed environmental issues within a range of curriculum subjects, developing pupils’ relationships with their locality. The scope covered sciences, humanities, creative arts and vocational subject areas across all phases of education. By exploring the experiences and reflections of teachers and academics involved, this paper demonstrates the importance of developing positive relationships, built on trust and empathy, which enabled a horizontal rather than hierarchical way of working. Participants recognised and valued each other’s expertise and used this to co-produce materials which could have real-life social value in our locality. This process has the potential to be transferable to other settings and the paper concludes with key reflections which could support the development of similar projects in the future.