For Teachers
This site was developed by two CSPE teachers especially for teachers and students of CSPE. It aims to assist you when teaching energy and environmental issues with your CSPE pupils and offers an alternative to what’s already in the text books. We’d welcome any feedback you may have. Mail us at schools@sei.ie
Use the factsheets in class to highlight how we have impacted on the world we live in and how we can reduce our negative impact by simple individual and collective actions. Why not test your students’ knowledge with our activities? Use them in class or as homework.
The action projects section give ideas for your students' action projects related to energy and the environment. The printable worksheets will also help them when organising their action project. Students must write up their action project in a Report on an Action Project (RAP) or in a Coursework Assessment Book (CWAB), which accounts for 60% of the Junior Certificate CSPE exam. If students keep a diary throughout the action this will help them when they come to write up the RAP or CWAB.
An Action Project MUST:
- Have a link with one of the seven CSPE concepts
- Involve a genuine action
- Have an involvement with people/community
- Have a human rights and social responsibility dimension
Where energy fits into the CSPE Curriculum
CSPE aims to prepare students for active participatory citizenship. It does this by:
- Helping them to understand the rights and responsibilities of the individual in society.
- Encouraging them to develop practical skills that enable students to adopt responsible roles as individuals, family members, citizens, workers and consumers.
- Assisting them to develop a knowledge and understanding of processes taking place at all levels of society, which lead to social, political and economic decision making.
The exploration and investigation of the issue of energy, energy conservation, renewable energy sources and how energy use and misuse impacts on our planet can assist students in acquiring some of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are central to the concepts of rights and responsibilities, interdependence and stewardship as laid out in the syllabus.
CSPE Syllabus Document, 1996
Rights and Responsibilities
‘…Responsibilities go hand in hand with the rights accorded to individuals. Every person is responsible for their actions towards other people at all levels. Irresponsibility results in self-interested or careless actions that can be damaging to other people at all levels’
Interdependence
‘Pupils should be aware of the interrelatedness of all human life at the individual, community, national and global levels. The actions of an individual effects, sometimes in places and situations they have never seen e.g. The effects on economies, businesses and of the purchases we make as consumers, the effects of our votes in elections on developments at local, national and international levels…’
Stewardship
‘Pupils should be aware that as individuals born on the planet every person becomes a temporary owner or steward entrusted and empowered with its care and maintenance e.g. with constructive management of its finite resources…Absence of stewardship leads to the belief that our role in relation to the natural world, the environment…is incidental or inconsequential. This results in phenomena like unnecessary depletion of resources, pollution of the environment…’
The investigation of energy related issues can also be related to the other four CSPE concepts i.e. Law, Development, Democracy and Human Dignity.