Dumfries and Galloway College
Excellent practice
Sustainability: Lug a Mug and recycling projects
One of the college’s objectives is to achieve the aims of Learning for Change:
Scotland’s Action Plan for the Second Half of the UN Decade of Education for
Sustainable Development (Scottish Government, 2010). By linking the formal and
informal curriculums, classroom learning can be transformed into class projects on
sustainability issues, which are supported by the Students’ Association across the
college.
For example, learners in programme areas use a well-designed and contextualised
college sustainability workbook. Initially, learners felt that these issues were not
important in their subject area. However, the sustainability workbooks, which are
specific to learners’ subject areas, have demonstrably changed their views.
This approach to embed sustainability in the curriculum incorporates a range of
measures and projects. Examples include Lug-a-Mug and various recycling
projects. Lug-a-Mug gives a twenty pence discount to learners who use their own
mug (previously purchased from the scheme) when buying a coffee or tea. This
initiative has been entered for a Green Dragon Award which will give it a national
profile and help other colleges in Scotland to replicate the project for their own
learners. In another exciting project, learners are involved in a recycling activity to
build a plastic bottle greenhouse which will be donated to a local primary school
when it is completed.
Learners are making positive links to their knowledge of sustainability by recognising
it as a strength in relation to employment. Learners are also relating classroom
learning to campus sustainability initiatives such as the solar panels in the college,
the car-share initiative and improving the range of recycling facilities.
Learner sustainability knowledge is being measured using their individual learning
plans. Sustainability awareness is linked to employability skills and global
citizenship, as well as being identified as an important core skill for lifelong learning.
Education Scotland
Foghlam Alba