Castletroy College won two categories at the national Pakman Awards held in the Intercontinental Hotel in Dublin on 24 October 2019.
The first award was in the ‘Environmental Education and Awareness Initiative’ category sponsored by the Department of Communication, Climate action and the Environment. The other win was the ‘Battery Champion’ award sponsored by the European Recycling Platform in recognition for the work done on an innovative cross curricular project called ‘emining@school’.
E-Mining@School is a teacher-led initiative that developed high quality educational materials to raise awareness and engage students in the area of sustainability in the use of electronics, most specifically the smartphone. This cross-curricular collaborative planning project explored the common theme of sustainability in our use of electronics in five Junior Cycle subject specifications but through different lenses. For example, Business address the theme through the economic sustainability lens, while CPSE looks at it through the social sustainability lens. The team of 7 seven teachers planned over 60 student-centred lessons across five subject areas namely Science, Geography, Business, Technology, and Civic, Social and Political Education (CSPE).
Commenting on the achievement, Castletroy College teacher, Ms. Lisa Kiely said;
I am absolutely thrilled that the work done by the team of very dedicated teachers over 12 months was recognised at a national level and it was my privilege to accept the awards on behalf of the team. It was beyond our dreams to win one award but to win two was extraordinary. It was given us a real boost as we continue work on refining our project for delivery to our students again in January 2020.
The cross curricular unit of work was delivered by a wider team of 24 teachers to a cohort of 220 2nd year over a four-week period. The lessons were complimented by a series of invited guest speakers, each an expert in one area of the project. The E-Minging@School project culminated in a WEEE collection event that recovered over 11 tonnes of WEEE that was sent for recycling. This event facilitated students to ‘take action’ and play an active role in this initiative.
Castletroy College collaborated with a team at the University of Limerick (UL) to ensure that the most cutting-edge expert knowledge in the area of Critical Raw Materials was available to the teacher team. This collaboration was funded by EIT KIC Raw Materials (an EU funded institute) as an EU collaborative ‘Learning & Education’ project in the area of sustainability. Five European countries competed over a period of 12 months to design an educational initiative to raise awareness and engage students in the subject area.
The Castletroy College emining@schools project was deemed the overall European winner and a team of 2 teachers and 7 students will now travel to Brussels later this month to present their project at a Critical raw Materials conference.
Teacher team: Lisa Kiely (Coordinator), Marian Roche, Kevin Grant, Anne Marie McMahon, John Keehan, Sharon Delaney and Linda Hannon.
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