Amanda Woods-McConney

The Rio Tinto Earth Assist Program (RTEA) is an innovative approach to linking schools with conservation and land management throughout Western Australia. Since its inception in 2009, Conservation Volunteers Australia has run the Rio Tinto funded program which has grown and evolved to deliver tailored programs to primary and secondary schools across the metropolitan region and throughout the state. The Living Classroom program has evolved from being designed for primary schools to becoming a program run in primary and secondary schools and involves activities such as creating a vegetable garden, building native bee boxes or constructing a frog pond on school grounds. The Community Service Program is an excursion designed for secondary students to actively participate in conservation projects such as weed abatement, rubbish collection and native vegetation surveys. In 2015, to meet part of the funding agreement, Conservation Volunteers Australia engaged Murdoch University (MU) to conduct a longitudinal study from 2015 to 2018 to measure the direct and indirect impacts and effectiveness of RTEA on participating schools and students. The evaluation was designed to offer formative feedback throughout the research period to enable RTEA to adapt and modify processes and programs for improved delivery and to better align with deliverables and key performance indicators. During the four years, data was collected through teacher surveys, student pre and post surveys and student focus group sessions. Additional information was also gained though administrative data and regular collaboration with the CVA and RTEA staff. Throughout the research period, MU provided regular feedback to RTEA and CVA in the form of recommendations, based on early data analysis. Many recommendations were implemented and program improvements were observed, and some key recommendations were not implemented. This report presents a comprehensive view of RTEA activities from 2015 to 2018 against the deliverables and key performance indicators provided to CVA by Rio Tinto.

Declining interest and engagement in science and science-related courses and careers has been well documented and widely noted across Australia and similar highly developed countries. For Australia to successfully navigate the transition from a mostly resource-dependant economy to one that is knowledge-based and competitive, every effort needs to be made to help all students engage in science at the secondary and tertiary level. For a variety of historical and social reasons, Indigenous Australians, while expert in traditional ecological knowledge, are arguably vulnerable with regard to school science, reflected by longstanding lower achievement in science compared to their nonIndigenous peers...

The aims of the project were to scope and develop sustainable energy curriculum frameworks for Australian higher education Institutions that meet the needs of Australian and international student graduates and employers, both now and into the near future. The focus was on student centred learning and outcomes and to support graduates with the knowledge, skills and generic attributes required to work in the rapidly expanding sustainable energy industry in Australia and globally. The outputs of the project are designed to be relevant to specialist Sustainable Engineering and Energy Studies programs, as well as conventional engineering, science and humanities and social science programs that have a sustainable energy focus or major.

This guide is to support institutions in developing and teaching tertiary level programmes for sustainable energy professionals. Ongoing curriculum renewal is more difficult but vital for multidisciplinary courses preparing graduates to work in a specialised rapidly changing field. After more than 15 years of offering tertiary level “sustainable energy” qualifications in Australian Universities there was a clear need to assess how these courses are taught and develop curriculum frameworks to guide Universities designing/redesigning programs and courses to provide graduates with the relevant skills, knowledge and attributes (capabilities) seen by graduates and employers as required to work in this rapidly changing field. This guide presents the sustainable energy curriculum frameworks developed by the “Renewing the sustainable energy curriculum – providing internationally relevant skills for a carbon constrained economy” project, which was conducted over a two-and-a-quarter year period.