British Academy Innovation Fellowship: the RoundView

Introduction

In 2023, the UK National Commission for UNESCO (UKNC) and University of Manchester (UoM) received a £120,000 British Academy Innovation Fellowship to help support UNESCO sites to embed and teach sustainability with their partners. The Fellowship application was led by Dr Joanne Tippett, UoM, and Matt Rabagliati, Head of Policy, Research and Communications at the UKNC.

The RoundView is a toolkit for sustainability thinking and learning. With a science-based set of guidelines to redesign our systems so we don’t cause environmental problems in the first place, it shifts the dial from climate anxiety to hope, confidence, and inspiration.

Twenty-five years of University of Manchester research and co-production with groups including Natural England, Lancashire Wildlife Trust, Tesco and the National Trust has led to an actionable, proven framework.

The British Academy Innovation Fellowship has meant that the RoundView is currently being trialled with community groups in UNESCO sites in the UK with the aim of developing the RoundView into a global learning resource.

Pilot Programmes

The pilot programmes in UNESCO sites have so far involved communities along the River Nith, aligned to the Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere Reserve. The RoundView programme has also been rolled out to libraries across Manchester UNESCO Creative City of Literature.

Project Announcements

Countering climate anxiety with hope, confidence and inspiration

Project blog: Dr Joanne Tippett

The RoundView is a toolkit for sustainability thinking and learning. With a science-based set of guidelines to redesign our systems so we don’t cause environmental problems in the first place, it shifts the dial from climate anxiety to hope, confidence, and inspiration. 

Hands-on learning tools do the heavy lifting of teaching the science in an enjoyable and engaging way, through play, poetry and art. To date, the RoundView has reached over 135,000 people and has recently been awarded a University of Manchester Making a Difference Award for ‘Outstanding public engagement initiative, national and international engagement’. Manchester UNESCO City of Literature highlighted the value of the RoundView to their work in the celebration video.

Building on this success, the RoundView was featured in eight libraries across Greater Manchester in this year’s Festival of Libraries. Library staff report that the RoundView learning resources really meet their needs, in particular providing a way to engage pupils with a positive way to think about future sustainability on school trips to the library. The team is developing ideas for loan boxes for schools, tailored for different key stages.

The RoundView is seen as “a ready-made resources that is easy for us to just slot in to our activities. We love the idea of these hands-on sustainability learning resources becoming part of our collections for schools and community groups to use.”

Staff noted that libraries are an early example of sustainability in action, and using libraries to loan hands-on learning resources to schools and community groups offers a way to reach huge numbers of people with efficient use of resources. Further feedback will be gathered from library staff to inform a bid for rollout in libraries and community spaces.

If you are interested in the next stage of taking the RoundView to scale, get in touch with [email protected]

Playing the RoundView: translating place-based sustainability learning into action

Project blog: Dr Joanne Tippett

If ‘sustainability for people and planet’ can only be achieved by collaboration, how do we ensure that people understand this complex topic in a meaningful, inclusive and accessible way?

Working with the UK National Commission for UNESCO, I will test creative, large-scale learning tools in UNESCO-designated sites.

I will work with partners to test this playful approach to exploring the global story of sustainability in a local context in diverse locations (rural to urban).

The British Academy Fellowship will assess the learning tools’ value for inspiring action and potential for wide-scale rollout.

I am already established as a creative researcher able to design impactful tools for knowledge co-production. My facilitation tool, Ketso, is used across the globe.

This Fellowship will allow me to turn my focus to embedding sustainability learning into widely-visited heritage and natural sites to create actionable knowledge. This work has direct implications for place-based practice at UNESCO sites worldwide.