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What happened to climate change?

One of the notable gaps in content in the new draft MFL A-levels is the environment, notably the issue of the climate crisis. This point was earnestly raised by a teacher at a recent A-level launch meeting I led for AQA. He felt that to omit the number one issue facing humanity was, at the least, surprising.

To be fair to the exam boards, it was not entirely their fault. When Michael Gove's ALCAB panel, led by Russell Group academics, looked into A-level, this is the list of topics they put forward for French.

Republican values
Schooling
Provinces and regions
Paris/Montreal/Marseilles
Dom-Toms
Québecois culture
Les grands projets
Secularism
Freedom of expression

The French revolution
The French empire and decolonisation
The Algerian war of independence
The occupation
The Dreyfus affair
Right and left in politics
The revival of antisemitism

Surrealism
The new wave
Existentialism
Popular music
Contemporary television
Impressionsist painting
Négritude/créolité
French mathematics
Science and technology in contemporary France

Now, thankfully, as I have pointed out before, the exam boards all tried to make the best of ALCAB's slightly ridiculous list. French mathematics! Only OCR decided to include aspects of science and technology in their themes, whilst none at all incorporated environmental issues.

It may be that they were in part responding to teacher feedback, the "not the environment again!" reaction I have occasionally heard. It may also be that the boards felt it was difficult to produce environmental topics which would be both rooted in the target language culture and fit the bill of "social issues and trends" imposed by ALCAB and the DfE.

The boards could have done better and put forward topics such as: tackling climate change, air pollution, energy production and conservation in French/German-speaking/ Hispanic countries. These are surely social as well as scientific questions and they can easily be given a target language country slant. To omit climate change in this day and age seems somewhat irresponsible on ALCAB's and the exam boards' part. It is, however, revealing of society's generally complacent perspective on the climate.

The teacher in my audience was absolutely right to point out a significant flaw in the new A-levels.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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