NowSCAN: A Welsh model

The biodiversity and sustainable development strategies for the UK envisaged that a major limiting factor in engaging people in local action is citizen awareness of what can be done and what has been done.   Welsh teachers responded by setting up the Schools and Sustainable Communities Agenda 21 Network (SCAN) in the early 1990s as a network of schools and their communities to make action plans for environmental improvements in home and neighbourhood within the context of the Local Agenda 21.  The stimulus was the Young People's Agenda 21 that emerged from the Rio Environment Summit in 1992 which promoted the idea that a bottom up citizen's environmental network was essential for promoting local action.  SCAN was created at St Clears Teacher's Resource Centre for West Wales with funds from the Countryside Council for Wales, Dyfed County Council and Texaco Pembroke Oil Refinery.  It thrived as part of the National Museum’s on line education service in Cardiff. It is a good working example of how to organise and sustain an bilingual interactive distance-learning network with national coverage.

The assumption is that schools working with the communities they serve are able to play a key role in the introduction of sustainable development principles into everyday living. SCAN's first community action plan was produced by Johnston Primary School in Pembrokeshire, and activated the local authority to make significant environmental improvements in the village. Links were made with the European Schools Network based in Portugal for pupils to compare their concerns about environment and spread ideas about how they could be tackled locally by school and community working together. In these pre-Internet days this networking was done by faxing picture/text postcards.

Two spinoffs from SCAN are 'NowSCAN' and 'Living Sustainably' created as European educational resources through the EC LIFE ENVIRONMENT programme.  The nectar point network is seen as a development of SCAN that promotes citizen awareness and engagement with conserving insect biodiversity in gardens, parks and green infrastructures, such as trees in the street, roundabouts and verges.

NowSCAN, is an on line resource for digital learning about how conservation management is a cross curricular knowledge system linking science communities and nature.  The nectar point network is a demonstration of these connections and the digital learning/action model is presented below as a mind map.

NowSCAN is developing a new environmental pedagogy for the 21st Century based the use of digital technologies to enhance life long learning signposting to resources for people who are too busy to spend hours searching the Web.  This will entail NowSCAN demonstrating a Nectar Point Network as a community system comprising a set of linked accounts with the major social media sites.