Responsible consumption and production

Students create a future me: Define your role and how it could look like in 30 years from now and ask yourself the following questions:

How can you actively influence decision-making processes as a consumer?
How can you actively participate and evaluate these processes?

Group activity/discussion. Discuss the challenge of finite resources. Direct the discussion towards our use of finite resources. You might ask: What kind of resources are we using in our everyday life? Could we keep going with the way we currently live forever? What are the limitations? What could we do about it?

Ask the students to discuss in pairs or groups first. Then collect some responses on the white/black board.

Then ask the students: How can we best come up with ideas and responses to the challenge that soon we will run out of non-renewable resources?

Group activity. Set up production/ consumption related scenario, e.g. a supermarket. Students adopt different roles e.g. manager, older person, pregnant woman, environmentalist, vegan, meat eater. Role-play team meetings based on resolving different issues, e.g. how to change consumer habits, increase profits, become more environmentally friendly. Groups share experiences and outcomes.

Individual task. Do research on campaigns that promote sustainable practices. Present your findings to class. Discuss with others the following questions:

What are your opinions of the campaigns?
How might they help us move to sustainable practices?
How can you influence things positively or negatively with your own actions?
How should the society in which we live
be(have)?

Share, swap and give away party. Bring things that you no longer need to class and have a swap party. Each student can take something home from these available products.

They then report how they have used their new item.

School project. Set up a development partnership with another school from the Global South. Exchange with other students from the partner school and create a project where you develop new forms of sustainable lifestyles.

Investigate in pairs the different actors in production and consumption. (Preselected). Students define their roles, rights and duties and present their findings to the others.

Group discussion: open or small group discussion.
Do you think your lifestyle is sustainable? How can you tell if your lifestyle is sustainable?
How can we compare lifestyles? How would you compare your lifestyle to a student in another country?
(Use a relevant example such as comparing your lifestyle to a cousin/friend’s in another country.)
Ask students to measure/compare everything! Lead them to the concept of “Ecological Footprint” as a unit to measure and compare different lifestyles. Our ecological footprint allows us to calculate how much pressure our lifestyle is putting on the planet.

In groups: investigate access to sustainable and affordable products from a developing world’s perspective. Each group takes a specific country and researches the potential perspective of these different stakeholders. Share your analysis with others and discuss, comparing the different case studies.